Friday December 30th 2022

 07:15 and Lois and I both jump out of bed - in different directions. We've got the possibility of TV aerial guy and WashTech washing-machine-repair guy both arriving here any time from 8 am onwards. 

In the event only TV aerial guy arrives, sharp on 8 am, and he's here till 10 am giving us our first feed of live TV since we moved from our former 1930's house in Cheltenham to our new-build house in Malvern on October 31st, Halloween. How long ago it seems now! We've managed by just watching catchup TV from the internet, but that has its limitations, so it'll be nice from now on to be able to see live a lot of the channels we haven't been able to access, especially Channel 5 and Sky Arts.

a typical tv aerial guy fixing an antenna

to the side of somebody's house. Ours has gone up in our attic, which is nicer

really isn't it!

The TV repair guy, suspiciously named "John Smith", is incredulous when we tell him that we have managed without live TV for 2 months, but we tell him we've been enjoying catchup TV and that we also play marital scrabble. 

That strikes a chord with Smith - if that's his real name! He says he also plays scrabble with his "missus", although he doesn't like it because she cheats, by using words that "aren't proper words", which we readily agree with him just isn't "cricket".

I tell him that we verify all words in our Chambers Dictionary. I also say that if he and his missus want to come round any time and have a game of 4-way marital scrabble with us, to feel free. But I feel duty bound to warn him that there's a surprisingly persistent rumour going around about me, that I "take too long making my moves", and that "nobody, apart from Lois, will play with me".

May I take this opportunity to scotch this rumour once and for all? I don't know how it arose! And in fact it was I who suggested the unofficial rule of "no searching through dictionaries allowed when it's your go" - a rule which neatly solves the time problem in our experience!

10:00 We get a call from Wash|Tech to say that their repairman can't come today - I had booked it online yesterday evening, after Lois discovered that one of her wash-cycles had been aborted and an error message displayed, leaving the washing machine stuffed with a lot of water and also a large load of dirty washing from our Christmas break in Oxford and Headley. Typical, isn't it!

It turns out that their repair guy can't come till Tuesday now.

14:00 Both Lois and I have slight colds today so we spend the afternoon in bed, with no worries about a repair man ringing our doorbell, which is a much more relaxing feeling, to put it mildly!

we spend the afternoon in bed, safe in the knowledge

that no unwelcome repair man will be calling, which is nice!

20:00 Ironically now that we've got the facility to see live TV for the first time in 2 months, we find that there is only rubbish on tonight's schedules. Damn!

So we watch a couple of catch ups. this year's Christmas edition of All Creatures Great and Small, and then married stand-up comics Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont's Christmas Party or "Party of the Year".

By coincidence, after all of this morning's talk about Scrabble,  in "All Creatures...", Siegfried is caught out when he puts a word down, "scrotch", which isn't a real word, and he's challenged by Helen.

What madness !!!!!

21:00 We then look a bit at Jon and Lucy's party on Channel 4.

It's interesting that viewers always imagine that the celebrities taking part in programmes like this are all personal friends, and certainly this is the impression that the programmes like to foster. However, tonight, perhaps due to an editing snafu, Jon lets slip, in an unguarded moment, that he and Lucy only socialise with Romesh when the cameras are there, which is revealing, to put it mildly!

Before the guests arrive, as always, Jon is at odds with wife Lucy about the way the party should go.

Lucy's idea about a party is to have a lot to drink, have a good laugh, and then go home and sleep it off. She says that Jon's idea is different however - he likes to schedule lots of games, and put people into categories, into boxes, activity all designed to show that he's the big man in the room, whereas he's actually the littlest man in the room.

In another revealing moment, Jon, in his turn, lets slip that deep down Lucy doesn't really like him, doesn't like his jokes, his ideas, his company, the clothes he wears. And he reveals that she's "got her eye on the prize", i.e. she's just waiting for the right moment to divorce him and scoop half his money - and  that moment is probably after one more Christmas special - ie. this one!

And on that bombshell.... oh dear! 

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

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

Thursday December 29th 2022

Who do you know that hasn't had COVID? Lois and I haven't, nor have our two daughters, the one in Hampshire UK and the one in Perth, Australia, each with their families, making 13 of us in all. And none of us has had COVID, which is nice!

But how long can our luck last? Our old friend Jen and her son Daniel, whom we stayed with before Christmas have now since had it, and Stephen, our handyman from Cheltenham, has just had it. My sister Gill in Cambridge has just had it, as well as one of her daughters, and this is all just in the last couple of weeks.

