Friday December 31st 2021

16:00 When Lois and I sit on the sofa for our extra-strong Earl Grey and scone and task review, it seems like we haven't achieved much today. 

I review the day: warning - this isn't me, 

I haven't a clue who he is !!!!

We've recently acquired a "desk diary" which we have rechristened our "sofa diary". On each date we list the jobs and tasks to be done - if we manage to do them, we cross these entries out; but if we fail to do them (the normal situation), we solemnly copy them into the space for the next day.

our much-vaunted so-called "sofa diary" - my god, what a disgrace !!!!

Today I managed just two jobs off the list - (1) to unlock the garage and read our gas and electric meters and submit our final reading for 2021 online. And (2) I also manage to replace 2 burnt out electric light bulbs. Not much, though, is it? My god!

the problematic handle to our "up-and-over" garage door

- today, however, it yields to my gentle but persistent fondling haha!

I jot down the Electricity and Gas readings

on an old Ben Sherman delivery slip

This morning we also had to do our walk on the local football field. Connor, my NHS physio, has scheduled walks for me on Monday Wednesday and Friday, and about 30 minutes of exercises for each of the other 4 days. This is to stop me seizing up completely and means that Lois doesn't have to squirt WD40 on me - my god (again) !!!!

Our walks on the football field are made nicer by Monika, the blonde Polish girl at the Whiskers Coffee Stand, who serves us coffees, hot chocolates, treacle tarts and flapjacks etc. Today we order 2 hot chocolates and 2 raspberry flapjacks. We ask Monika is she's going to stay up to see the new year in, but she says she and her partner don't normally stay up late. So they're like us, which is nice to hear!

Monika, the Polish girl at the Whiskers Coffee Stand

serves us 2 hot chocolates and a raspberry flapjack

And our afternoon is taken up with one of our twice-weekly showers and a nap in bed, which is also nice, to put it mildly. 

We also took delivery from Amazon of 200 Teapigs Extra-strong Earl Grey tea bags, and 24 get-well cards. 

When you're old, most of your friends are old, we've discovered, so you frequently need to send off get-well cards, that's for sure. Oh dear!

Today, as an example, we heard that Ruth, wife of Lois's cousin in Bournemouth, Brian, has been very poorly with ulcers on her legs and has spent some time in the local hospital. And Brian is exhausted from looking after Ruth. We'd been worrying a lot about them, because they haven't answered any phone calls or texts for a few days. Finally we got a message through to their daughter Julia, who lives in Portishead, and it was Julia that gave us the update.

flashback to August 2019: Lois and I see Ruth and Brian in happier times,

celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary in Bournemouth with family members

Somehow we've got to get this news to Brian's sister, Iris, who's in a nursing home in Southport - a nursing home currently coping with a COVID outbreak. But Iris isn't answering phone calls or texts either! Yikes !!!!!

20:00 We watch some TV, a slice of life from the world of the stand-up comics Jon Richardson and his wife Lucy Beaumont, who some years ago made the questionable decision to marry each other.

What is it exactly, that went wrong with Jon and Lucy's marriage? A few years ago we saw Jon take part in a Virtual Reality experiment in which he fondled Lucy at long distance from California by means of a digital link and some robot hands. During the experiment, which Lucy said she enjoyed, Jon let slip that he never fondles Lucy when in her presence. Oh dear!

flashback to December 2020: Jon fondles Lucy long-distance from

California, via a digital link and a pair of robot hands - what madness!

And tonight, during a Christmas meal that the couple host for 3 of their stand-up friends, Lucy revealed, during the group's review of 2021, that she has several times watched the security video clip of ex-Health Secretary Matt Hancock kissing his political aide Gina Coladangelo outside his London office. Hancock was, of course, forced to resign his post after the video was made public.

Lucy admits, however, that the video of the famously unsexy Hancock "turns her on", which is not what her husband Jon wants to hear, to put it mildly!

Jon and Lucy are hosting a vegan Christmas dinner for 3 of their friends in stand-up comedy. And it makes Lois and me realise we're never going to be easy converts to veganism - my god!

"Celebrity chef" Big Zuu arrives, whom Lois and I have never heard of, and he begins to cook the meal's centrepiece, a "vegan shawarma", based on a brussels sprout "tree", chopped up and roasted in vegan butter. My god!

Not a very appetising, as a Christmas meal, from mine and Lois's point of view, that's for sure!

I don't think viewers were meant to see this, but Jon, as chief presenter, was obviously quite nervous about whether he could make his little "Christmas sleepover" entertaining enough for TV viewers. As a result he seems to have organised a tight schedule of activities for his guests that he hoped would be a catalyst for humorous comments and banter - from time to time I catch a glimpse of Jon's clipboard detailing the activities he's planned, his so-called "Fun-tinerary".

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

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

Thursday December 30th 2021

Not much of a day, but it starts early with some quick swabbing for Lois and me. Don't you just love to swab haha??? 

Our weekly grocery order is usually delivered on Saturdays by Budgens, the convenience store in the village, but because this coming Saturday is New Year's Day, the delivery is being brought forward to today. 

