A busy day - two visitors to the house: yikes !!!! In the morning a visit from Stephen, the son of an old friend of ours. And he's a handyman!!!! How lucky is that!!!!!
And he told Lois and me that we don't look any different from when he used to know us back in the 1980's - how nice is that! But I ask him to put that in writing, just in case we need to show it to someone. Better safe than sorry haha!
We want Stephen to solve all our myriad problems with this house, from getting rid of an unwanted, non-functioning freezer, through concealing-all-the cracks-in-walls-and-ceilings, and decorating-deficiencies over the place, to repairing or replacing non-functioning bathroom washbasin components. You name it! Problems: we got 'em hahaha!
a typical handyman, with tools - warning: this isn't Stephen
Stephen also gave us the name of a friendly local estate agent, Kim, who might be able to advise us on what problems to fix and what problems to ignore, if and when we want to sell the house.
Kim, a friendly local estate agent, and friend of handyman Stephen
Sarah, our daughter in Australia, has expressed interest in buying our house, but if that turns out not to be possible we may need to put it on the open market.
flashback to Christmas 2019: Sarah, our daughter in Australia,
with husband Francis and their twins, Lily and Jessie
15:00 And this afternoon, Jeff our gas boiler specialist visits us for his annual servicing of our gas boiler. The Government has said they want to phase out gas boilers and gas central heating systems etc. We ask Jeff to comment on this, and he says "It will never happen", and perhaps he's right, who knows? Not us, Lois and I don't know, that's for sure, although admittedly Jeff's got a personal stake in the matter, so he may not be 100% impartial, no doubt about that!
Jeff, our gas boiler specialist, in happier times, indulging in his
key leisure-time pursuit of bareback riding
15:30 And hurrah - a late Christmas card arrives in the post from Japan - from my friend Yuko that I met over there when I was a student at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University in 1970-1, i.e. 50 years ago. Yuko's is always the last card to arrive: every year it's the same pattern - what madness !!!!
flashback to August 1971: I take a boat trip on
Lake Towadako with my Japanese friend Yuko
The arrival of Yuko's card is always the official signal that Christmas is well truly over. We'll keep the card in its envelope in the usual 24-hour quarantine area on the hall floor, before opening it tomorrow.
16:00 We relax with our first slices of Christmas Cake 2021: we didn't bother to decorate the top this year. It didn't seem to make any sense to put lots of little plastic reindeer, fir trees and igloos etc on top, and then immediately take them off to cut the cake. What madness that would have been!!!
I showcase this year's cake, minus reindeer, igloos, fir trees etc.
Crazy, isn't it !!!!
it's January 6th 2022 before we enjoy our first slices of
Christmas Cake 2021 - what madness !!!!
We have the cake this afternoon, accompanied by cups of Teapigs Extra-Strong Earl Grey Tea.
Steve our American brother-in-law has suggested that it would be healthier if we switched to Green Rooibos tea, a move he's going to make himself at the beginning of February. We've asked him to send us his review of the product, as soon as his trial period has begun - we don't take any decisions hastily here, to put it mildly!
17:30 I get a text from my sister Gill in Cambridge. In the closing months of 2021 we found out that we had a cousin we didn't know about - David, a BBC online journalist, born 1959, who was the illegitimate son of our Aunty Joan, and who was adopted as a baby. The connection only came to light after Gill took a DNA test. Both Gill and I have since met up with David and his wife Zanne.
In her text, Gill says that David has finally located, and spoken to, his half-sister [Elizabeth] Anne (born 1949) - which is exciting. Lois and I are agog to know how things are going between the 2 half-siblings, but we must hope for further news in due course. It must have been quite a shock to Anne, we suspect, but we don't know for sure - we'll have to see.
Lois and I also know that in the early 1970's Anne and her husband Tom, plus Anne and David's father Peter, were all living only about a mile from our current house, which is a bit of a coincidence. Lois found that out from the electoral registers of the period.
flashback to the closing months of 2021: me (top) and Gill (below)
meet up with our "new" cousin David and his wife Zanne
flashback to September 2021: David and Zanne and their daughter
visit the grave in Oxford where our 2 mothers and our maternal
grandparents are all buried.
Later in the evening, Gill texts me to say that David's initial contact with Anne went well, and that Anne seemed to be well aware of their father Peter's philandering side. Phew! So not too big of a shock for Anne, seemingly, which is good.
20:00 We settle down on the sofa and watch another programme in Alice Roberts's series "Digging for Britain", which reviews archaeological work and discoveries throughout the UK in 2021. Tonight's programme is all about work done in Scotland and the north of England.
series presenter Professor Alice Roberts
More excavations to fascinate us tonight. All of the past invaders of Britain from the Continent, be they Romans or Normans or whoever, always found it tougher going the further north they travelled in Britain - both the landscape and the inhabitants were found to be more and more wild and savage the further north the invaders travelled.
When William I ("William the Conqueror") invaded Britain in 1066, and started moving north his men threw together an enormous castle at Richmond, Yorkshire, to tell the natives that he really meant business.
Richmond, Yorkshire, where William the Conqueror
built one of his earliest castles, 5 years after his arrival in Britain
Today a lot of that castle has been demolished or ruined, apart from the outer walls and the keep, but archaeologists are trying to lay bare more of what the castle would originally have consisted of.
Tonight we hear a nice human-interest story of a local volunteer, Jenny, who turned up on the day of filming to help out with the dig, only to uncover the excavation's earliest ever find - a silver penny with William the Conqueror's face on it.
Jenny was so new to excavating that she actually made the rookie error of turning up wearing something white-ish before scraping about in the mud and getting "down and dirty" like everybody else. That's the sign of a rookie, that's for sure !!!
It must have been lost by somebody nearly a thousand years ago, during the building of the castle, and I bet whoever lost it was really mad about it. My god! A penny doesn't buy you anything today but it could buy you a lot of things in those far-off wild and crazy days, no doubt about that!!!
It reminded me of my own experience as a student in the 1960's excavating at the medieval Mount Grace Priory, not far from Richmond, where on my first day ever at a dig, I discovered the week's highlight discovery - a strip of metal with a Latin inscription embossed on it. Happy times !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzz!!!!
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