My goodness!!!! It's closing in on us, that's for sure !!!!

09:00 I finally get around to asking a TV engineer to come and survey our house for a TV aerial - we're fed up with just watching catchup TV on the internet. Enough is enough!

I wouldn't have a clue who to call, so I decide to just get in touch with the firm that put an aerial up just down the street from us. Later I hear that the guy will be calling on us tomorrow, some time between 8am and 10am, so another early start for us tomorrow - damn!

flashback to December 13th: the TV guy who fitted an

aerial just down the street from us

I've also been making enquiries about whether there's a local dairy that will deliver milk to our doorstep, so that we don't have to keep popping into shops to buy some any more. Doorstep milk deliveries are an essential part of a civilised existence if you ask us!

11:30 I drive Lois over to our new doctor's surgery. She was asked to take her blood pressure reading twice a day over the last week, but she fell short of that - well, it's really difficult at Christmas time, isn't it, when you're staying in other people's houses, and there's a lot of going on, let alone all the pernickety restrictions about e.g. not taking a reading too soon after eating. People are eating all day around Christmas time, aren't they. 

I sit in the waiting-room taking selfies,

while Lois is seeing the nurse

Lois goes in and sees the nurse, who says that her results are encouraging, which is nice. Like me, Lois's blood pressure always tends to go up when she's at the doctor's - it's called "white coat syndrome". 

Larry David, star of the US sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm also suffers from "white coat syndrome", especially when he is being seen by Nurse Renée.

a typical check-up as depicted in this scene from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - 

Larry David gets a check-up from from Nurse Renée

And because Lois didn't take as many readings as requested, the nurse asked her to continue testing for another 7 days, and to send her the results. So that's okay then!

15:00 Our daughter Sarah in Australia, and her husband Francis, are planning to move back to the UK next year, and they have asked us to view a property that they are interested in. It's not very far from the new-build home in Malvern that we moved into at the end of October, so we drive round to take a few pictures.

We like particularly the so-called master bedroom at the back, a very effective concept with its simple "bed and not much else", together with its great views of the Malvern Hills.

We are feeling a bit on edge as the estate agent shows us around. Sarah and Francis have told us they are anxious that Lois and I "don't say the wrong thing", when we are being shown round the house by the estate agent. We've sort of got the idea after previous viewings, that we may have given away too much information about Sarah's and Francis's financial and employment circumstances, which allegedly weakened their bargaining position in subsequent negotiations.

What madness !!!!

But it isn't easy viewing a house for somebody 9000 miles away on the other side of the world now, is it! Be fair !!!!

Sarah and Francis have asked us in particular not to appear too enthusiastic about the property, and I think we manage this quite well today. Luckily the owners are nor around, and it's just the agent, Stephen, taking us through the rooms. We are glad the owner aren't here this afternoon, because it's hard to appear blasé and unimpressed, or even contemptuous, when you're talking to the owners - it seems kind of rude after all! 

One other thing that Sarah and Francis are quite a bit concerned about is that to the rear of the property lies part of the premises once used by top-secret government defence and security contractor, Qinetiq. The reason for their concern is that this bit of land has been scheduled for commercial redevelopment, with possibly a 4-storey building in the pipeline, overlooking all the back gardens along the street.

I took a picture out of the master bedroom window, which shows the tatty old high-security barbed-wire fencing that can still be seen, and which still marks the boundary of the Qinetiq site.

another view through the master bedroom window

a close-up, highlighting the tatty old

high security fence protecting the top-secret Qinetiq premises.

Oh dear - it's quite close isn't it!

Wednesday December 8th 2022

08:00 Lois and I wake up in our enormous bed in the luxurious Hawkswell House Hotel in Iffley, Oxford.

at 8 am we wake up in our enormous bed at 

the Hawkswell House Hotel at Iffley, Oxford

How nice to find that we're waking up here again, where we've had so many really good times in the past, even though not all our stays at the hotel have exactly been fun occasions - there are two I remember as funeral-related stays. 

In 2011 we stayed here when my mother's ashes were interred in her parents' grave at Rose Hill Cemetery, and in 2019 we stayed here again after the funeral of my Auntie Bobby, who was my mother's sister-in-law and the last of that generation to pass on. 

In 2011, I remember that it was nice weather and Lois and I were outside in the hotel gardens after my mother's interment ceremony, when my dear late sister Kathy phoned me from the US to ask how it all went - she hadn't been able to attend the interment due to her own poor health.

