Monday October 18th 2021

08:00 Lois and I are still very much in bed, taking full advantage of the fact that we have no appointments today, which is nice.  We hear a noise outside and I ask Lois to take a look through the curtains - her side of the bed is nearest the window, so she can get there in half the time I can, so it makes sense to me at any rate!

He's having some big concrete blocks delivered - almost certainly for building the extension he's building on the side of his house. We're getting quite good at monitoring the deceptively mundane activities of our suspiciously mild-mannered neighbours, that's for sure.

Our mentor, film-star Michael Caine, spiritual leader of Britain's thousands of "nosy neighbours" would be proud of us, we're sure!

film-star Michael Caine, spiritual leader of Britain's thousands

of "nosy neighbours"

Caine is making headlines in the Danish media today, I discover later (ekstrabladet.dk). Apparently he threatened to retire on a BBC radio programme the other day, but then he got "cold feet" and announced on his twitter account that he was reversing the decision. 

Caine reportedly said on the BBC that "Nobody wants an 88-year-old", and he pointed out he had noticed that there are few films being made where the leading role is that of such an old man. But he obviously soon began to regret his announcement.

And it's nice, on his Twitter recant,  to see him using his "other" catchphrase "Not a lot of people know that", in addition to his most popular one "My name is... Michael Caine... and I am... a nosy neighbour".

Good on you, Sir Michael, you obviously haven't "lost any of your marbles yet", that's for sure!

But what a crazy world we live in !!!! 

08:15 Lois gets back into bed and we have a brief discussion about whether our neighbour will be forced to close his mini-gym while the building work is in progress. We get our answer later in the day around 5pm, when we see the customer known to us as so-called Ugly Guy (codename UG) and his trademark silver-grey sports car parked outside the gym, so it's "business as usual", which is nice to know, to put it mildly!

Mr so-called "Ugly Guy" has parked his trademark silver-grey

sports car outside the mini-gym, so it's "Business as usual", which is nice to see!

08:30 We're still reluctant to get up and start our Monday shower however. A text comes in from Sarah, our younger daughter who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie. The girls' school photo has arrived from the school in Lower Chittering that the girls have just left - the family has moved into one of Perth's northern suburbs, and they started their new school this last week.

What a charming photo !!!!

the girls' last school photo from their previous school, a private

Catholic school near Lower Chittering.

The school motto is not to Lois's taste - something about "through Mary to Jesus", a motto her sect wouldn't approve of, but I'm going to let that one slide. It's such a lovely picture of the girls, and it also shows just how much taller Lily is than Jessie, which is a surprise - they're not identical twins however, so that's fair enough! You couldn't get more charming that this, we feel! 

08:45 We finally get out of bed and into the shower, and the day begins. Later we go for a walk on the local football field, but the weather isn't that great, to put it mildly. You can't see the hills. And it's windy and it's drizzling, which isn't a good combination. For the first time in months I put on my winter coat.

Lois orders 2 hot chocolates at the Whiskers Coffee Stand - brrrrrr!!!!!

15:00 It's back to bed in the afternoon, because we're restarting Lois's "ear squirt" routine, after a couple of days when we couldn't be bothered. In about 10 days' time she's got her appointment at the ear clinic next week, and we're trying to pre-soften her ear-wax with twice-daily squirts of olive-oil. She has to lie on her right side for the squirt and then has to stay in that position for 20 minutes afterwards, to make sure it all goes in. 

What madness !!!!! 

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar, although it takes a bit of time to get going, she tells me later. The presenter, Mike, known informally as "The Ratcatcher", because he runs a pest control business, is a bit late starting - he had an urgent call from a householder with squirrels in the attic: one of the traps he laid had caught a squirrel, and it had to be dealt with humanely. What a crazy world we live in !!!!

I settle down on the couch and watch some old BBC news clips and interviews about the James Bond film franchise. The programme was actually broadcast at the end of September, to coincide with the release of the latest Bond Film starring Daniel Craig - I forget what the film's called.

An enjoyable programme, although I stop watching when they get past the Roger Moore era. I only ever really liked Sean Connery and Roger Moore in the role, because they both brought a bit of humour to it, in their different ways. Although, as is pointed out tonight, that refusal to take the action 100% seriously was never in the original Ian Fleming books, so fair enough!

There are some golden moments tonight, however. It's nice to see ex-Prime Minister Harold Wilson passing almost unnoticed in the crowd that had gathered for the publicity event for "The Spy Who Loved Me" in 1976, as captured by a BBC News item from the time: 

1976: ex-Prime Minister Harold Wilson, passing unnoticed in the crowd

gathered for the publicity event for Roger Moore's "The Spy Who Loved Me"

Nice also to see Prince Andrew in happier times, here attending the 1983 premiere of "Never Say Never Again", the film which saw the one-off return of Sean Connery to the role.

Flashback to 1983: the premiere of Sean Connery in "Never Say Never Again",

attended by Prince Andrew, seen here in happier times

Happy days!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch the second episode of "The Larkins", the series based around Ma and Pop Larkins, genial centres of attention in a rural Kent village back in the 1950's.

This is a kind of remake, and Lois and I sort of remember the original series, even though we never really watched it much.

It's a very good-humoured series, befitting the good-humoured central couple, the Larkins. It's interesting to us that although the stories are still set in the 1950's, the producers have chosen to make quite a few of the characters into non-white people. Any questions about race, descent, background, backstory etc are completely absent.

Lois and I are history buffs, so it sort of offends out historical sense that we are expected to believe that there was a sizeable proportion of non-white residents in a rural Kent village in the 1950's. But I think it's all well-meant. I'm guessing that the producers are saying, Don't look at the person's skin colour, look at the person. Skin colour is no different from, say, eye colour: whether somebody has blue or brown eyes doesn't really matter. 

And when Pop Larkin is having sleepless nights over his tax returns, there's also some saucy dialogue between him and Ma Larkin, who is trying to cheer him up: dialogue that Lois assures me wouldn't have been in the original novel by HE Bates, which came out in 1958. Oh dear!

What madness !!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!