09:00 Lois and I linger in bed: it looks frosty outside again - brrrrr!!!!!
We get a smile from a Daily Mail article sent us by Steve, our American brother-in-law, which has come through on my smartphone.
flashback to May 2020 and the early days of the pandemic:
Lois and I try out our new home-made face-masks
before going out on the town, "on the pull"
Are we going senile at last? Well, we don't think so, although it's true that twice in the last month we've left behind at the field our green plastic mac that we use to sit on at the field if the bench is damp. We left it behind two days ago, but today we find again that somebody has just folded it up nicely and draped it over the back of the bench, which is nice. People are honest and respectful round here, that's for sure - on the other hand who in their right mind would want to steal it haha !!!
Lois showcases our old green plastic mac that we left behind
on the bench 2 days ago: for the 2nd time, it hasn't been stolen or damaged,
which is nice..
It's really frosty in the spots on the field where the sun hasn't reached, but at least it's sunny, so that's a relief.
Lois showcases one of the frosty corners of the field,
where the sun doesn't shine
we share our mid-month treacle tart
We've both been putting on a bit of weight round the middle recently - too many currant buns and Christmas cake probably. But we don't want to cut down too much. We both subscribe to the view that January is the month for excess, not for starting on diets and New Year's resolutions. It's a dark time of the year, so why not live it up - that's what we say!
We heard the other day that there are serious shortages of vegan food at the moment, as a result, not just of the pandemic, but of all the people opting for the so-called "Veganuary" idea. Well, that particular shortage doesn't bother us haha!
The Romans thought like us about January, that's for sure. And in the Middle Ages also, January was a month for feasting and having fun, no doubt about that.
January in the Middle Ages was especially associated with
feasting. In the c. 1400 Middle English
poem Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, the narrator refers to the population's love of exchanging gifts in January and playing special January games, including kissing games like so-called "handy, dandy, prickly, pandy - whose hand will you have", and other jollities.
What tremendous fun it must have been!
14:00 After lunch we take our delayed shower followed by a nap in bed, which is nice. Well, you've got to celebrate Fridays as well as January, haven't you haha!
17:00 Lois gets a visit from her friend and fellow-sect member Mari-Ann.
Lois looks after a lot of the sect's financial affairs and bank accounts when it comes to funding preaching activities and so-called "outreach". This is a complicated enough job in itself, and very time-consuming, but in the last year or two it's been made even more complicated by an influx of Iranian Christian refugees.
The sect funds get-togethers with Iranians and British sect-members in a community coffee shop in Gloucester, and also helps newly arrived Iranians with the expense of winter clothing etc. Some of these have just recently arrived from Iran and just have what in Britain would be called "summer wear".
the community coffee shop in Gloucester, where the sect
funds get-togethers for Iranian Christian refugees and other sect-members
Mari-Ann also has to set them up with the NHS and with doctors, and she's just taken one of them for an eye-appointment at Specsavers in Gloucester, after it was discovered the poor guy has no glasses and suffers from terrible migraines.
What madness !!!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, an interesting new documentary on the life and career of the film-star Mae West (1893-1980).
A fascinating documentary. There was nobody quite like Mae West, that's for sure. She made the rules for her career, and did it her way. And the Hollywood studios went along with that, simply because they were making huge amounts of money out of her - people flocked to see her films.
And if the lines she was given were too tame in her eyes, she would just re-write them. What a woman !!!!
Lois and I were surprised to see how truly uncensored US films and plays were in the 1920's and early 1930's. A lot of the plays that Mae West wrote and put out on Broadway, and a lot of other films and plays produced by other people at the time, we think could never have been shown in the UK because we had the crazily antiquated Lord Chamberlain system for censoring, or refusing a licence to, films or plays thought to be salacious.
Critics and religious groups condemned Mae West's shows and films, but this had the effect of making more and more people want to see them, as with her play "Sex" that she put on at a theatre on Broadway.
Mae West's play "Sex" - every time somebody condemned it
for being too dirty, the queues at the theatre just got longer and longer
Eventually the moral crusaders got their way and the movie industry's "Hays Code" came in in around 1934. The extraordinary thing was that it made little difference to Mae - so much of her sexiness came from just a look on her face or a wiggle of her hips: things that are more difficult to censor than a saucy script or a revealing pose.
Throughout her career, she famously took a man's approach to sex and stood up for women who enjoyed sex. Her mother apparently told her not to hitch her wagon to one man, but to have several - that way none of them would be able to control her, which makes sense to us !!!
And she was famously promiscuous - even at the start of her career, as an 18-year-old in vaudeville she slept with lots of men, we are told, but she made sure she never got close to them emotionally.
Mae, seen here with her "discovery" - a young Cary Grant
She came from a poor background, in Brooklyn, New York, and she was extremely proud of her origins, never trying to rise above them. But although she brought a lot of black actors into her plays and films, the makers of this documentary don't see much evidence that she was interested in their civil rights.
The programme's verdict on her is that "she wasn't a product of her time, she was a product of her own imagination".
And she never changed, even as she approached old age. And we hear lots more of her quotes and her lines, including this scene with a young cowboy interviewee from the film Myra Breckinridge (1970), in which Mae starred along with Raquel Welch.
Haha - keep those funny lines coming, Mae! [I think it's a bit late for that request! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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