Budgens, the convenience store in the village (first store on the left)

The doorbell rings, and we discover that it's the big boss doing the delivery, so we see "naughty-elf" Ray for once, but he hasn't got time to chat. At least we feel we're doing something to help local small businesses, by only ordering very occasionally from the big supermarkets - and this week the bill is nearly £80, so fair enough - we're doing our bit, all right!

Yes, good old Ray, he's just a very wild and crazy guy haha!

11:00 When Lois and I have finished swabbinge everything in sight, we drive over to the local general hospital to drop a get-well card in at reception, for Ursula. 

flashback to December 8th: we visit Ursula in her Churchdown home

It's typical of Lois that, after hearing that her elderly fellow-sect-member Ursula has gone into hospital with pneumonia, she not only writes Ursula an encouraging get-well card, but she also decides we have to deliver it to the hospital by hand. She argues, justifiably, that the Royal Mail is getting very behind with its deliveries and with the New Year's Day holiday coming up as well as the weekend, Ursula might not get the card for several days.

Lois is so warm-hearted - I wish I could be more like her: what's wrong with me???!!!!!

the local General Hospital

I get away with not paying a parking fee while Lois nips in to hand over the get-well card to a nice man. In an unusual gesture of kindness, the hospital lets you park up to 20 minutes without having to buy a ticket, which is a relief.

14:00 Apart from the above feverish activity, it's a good day for an afternoon nap in bed, that's for sure.

I look at my smartphone and try and get some education from the quora forum website again. And I bet not many people know why it's relatively dangerous for human beings to give birth.

Lois and I have been waiting for Jason Chandler, one of our favourite quora pundits, to weigh in on this incredibly vexed question, and today I see that he has at last, which is nice. He's "broken his silence", as our sensationalist media say. But who is Chandler, exactly? His profile doesn't give much away, that's for sure!

Who knew, apart from Chandler obviously, that it's one of the penalties of bipedalism (walking on two feet) and big brains?? [I expect a lot of people know that - Ed]

Chandler explains that "Our biped adaptation came on us relatively quickly, and our hips had to adjust to it. To walk and run efficiently your legs need to swing back and forth pretty straight, and the joints and weight-bearing structures in your hips have to be aligned for that. Unfortunately for us, that means that we’ve got a smaller space left between all those hip parts left for babies to come through."

Who would have thought it eh?? 

the effects of bipedalism

And as for big brains, Chandler advises us to "take another look at our primate relatives and you’ll see that our heads have a much rounder shape, with our face angled much more vertically (smaller jaws, higher foreheads). 

"Those adaptations came along as bipedalism freed up our hands to do interesting stuff, so our brains got bigger and bigger and had to still fit into our primate skull format and the top part of our heads just ballooned. When you look at a human baby the most prominent thing about them is the huge size of their cute heads."

the huge head of a typically cute human baby 

- 44 inches in diameter: yikes!

flashback to 1983: some people retain their large head size into adulthood;

see me here wearing my enormous 7.5 size tricorn in Williamsburg, Virginia

Having lots of brains is generally an asset in later life - although not always - but when we're being born, of course, our huge heads have to fit through what Chandler calls "that tiny new human hip-hole". My god!

That big brain need time to develop in the womb, but it can't stay too long inside the mother, or it'll get TOO big. 

As soon as it's at all possible, the mother has to push that big head out of herself really early, which means that human infants are much more helpless than primate babies - as soon as her babies can at least breathe for themselves, the mother wants them out. 

Primate babies, on the other hand, can "hit the ground running" - move around, see things etc from the get-go. Human babies, however, have to lie around, cuddling mummy for weeks, until their eyes and other body systems "catch up". 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

20:00 We watch some TV, one of our favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking. Tonight it's the second programme in the quiz's special Christmas series.

Presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell introduces the show with a honk

Tonight's theme is birds and bees, and it would take a lot for the show's question-setters to get this particular question past Lois and me, so versed as we are in the Cole Porter Songbook.

Yes, but do YOU know what the fourth element is in this sequence?

Yes, of course, the fourth element just adds "LET'S", from the Cole Porter song:

On balance, however, Lois and I think there are rather too many birds and bees in tonight's questions. So much so, that by the end of the show we imagine them coming out of our ears. Take the connecting walls, for example.

This is the first wall, with its solution:

The top line (dark blue) are all operatic choruses. The second line (green) all have the names of chess pieces at the end - knight, king, pawn, rook. The third line (purple) can all be the first words in Walt Disney animated films (Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Lady and the Tramp, Snow White). And the elements in the fourth line (light blue) can all have the word "bird" appended to them.

See? Simples!

And the second wall?

The first line (dark blue) can all have the name "Ryder" appended to them. The elements of the second line (green) all start with words for "backside": rear, bum, rump, butt. The elements of the third line (purple) can all add an 's' to become the name of a pop group. 

And the fourth line elements can all be bees.

22:00 We go to bed with the sound of bees buzzing in our ears - buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!! Oh dear!!!!

Thursday December 29th 2021

Back to life, back to reality! Lois and I home again after 5 days away, staying with our daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children.

