07:00 I get up to make Lois and me a cup of tea and bring them back up to bed with me. Yesterday morning Lois saw a mouse in the larder, so I've put another pair of electric plug-in mouse repellents in there. No sign of any rodent intruders there this morning, but we'll have to monitor the situation closely, that's for sure. Oh dear!
08:00 Lois and I have to get going early again - her great-niece Molly has done an abstract painting that Lois wants to get framed, and it'll be a Christmas present to her from me.
the abstract painted by Lois's great-niece Molly
But which way up is it? We'll have to decide before we go into the framers' shop, that's for sure. Or we could take a vote on it with the shop's staff - that's another way!
It's a pity there isn't a sign on the painting like the one on poor little Ben's box, seen recently in a repeat of the sitcom "The Brittas Empire": the box that Ben's mother, Carole weepy receptionist at the Whitbury New Town Leisure Centre, made use of to move little Ben into his new accommodation behind the reception desk.
flashback to 1994 and the sitcom "The Brittas Empire": note the helpful
"This Way Up" sign on the box used to transport little Ben to Carole's
new reception desk area: poor Ben !!!!!!
Poor little Ben (right) in happier times: being rescued by
manager Gordon Brittas from a collapsing leisure centre building
But I digress! Time is getting on, Christmas is only about 6 weeks away now - yikes! - and Lois wants us to take the painting to Cleeve Picture Framing this morning - it'll take them a couple of weeks to do the work.
But the main snag about taking the picture in this morning is that a 3-day horse-racing festival starts at Cheltenham Racecourse today, and Cleeve Picture Framing is right in "the eye of the storm", only about a quarter of a mile down the road from the Racecourse. Damn !!!!
Cleeve Picture Framing - tragically close to the Racecourse
me sporting my new Ben Sherman jeans, but feeling a bit
deflate by the Racing Festival (see sign below)
damn! we'll just have to hunker down at home
for the next 3 days - damn! (again)
It'll be much worse tomorrow, because we're due to get our COVID booster and general flu jabs at the County Fire Station at lunchtime, and the first race at the racecourse will be at 12:30 pm.
Damn damn damn!!!!
09:00 The framing shop, Cleeve Picture Framers, opens at 9 am, so we decide to get the job done. We take the saleswoman's advice and get the painting mounted on something purple with a black wooden frame running round the outside. Simples!
Lois pictured here in front of the shop, with a picturesque house
seen in the distance to the left
10:00 We come home and do our usual walk round the local football field. We also add a little extra "leg" onto the walk by inspecting the nearby building-site, but they don't seem to have got very far with their project to build 2-storey and 3-storey blocks of flats - 70 flats in all.
Why do they keep building all these houses and flats all over the place? Nobody wants them really do they, least of all the people already living right next door to them, that's for sure.
What madness !!!!!
we inspect the local building site - lots of activity
but not much to be seen in the way of results
- what madness !!!!!
On our way home we stop to have a coffee.
14:00 After lunch we go to bed, have a nap, then a shower, then another nap - this is our new routine for Friday afternoons, and so far it's working well. I realise it wouldn't suit everybody.
16:00 We get up and go downstairs for a cup of tea on the couch. The downside of a lazy afternoon is that emails pile up, so after the tea we both log on in our so-called "home office".
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch TV, a documentary about the composer Anton Bruckner.
I hope I'm not betraying any national bias when I say that Lois and I quite enjoy French-made documentaries, although we sometimes think they are too imaginative and not "down-to-earth" enough. Whereas German or Austrian ones, like this one, we think are not imaginative enough and tend to be a bit pedestrian and dull
[Yes, you are betraying national bias! - Ed]
Also, the programme could have been a bit more generous with its extracts of Bruckner's music - just a few seconds of each symphony, for example, isn't enough, we feel.
We do pick up some interesting snippets about the man himself, however. He went bald, for instance. Usually, in our experience, most composers have lots of hair, which is odd, to say the least!
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) - went bald at some point
And who knew that, when Bruckner had his nervous breakdowns, he developed a mania for counting everything - windows in houses, leaves on trees, that kind of thing - a bit like the Count on Sesame Street, who "loved to count".
And who knew that although Bruckner never married, he issued countless marriage proposals, all unsuccessful, and always to teenage girls. His diaries list the names of hundreds of teenage girls he knew, whom he found attractive. It seems that he thought that any woman of 20 years or over in Austria was unlikely to be a virgin, and he desperately didn't want to marry a woman who wasn't a virgin. I think it must be a Catholic thing - Bruckner was a devout Catholic.
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
21:00 The rest of the evening is overshadowed by a mouse that runs into the living-room and jumps into a ventilation hole in the chimney-piece under the gas fire. Yikes!
Lois saw a mouse when she got up to make our early morning cups of tea yesterday, and presumably this is the same one.
Our first thought is to block the ventilation hole with something heavy, but it's a confined space under the gas fire, so not everything we think of will fit there: after much debate and a search of the house we block the hole with (1) a plastic bag, (2) the lid of a biscuit tin, (3) a margarine tub with 4 heavy padlocks in, (4) the Sellotape dispenser, and (5) an 11 lb dumb-bell.
the scene under our gas fire tonight, as we go to bed
If you're interested, the big book is a biographical dictionary.
But will all these blockers still be in place tomorrow morning when we get up? I can only say that we simply don't know - the jury's still out on that one, I'm afraid!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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