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!!!!