And the pandemic is still on - yikes, will it never end haha !!!!!!!

We wake up in our own bed for the first time in 5 days or so. It feels surprisingly spacious, however, because we've got 6 extra inches of width, which is nice. The bed we slept in at our daughter Alison's house was a standard 4ft 6in bed, so now we've got a bit more to play with, and it seems like a lot. I can just about see Lois somewhere in the middle distance haha!

back to our old bed, which now seems so big... 

..after the "small" bed we slept in at our daughter Alison's

But nothing says "Back to reality" as much as our usual walk round the local football field. 

And we've got to start cutting down on fattening food soon, but not yet! We'll wait till next year haha! And at the coffee stand I order a treacle tart from what's-her-name's country kitchen.

I order a treacle tart from Margaret's Country Kitchen

Lois orders some sort of cake. Later on she complains of an upset stomach, but there's not necessarily a connection. Poor Lois - let's hope it goes away soon.

16:00 We have a cup of Earl Grey tea on the couch and I look at my smartphone. I'm pleased to see that one of our favourite pundits on the quora forum website, C. Spear [crazy name, crazy guy!] has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "which countries were previously [populated by] Indo-Europeans [but aren't today]".

We hear a lot about the Indo-European homelands in the steppes of Central Asia, but who knows anything about the origins of non-Indo-Europeans? [I expect a lot of people do! - Ed]

The following map shows the homeland of the Indo-Europeans, and also the places they spread to in their so-called "early years", when they were starting to throw their weight about, as we all know:

But how did it happen that a lot of these places are now populated by the Turkics? Did they wait till the Indo-Europeans had left and then move in? I don't know, but I think we should be told, and C.Spear does just that, which is nice!

The Turkic world as it looks today - all "faraway countries

of which we know nothing" [phrase copyright - Neville Chamberlain]

Well, the following map shows how the Turkics started out, quite an unassuming bunch of people, by all accounts - they were called the Proto-Turkics, and they had quite humble origins, which surprises me - 

What fun it must have been in those far-off days. Everybody belonged to some "Proto" group or other, and there weren't many people about generally, so you could wander off wherever your fancy took you, with no passports to show anybody!

What a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days !!!!!

18:00 Lois doesn't want to eat. She goes upstairs to lie down for a bit,  so I rush into the kitchen and make one of my signature meals: slices of corn beef, heated-up ex-boiled potatoes, and defrosted and warmed-up ex-frozen mixed vegetables - yum yum!

19:30 Lois is feeling a bit better. I make her a round of toast and marmalade, with a cup of Rooibos tea. After that, she has the rest of the cherry and almond cake she bought at the coffee stand this morning.

We settle down on the couch to watch a film on the Talking Pictures TV channel, "The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders", which is loosely based on the 18th century Daniel Defoe novel.

It's an incredibly long film, and takes 2 hours 35 minutes including adverts, and we think they've left out 75% of the original story and mixed up the 25% that they've kept - what madness! 

In the book Moll goes to bed with dozens of men, and has several marriages, one of them (unintentionally) with her half-brother. Lois and I think from memory, that Moll went out to the colonies (Virginia) twice, and finishes up in Maryland on her biological mother's estate at the end of the story, but this is all confused in the film. 

Plus, in the book, she gets pregnant several times but has all the children adopted, including the one she has with her half-brother. In the film, however, there are no pregnancies, and her love-life is pared down mostly to two men, Jemmy the gentlemanly highwayman, and "The Banker". What madness! [Don't say that again! - Ed]

For all that, Lois and I enjoy the 18th century ambience of the scenes. Moll meets "The Banker" on the stagecoach she takes to London. He's ostensibly reading a book of sermons, but Moll sees the real contents when she looks over his shoulder.

Moll's expensive (borrowed) dress soon gets "The Banker's" attention, something Moll quickly notices. 

Moll looks over the Banker's shoulder to see that his

book of "Selected Sermons" is no such thing - oh dear!

yikes, it's going to be a long trip !

We enjoy the re-creation of the festive 18th century atmosphere in Ranelagh Gardens in London, where Jemmy takes Moll on their first "date": the crowds, the fireworks, the fire-eaters, the peep-shows etc.

Ranelagh Gardens, London, where Jemmy takes Moll

on their first "date": God save King George!

Any "coitus" in the film tends to be "interruptus", we notice, usually "interruptus" before it really starts, like this scene on the boat on the Thames that Jemmy pretends to Moll that he owns. Here, it's Jemmy's servant who plays the role of interrupter, when he jumps on board through a window in the side of the boat.

Oh dear - has that killed the mood, we wonder haha !!!

"The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders" is not really an explicit film, to put it mildly. It's actually quite a tame film, and seems tamer even than when we both first saw it at the cinema in the 1960's. 

Then suddenly we realise why - this is the US version, a fact revealed by the American spelling in the subtitles. Lois says she read that the director had to make dozen of cuts to enable the film to be seen in the US. 

What madness !!!!  [That's it - you've said that once too often! Just go to bed! - Ed]

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