Still - happier times today, and we decide to have the nice cooked breakfast in the dining-room. It's a pity that it's all self-service now however, with staff - all East Europeans - just standing around offering to help you if you get stuck. 

The thing I hate most about self-service hotel breakfasts is doing the toast: you have to work how to do it, and it takes forever, and meanwhile other people sometimes try to slip their own bread selection in, or else a massive queue builds up - both unattractive outcomes, if you ask us!

 a typical hotel self-service toaster

What madness!!! So today we decide to skip the toast and just have fruit juice and cereal followed by a plate of bacon, scrambled egg and sausage with tomato, with a cup of decaf tea.

Call us mad unconventional freaks if you like haha!

10:00 We check out of the hotel and get on the road home to Malvern. Yes, it's weird, but suddenly Malvern seems really like "home" at last, even though we've only been there 2 months.

It's soon raining really hard, and it turns out to be a really unpleasant journey. Added to that, it suddenly occurs to me that I may have left my phone charger back in our hotel room, and that bothers me all the way home. Crazy isn't it, how one gets these ideas. And when we arrive home I find that I didn't leave it behind after all, and it's there, safe and sound, in my bag of "extras". Total madness !!!!

When we get back to our street in Malvern, it's nice to see no building work going on, and all the houses on the opposite side of the street look as if they're either occupied or ready-to-be-occupied, which is nice. Hopefully it won't seem quite so much like living on a building-site from now on.

I feel really exhausted today from the effort of concentrating at the wheel for nearly 2 hours this morning, in order to drive us the 75 miles safely through all the heavy rain. I'm just not used to having to do that these days - and the pandemic and associated lockdowns didn't help with that, no doubt about it.

When we get back at midday we find a bunch of nice Christmas cards on our doormat and also our 2023 calendar made up of our own photos from 2022, all of ourselves and our two daughters' families, Alison's in Hampshire UK and Sarah's family in Perth, Australia, plus photos of my sister Gill and family in Cambridge. 

The it's back up to bed for the afternoon. Tomorrow we'll have to get back to normal life, that's for sure. 

Oh dear!

Later, as evening falls, we stumble out of bed again, and I take this picture of the other side of our street, which clearly shows that more couples are starting to move in there, which is nice.

the other side of our street - more couples are moving in there now, which is nice!

Tuesday December 27th 2022

A really enjoyable but exhausting day for Lois and me - if we needed any more proof that we're getting old, this would be it!

09:00 We roll out of bed and go down to the kitchen. This is our last day of staying at our daughter Alison's crumbling Victorian mansion, where she lives with Ed and their 2 daughters Josie (16) and Rosalind (14) and son Isaac (12).

When we arrive at the kitchen table we see that there is no space to have breakfast because work continues on the "impossibly difficult jigsaw puzzle", that can't possibly be finished before Josie, Rosalind and Isaac go back to school in early January.

What madness !!!!!

Alison and Rosalind continue to work on this year's

 "impossibly difficult jigsaw puzzle"

10:00 We pack our stuff into the car and drive the 70 miles from Headley, Hampshire, to Risinghurst, Oxford to see Lois's relatives there. Lois's brother Andrew sadly died at the awfully young age - in his early 50's - and Andrew's wife Jenny died in 2013, but their son Ian and daughter Sharon are still there in Oxford, each with a large family. 

We haven't seen them for 3 years because of the pandemic, so this visit is long overdue, and we've also got bags full of Christmas presents for Ian's family and Sharon's family - 11 children in all.

we drive the 70 miles from Headley, Hampshire, to Risinghurst, Oxford

to see Lois's relatives in the Oxford area

12:30 We arrive at Sharon's house, but we think Sharon must have been in the shower, because nobody answers the door when we ring the bell, which is a pity. However Sharon peeps through the curtains at about 12:45 pm, and opens up, so all is well in the end.

Soon it's lunchtime and we are joined by Sharon's family: Sharon's partner Michael, Sharon's daughter Molly and her partner Sam, Sharon's son Billy, and Sharon and Michael's 2 daughters Lily Rose and Little Lois.

Molly is Lois's online chair yoga teacher, and we meet Molly's partner Sam for the first time. The couple live in Leeds, where Molly works for social services and Sam works in IT, mostly from home.

