Friday January 4th 2022

10:00 More trouble for Boris on the news today - advisor is copying advisor in resigning: what madness - why can't they be more original haha!!!! 

Poor Boris !!!!!! Never mind, Boris, remember the old adage - when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Attaboris - you can do it haha !!!!!!

11:00 Lois and I take the car for a spin to the small town of Bishops Cleeve which is 3 miles outside Cheltenham. We've just realised we haven't used the car since last Wednesday: 9 days, so it'll be starting to seize up any day now. 

While we're going down the town's main shopping street, Lois has the bright idea of measuring the slit in the post box outside the post office there.

the red post-box outside the Post Office in Bishops Cleeve

We're always on the look-out for bigger slits, or is it slots? I think we should be told. We often have small parcels to post, usually to our daughter Sarah's little family in Australia, and usually we're sending the books Sarah used to read when she was little, in case her 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica would like them.

We haven't got a ruler in the car to measure the local slit, but we've got a couple of wooden forks from a long-discarded take-away meal. Lois takes a fork to the slit and measures it as 1.5 forks wide. 

When we get home, we measure the fork, which turns out to be 6.25 inches, so the slit in the post-box at Bishops Cleeve must be 6.25 + 3.125 inches = 9.375 inches (23.8 cm). You do the math haha! [I think you've already done it! - Ed]. Well, did I ever tell you I've got a degree in maths? [Yes, many times! - Ed]

Perhaps we can get the takeaway fork accepted as a standard imperial measurement, do you suppose?  [I hardly think so! - Ed]. Perhaps readers can send me in their support, which will help my case to the Government's Imperial Weights and Measures Department. But on a postcard please - have some pity for my poor local postman!!!

a 6.25 inch wooden fork from a long-discarded takeaway meal

This is important because we've got a child's atlas that we want to send to our twin granddaughters, and this will definitely go through this enlarged slit or slot, which is nice.

Unfortunately it's only after I buy the postage for the atlas online from the Royal Mail website, and prepare to stick the labels on the package,  that I realise that it was an atlas from the late 1970's, and so it's a bit out of date, to put it mildly. Mostly it's all right, but on one or two pages it's still talking about the so-called "USSR" and "The Soviet Union". 

What a crazy world we live in!!!!

But can we in good conscience give this atlas to a couple of 8-year-olds, who, for all we know, may commit these pages to memory. What did St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) say? Yes, "Give me the child until he's seven, and I have him for life!". Young minds are precious - and they're so very impressionable. Talking point for the day! [I want something a bit more original that that please! - Ed]

14:30 I'm a member of Lynda's local U3A Middle English group, and today is the group's monthly meeting on zoom. 

We're reading a story called "Dame Sirith", which was written some time between 1273 and 1283.

The text has a simple plot at the beginning - some guy called Will, a young "clerk", is infatuated with a local housewife called Margery. He waits till her husband is out of town and then goes to see her, hoping to get her to go to bed with him, but she's not keen.

a young clerk Will (right) becomes infatuated with

a young housewife, Margery, and he tries to get her to go to bed with him

[picture from a modern Canadian stage version of the story]

Note the glaring rookie error by the producer in the above-pictured stage-version, by the way: electric fans certainly didn't exist in those crazy, far-off days, and there's no way Margery would have had one! However, the green exit-stair light is just about okay, I think - health and safety worries were just starting to make an impact in in the late 13th century, I believe! 

And I think it was only in the early 14th century that the pendulum swung the other way and people were calling such worries "health and safety gone mad" or "hælð and sauvete waxen wod!" , as they put it in their quaint Middle English dialect!

Incidentally, it's interesting that in the older versions of the well-worn cliché "It's health and safety gone mad" or it's "health and safety waxed wood", the meaning of the word "wood" in the sense of "mad" or "crazy" derives from the religious mania associated with the god Woden (or Odin in Norse), the god that gave his name to our weekday "Wednesday". [I don't think that's all that interesting if you ask me! - Ed]. 

