Danskcolin: Sunday February 6th 2022

A quiet Sunday even by our standards - my god! While Lois takes part in her sect's 2 Sunday morning meetings on zoom, I do the exercises that Connor, my NHS physio, has scheduled for me today.

14:00 Lois goes for a walk on the local field while I snooze in my armchair, like a poor little old man. My god (again).

I look at my smartphone. Steve, our American brother-in-law, has incorporated Green Rooibos tea into his daily regime, and he says it's lighter and fruitier than the ordinary Rooibos, so I decide to order some from Amazon so that Lois and I can try it out.

Apparently it also helps to soothe anxiety, according to a new study by Stellenbosch University, so it's just the thing for our anxious times, no doubt about that!

14:30 Lois comes back from her walk. She reports that it's pretty quiet on the football field, which is how we like it!

For the second time in a week, the field has hit world headlines - a few mornings ago, the County Air Ambulance helicopter landed there to ferry a casualty to hospital. And this morning we heard that the Parish Council is hoping to upgrade the playground area for little kids, and make it more modern and up to date.

Lois and I are not too sure that Hamish is doing the right thing here. As two grandparents who have , at one time or another, taken all of our 5 grandchildren to this very playground when they were small, we quite like it as it is, Hamish, thanks very much!

flashback to 2014: we take Sarah's twin daughters to the playground

- happy days !!!!!

Sometimes Lois and I like to have a go on the equipment ourselves, when there's nobody about - I'm not sure we would survive a turn on the Wee Hopper, at least not without a flagon of Green Rooibos first, to calm our nerves, and possibly a second flagon afterwards. My god!!!!

a typical "Wee Hopper" from the Kompan company

Yikes - scary!!!! Probably not one for us, we suspect!

Call us old fogeys and stick-in-the-muds if you like!!!

16:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch for our cup of Earl Grey and a currant bun each. Lois reads me highlights from her last week's copy of "The Week" magazine, which gives a digest of all the big stories from home and abroad.

Lois reads me out highlights from her copy of

"The Week" magazine, which gives us the highlights

of news from home and abroad

I look at my smartphone. My sister Gill in Cambridge, and her daughter Lucy, are asking if they can visit us next Sunday which will be great. It's a few years since we've seen them, mostly due to the pandemic and other factors. It's been arranged that a live-in carer will come and look after Gill's husband Peter, who is disabled, while Gill has this short break, which will be based in Oxford, which is about 40 miles from here.

We get onto the CookShop website and order a meal for their visit. If the visit is cancelled for any reason we can always eat the 4 meals ourselves - probably on two different nights though: we're not pigs haha!!!

Plus, we want to still be able to fit in the child seats in the playground area haha!

We decide on the Chicken and Mushroom Lasagne and the Spiced Apple and Blackberry Torte.

While we're on the website we decide to order a Valentine's Day meal for ourselves: duck with red cabbage and dauphinoise potatoes, with a salted caramel cheesecake to follow. Yum yum !!!

17:00 We go back to discussing the week's news. We decide that on balance Russia won't invade the Ukraine. It would be too embarrassing for them now that everybody is watching them!

And we think the movement to unseat Boris is finally running out of steam, which is good. Perhaps now he can concentrate on running the country, thank you very much, you so-called "rebels " !!!!

Those "rebels"! They're just a bunch of little show-offs trying to make a name for themselves, that's what my mother would have said. They're not "rebels", they're just a bunch of very naughty little boys! And they were probably spoilt when they were little! That's what my mother would have said! [Stop repeating yourself! - Ed] Yes indeed haha!

20:00 We watch some TV, a delightful interview with the late actor Derek Fowlds from the "Yes Minister" sitcom, a programme which we almost didn't notice in the listings of the Talking Pictures TV channel, a channel which mostly features old films from the black-and-white era.

This programme, unusually, consists only of seeing Derek talking on his sofa or looking at old photos and souvenirs on his walls. There are no video clips of performances, only stills, and we don't even hear the actual questions from his "interviewer", though we can hear the interviewer laughing from time to time at something amusing that Derek has said, which is nice.

There's a little bit at the start of the programme about Derek's early life, and it's always fun to see pictures of well-known actors when they were young, we think.

Before Derek had settled on an acting career, like all young men in the 1950's he had to do 2 years of national service, and he chose the RAF.

Derek, who died in 2020, was such a genuinely nice man, we can tell, and his mother doted on him, no doubt about that. And she once said to him that she had three wishes for his career: (1) to see his name up in lights, (2), to see him on the cover of the Radio Times, and (3) to see him as the subject of the TV programme "This Is Your Life".

After many many years all these wishes were fulfilled, and after the "This Is Your Life" programme (1993), his mother, by then a very old woman, told Derek "Well, I can go now!", and she did - she died the following year.

Derek's name up in lights, for the show "No Sex Please, We're British"

at the Strand Theatre, London

on the cover of the Radio Times

Derek (centre) surprised by This Is Your Life presenter Michael Aspel,

while filming for the Yorkshire TV series "Heartbeat" in 1993

Derek is, of course, best known for his role in "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister", a period which he describes tonight as "seven wonderful years", and he became very close friends with his co-stars Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne.

The other day, Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, said how much she'd like to see Boris in a "Yes Minister", and guess what, Derek says something on similar lines in tonight's programme.

They did the pilot in 1979, but when Prime Minister James Callaghan called an election, they decided to wait a year to start the actual series, when they would know whether Callaghan would be re-elected, or whether Margaret Thatcher would replace him, because his would affect the background to the series.