Lois's great-niece Molly and Molly's partner Sam

(left to right) Sam, Sharon's son Billy, Sharon's daughter Molly,

Sharon and Michael's daughters Lily Rose and Little Lois,

and Michael with Sharon, Lois's niece

We have a really enjoyable afternoon chatting with them all, they're all just such really nice people, every last one, and Sharon and Molly both talk nineteen to the dozen, which is nice too!

We are also green with envy when we see the private bar-room that Michael and Sharon have had built at the bottom of their back garden.

the private mini-bar-room that Michael and Sharon

have had built at the bottom of their back garden.

I ask Michael if they got the idea from stand-up comedian Jon Richardson, but they don't seem to be aware of Jon's private mini-pub, the so-called "Dog and Bastard", a media sensation which was extensively covered in Jon's and his wife Lucy's reality TV series "Meet the Richardsons".

But what a great idea anyway!

16:00 We drive off to our hotel, the Hawkswell House in the Oxford suburb of Iffley, and, feeling totally exhausted, we check into our room. Lois wants to see "The Goonies" on Channel Five, a film that we took our two daughters, Alison (10) and Sarah (8)  to at a cinema in Columbia, Maryland, where we were living in 1985.

Happy times !!!!!

We feel very at home at this hotel, we've stayed here several times over the last 15 years or so. 

Monday December 26th 2022 (Boxing Day or St Stephen's Protomartyr Day)

A quieter day for Lois and me at our daughter Alison's family's house, with lots of "chilling out" after the excitements of Christmas Day yesterday. We don't have much time before a scheduled zoom call, but Lois feels like stretching her legs, so we go for a walk around the neighbourhood, and visit Eddey's Lane.

"Who was Eddey?", we wonder. We don't know, but perhaps we should be told!

12:00 We have a zoom call with Sarah and her 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.

we have a midday zoom call with Sarah, our daughter in Australia,

and her 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica

13:00 Lunch is a rerun of Christmas Day lunch, and, after that, the day dissolves into a frenzy of Impossibly Difficult Jigsaw work.

What can I say, except perhaps "What madness !!!!" There's no chance that this jigsaw will be finished before the children go back to school in January, that's for sure!!!!

Sunday December 25th 2022 (Christmas Day)

09:30 A quick whatsapp with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, and her 9-year-old twin daughters Lily and Jessica. They're on the beach and it's "not particularly warm", Sarah says - "only" 25C or 77F. 

What a crazy planet we live on!

And the sunlight there at 5:30 pm local time is so bright that Sarah can't see the screen on her phone without holding a big towel over them all. We soon abandon the attempt at a conversation and decide to have a zoom after we get back from church.

10:00 We drive off to the parish church in the village for the Christmas Day morning service, led by the female curate(?), because the vicar, Jan, is recovering from a brain tumour operation, although he's present in the church and says hello to us. He's still "on light duties" however. My goodness !!!!!

12:00 When we get home we have a quick zoom with Sarah, Francis and the girls, who are at the table eating their Christmas Day evening meal.

14:00 Lunch - turkey crown for the meat-eaters, and a nut roast for the rest:

15:00 We break off after the main course to see King Charles give his first Christmas Day message to the nation. Even the fish in the fish-tank next to the TV stop swimming around momentarily to listen to the King's words, which is a nice touch!

15:30 Back to the table to finish off the meal - the dessert, including a very chocolatey yule-log. Yum yum!

 

16:30 Time to open the presents under the Christmas tree. 

I haven't got much time to write, so here's a set of pictures to give you a rough idea of what people here in fashionable, trend-setting Headley Hampshire, are getting this year, the place where Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac recorded much of their material:

Guylian chocolates for Granny.....

...and gin for Poppa

"Bletchley Park" puzzles for Josie

some fragrances for Josie - a reminder that she's

turning into a young woman: she'll be 17 next year

a little bee-house for Ali

a pre-Steeleye Span CD for Granny: 

I learnt this Christmas from our friend Jen's son Daniel, that Steeleye Span recorded a lot of their music at studios in Kennington, Oxford, where Jen and Daniel live. What are the chances of that happening, eh?

Enough said, I think !!!!!

PS Talking about historic recording studios.....

Warehouse Studios, Kennington, where Steeleye Span

recorded a lot of their music.

Nearby Littlemore is where my parents and siblings lived for many years from 1968. {Isn't this getting a bit "off-topic" ? - Ed]

Flashback to the 1970's: Led Zeppelin at Headley Grange

flashback to June 2021: me outside Benifold, Fleetwood Mac's old "pad"

flashback to the late 1960's: the Littlemore years