Fascinating stuff !!!!

typical medieval health and safety inspectors

or "hælð and sauvete" inspectors, as they were called at the time

Anyway, back to the plot! 

So, as I was saying, "Dame Sirith", to start with, is just a simple "Boy Fancies Girl" drama, like a thousand others. It's only later that the plot starts to get a bit weird.... 

Everything starts to go pear-shaped when Will, in order to fulfil his aim of seducing Margery, enlists the help of an older woman, Dame Sirith. 

Dame Sirith has the idea of making her dog weep uncontrollably, by giving him hot spices. Then she takes her dog along to Margery, saying that if Margery will just agree to sleep with Will, the dog will be cured of its incessant weeping.  

Does any of that make the slightest bit of sense? Not to me, but then I'm a maths graduate - I can work out 6.25 x 1.5, but I don't normally tend to stray very far outside the realm of simple multiplication problems! Call me a coward if you like!

Dame Sirith brings her weeping dog along to help little Willie 

with his seduction scheme

But what a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days !!!!!!

During the meeting, I come up with a few "bon mots" that set the group laughing, although not always intentionally I have to say!

When Willie first complains to a friend that he can't get Margery to go to bed with him, the friend advises him to "go tell his troubles to Dame Sirith, who always speaks courteously", and I speculate aloud as to whether Dames Sirith might have been listed in Yellow Pages at the time - thus making the same mistake as the producer in that modern-day Canadian stage version of the story, who got his technology totally wrong for a 13th century drama. 

Historically speaking, "Yellow Pages" is absolutely and without question "not right" for the 1270's. Oh dear!

Let's hope the group will have forgotten about my gigantic "gaffe" by the time of next month's meeting!

20:00 We watch some TV, an interesting documentary about Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the French painter, and especially about his later works, which the public loved, but which the critics, including many feminists, absolutely hated. 

Poor Pierre-Auguste haha!!!!

And talking about "gigantic gaffes", look at the gaffe made by the BBC's "Radio Times" with its programme listing, which talks about "Jean" Renoir. My god! Doesn't anybody ever check for errors at the BBC? "Jean" Renoir is, of course, not the name of the famous painter, but the name of his son, who wrote about his father extensively, admittedly!

Not good enough, BBC !!!!!

Yes, later in life, Renoir turned more or less exclusively to painting female nudes, and, might I add, female  nudes looking very happy and contented - with an almost "bovine" look on their faces, feminists said. Renoir loved painting flesh, that's for sure, and he was able to make flesh look eminently tactile, something a lot of painters have failed to do. 

But Lois points out that Renoir's later nudes were not at all suggestive. They're just the female form in its totally natural (often) pear-shaped version, and totally without the coy titillation and the suggestive "wry smiles to camera" (phrase copyright: Danish crime writers) favoured by earlier artists.

But of course the critics hated the pictures, and feminists talk of Renoir's models being "objectified". My god, what a crazy world we live in !!!!

one of Renoir's "late" works, the sort that the critics hated:

"The Large Bathers" in the Philadelphia Museum of Art: the thigh in the foreground 

has been described as "the best thigh in the history of Western Art"

Many others of these later works are exhibited at the Barnes Foundation gallery, also in Philadelphia. Barnes was a wealthy US industrialist who snapped most of these later pictures up.

In tonight's programme we see visitors browsing some of Renoir's late pictures in the Barnes gallery, and making appreciative comments, which is nice.

And who knew that when many of Renoir's models were not disporting themselves in his studio as naked "Venuses on Olympus" or whatever, they frequently offered to do housework for him, especially when he was living in Essoyes. They did little jobs around the house like pressing Renoir's trousers, or darning his socks, which was nice of them, Lois and I feel.

This might have made a good subject for some more paintings, we think. A missed opportunity there perhaps? 

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