Monday January 24th 2022

A busy morning (by our standards) - we take the car out for the second day running: my god! Lois wants to pick up a receipt from Mari-Ann and drop a diary in with Fran. But, at Lois's suggestion, I stay in the car, deprived of social intercourse, keeping the engine running, while Lois pops out each time and does the necessary. Poor me !!!! 

Then we fill up with petrol at our local Murco petrol station. 

our local Murco petrol station

We're down to about 2 gallons so we pump 7 more gallons in, costing £48.47.  This is the first time we've filled up our 9 gallon tank since before Christmas, but it includes our famous trip to Headley, Hampshire and back, which was about 200 miles altogether: this was to spend Christmas with Alison, our daughter, and her family. Apart from that trip we've only done piddling little local journeys, mostly just to stop the car mouldering away. 

Do these figures make sense? Answers on a postcard haha! No, don't bother, I've just checked the maths using Mathfacts, and it turns out that the calculation is covered by the "MathFacts 2" computation, so I've definitely got it right haha (again) !!!!! I thought it would be right - after all I have got a maths degree. 

Finally we do our walk round the local football field. We don't want to miss a Monday session because we've become fans of the local Old Codgers team's desperate attempts to play soccer.

Lois (left) in the pink coat orders 2 hot chocolates from the Polish girl at the

Whiskers Coffee Stand, as excitement mounts at the sight of the local

Old Codgers soccer team (right) arriving for their weekly game -

Go Codgers !!!!!

13:00 A text comes in from Sarah, our daughter in Australia, asking me to measure up our kitchen for her and her husband Francis. Francis thinks he could get somebody to put some new base units round in a simple way that would make a big difference.

flashback to December 2021: our kitchen in happier times,

with Lois making the Christmas pudding

Sarah says it's Australia Day in Western Australia on Wednesday - she'll get the day off, and the family are hoping to go down to Perth harbour to see the fireworks, which will be nice.

flashback to 2012, when the traditional Australia Day fireworks

over the harbour coincided with a lightning strike - yikes!

a typical Australia Day menu at the prestigious Perth Flying

Squadron Yacht Club - yum yum!

13:30 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent me three more amusing Venn diagrams.

Oh dear - poor Boris! He's certainly been getting some stick lately. Personally I hope he survives the storm of trivialities about so-called "parties", and carries on regardless. He's intelligent, he's got a sense of humour, and he's not afraid to apologise for his mistakes. How many politicians can you say all that about? Most of them fail all 3 of those basic tests!

And don't forget, Tory MPs, a vote to unseat Boris is a vote for Dominic Cummings - and that man Cummings is such a bastard !!!!!

Colin says, "In the name of God, Boris, please stay !!!!!!"

18:30 Dinner at back to more like our usual unsophisticated time of 6:30 pm, for a shared steak pie, with roast potatoes, and roast carrots and parsnips, plus sprouts, yum yum!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the first programme in the welcome return of Mrs Thatcher's former cabinet minister Michael Portillo's long-running series on Great Railway Journeys.

We don't mind "celebrity travelogues" if they're done by somebody intelligent and amusing, like Michael, so we welcome him back warmly tonight: although he obviously can't hear us, which is a pity!

In this latest series of his Railway Journeys, Michael is going to be travelling up the east coast of Scotland, from Dunbar to Aberdeen.

He starts tonight at Dunbar, and it's fascinating to see Siccar Point, where in 1788, James Hutton, by observing the local rocks, realised that the Earth was much much older than the Biblical 6,000 years. Note even Galileo or Sir Isaac Newton had challenged the figure of 6,000, so Hutton's discovery, publicised by his colleague John Playfair, was a real breakthrough. And no wonder that James Hutton is often called "the father of modern geology".

Hutton and a couple of colleagues were sailing along the coast at Siccar Point. Hutton was a local farmer, and his travelling companion James Hill lived just up the coast from here. Hutton had remarked that there were grey rocks to the south, and red rocks to the north, and that somewhere around this point there had to be a great junction.

This junction provided evidence of the immense amount of time over which the world had existed and evolved. The lower, grey rocks here were originally flat but they are now in their upturned vertical position; and then on top of those, we see the upper, red rocks, still in flat layers.

In this next shot we can clearly see the vertical grey rocks below, with the horizontal red rocks laid on top.

James Hutton figured it all out, but it was John Playfair, another colleague on the expedition, who explained his theory to the wider world.

What guys they were! And no wonder Hutton is often called "the father of modern geology". [May I point out that you've said that once already! - Ed]

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

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