Saturday December 4th 2021

08:00 For the 5th day in a row Lois and I haven't been able to stay in bed after 8 o'clock. What madness! We've "only" been retired for 15 years - what a crazy world we live in !!!

At least today it's for a nice reason - our weekly zoom call with our daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie. The call is fixed for 9 am GMT, which is 5 pm in Perth - a good time because the family have come home from any Saturday activities they may have been engaged in, but it's before tea-time and the run-up to bedtime, which is good.

me waiting for the zoom call to start...

Jessie wants to showcase the work she's been doing on the "squeebles" maths app for children. Sarah is concerned that the twins have been falling behind in their schoolwork compared to schools in the UK, and our other daughter Alison recommended a number of apps for them to try, including "squeebles".

Midway through the zoom call, Frances comes home from his golf game at the club, which is nice.

10:00 The weekly delivery of groceries arrives from Budgens, the convenience store in the village, so we spend a bit of time swabbing down every item with disinfectant before storing them away.

Then Lois goes off for a walk round the local football field, while I start my first work on this year's great "Christmas Card" project, starting with the cards going overseas. 

After a lunch and our nap in bed, by 5 pm I've done about 20 cards, which doesn't sound much does it? I start with the cards going overseas: USA, Australia, Japan, and then the ones going to Ireland and Europe - Hungary and France.

The crazy thing is that I discover Royal Mail now charges more to send a card to the EU countries than it does to send to Japan, Australia and the USA. What madness !!! 

It's £1.70 to send to Europe and only £1.45 to go anywhere else in the world, including Japan. Is that yet another hidden downside to Brexit? I don't know, but I think we should be told - and quickly!!

Isn't it strange how random it is who you send cards to and who you don't? I met hundreds of people during my student year in Japan, but one by one they've all dropped off the list except for two, and it's quite random. Lois and I met even more people when we lived in the US from 1982 to 1985, but there's just a handful now that we exchange cards with now. What madness !!! [Say that again and you're fired! - Ed]

I've got about 30 first cousins, but I only exchange cards with some of them. Why is this? It beats me, that's for sure. 

I used to send a newsletter, but I've stopped doing that since the pandemic started. No point in boasting about anything - none of us is doing anything very much these days, that we can boast about, are we haha!!!!

17:00 Lois has been asking me what I want her to give me for Christmas. She suggests she could give me some brown corduroy trousers. What a brilliant idea! I haven't worn corduroy trousers for years. I wonder if that's why I've become so unpopular locally in the last few years. Well we'll see!

20:00 We watch an interesting documentary about film-star Claudette Colbert (1925-1987), on the Sky Arts Channel.

In the opening scenes of this documentary we see Colbert playing Nero's wife Poppaea in "Sign of the Cross" (1932), bathing in a huge pool of what is claimed to be asses' milk. 

Claudette Colbert as Nero's wife the Empress Poppaea,

bathing in a pool of "asses' milk"

Lois immediately questions the content of the pool, claiming you would need to milk an awful lot of asses to fill a pool that size. Well, is she right? It's very handy watching TV with a smartphone, because you can look these questions up before you forget about them, which is nice. 

So I look up Wikiipedia, and discover that director Cecil B DeMille did claim at the time that it was genuinely asses' milk in the pool, but it was later revealed to be powdered cows' milk - and as the scene took days to film, the milk gradually turned sour under the powerful lights, making it very unpleasant for Colbert to bear the stench. My god!

Poor Claudette !!!!!

Later we see the famous scene in "It Happened One Night" (1934), where Colbert's character and Clark Gable are standing by the roadside trying unsuccessfully to get drivers to stop and give them a lift.

Eventually Colbert's character decides to show the passing drivers a bit of leg, and it works wonders.

Colbert had a reputation at the studio for being a strong woman, who didn't want herself to be sexualised, so the director initially brought in a stand-in "body-double" to show the leg in question. Colbert, however, took one look at the body double's legs and didn't think much of them compared to her own - so the leg we see is actually Colbert's. Good to know haha!

She certainly knew how to look her best on film. And after she became a big star, she made no bones about using her power and influence to control how she appeared. 

One of her extraordinary feats was to stop photographers filming the right side of her face. Owing to some accident in her childhood she had a slight bump on her nose, which was only visible from her right side. So she was very strict about not showing her right profile on film.

This caused problems. More than once, entire sets had to be rebuilt the other way round so the studio could accommodate her wishes. And she actually had cinematographers sacked if by mistake they photographed her from the wrong side.

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

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