haha!
08:00 A hearty laugh in bed - that's how Lois and I like to start the day and Steve, our American brother-in-law, has obliged us with the latest in a series of thoughtful Venn diagrams by Edith Pritchett:
Poor Boris !!!!!!
Perhaps next week Edith can do something with Jacob Rees-Mogg. Somebody ought to do something with him haha!!!!
11:00 We struggle out of bed just before Mark the Gardener arrives. He's come to dig up some fruit bushes that we can take to our daughter Alison next time we visit her - Ali's got a massive "cage", that she and her husband Ed assembled at the weekend.
a typical deer of the species "cervus fructivorus"
- the little buggers !!!!!!!
When Mark has dug up the fruit bushes, he's going to help us clear out our attic and put as much as possible of the accumulated "tat" in the garage. There isn't so much to do in the garden this time of year, so he likes to turn his hand to other work if he can get it.
I can't believe it - the long nightmare years of "What can we do with all the junk in the attic?" is over at long last, and Lois and I can "move forward into broad sunlit uplands" (Phrase copyright: Winston Churchill).
I always think Michael Rosen's series works best when he's got an authoritative guest who's got a lot to say on his subject - when this doesn't happen, it gives Michael more chance to say more himself and to be his usual discursive self, which is a bit of a pity, to put it mildly!
Ninety minutes later and - I can't believe it - the attic is pretty much clear. We're keeping a few things up there like useful empty cardboard boxes, useful wooden planks, and also a few mattresses: mattresses would probably deteriorate in the garage, and if we change our mind it's easy to throw mattresses "down the hatch", without killing anybody walking beneath haha!
What a transformation in the attic! This is how it looks now - my god!
our new attic - modern style!!!!
Mine and Lois's other fear was - will the garage become a "no-go area", totally impassible except maybe to an explorer with Brazilian-jungle experience and a machete?
The answer is no - with our economic use of boxes and bags this morning, even the garage doesn't look too bad. And it'll be far more convenient to identify total junk and put some in our wheelie-bin each week for the Borough Council to take away.
See? Simples !!!!!!!
our garage - new style haha!!!!
flashback to July 2019, when I first started on my work
to explore the so-called "undocumented" areas of the attic,
thought to represent at least 79% of the total roof space.
My god !!!!!
Remember that shock study reported in Onion News that galvanised the nation so many years ago?
My work up there in our attic since July 2019 proves it can be done - attics can be tamed! And the success of today's clearance work is going to make things a lot easier when Lois and I decide to downsize to a smaller house, whether or not our daughter Sarah in Australia and her family decide to buy this house off us or not.
Sarah and Francis are half-thinking of moving back to the UK - Sarah isn't impressed with the education their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie are getting at the local primary school, that's for sure. She says private schools are okay over there, but when they moved back into the city a few months back, they had to leave their private Catholic school and started at the local state school, and she's noticed the difference already. Oh dear!
15:00 Sometimes Lois comes to me with a computer problem, because she thinks I know more than she does. My standard advice is, of course, "try turning it off and turning it on again" (copyright the sitcom 'The IT Crowd").
Lois's problem today, however, is a cursor that intermittently "freezes". By a stroke of pure luck I diagnose a dirty mouse-mat and give it a wipe with a damp cloth. This has improved Lois's opinion of me no end. You would not BELIEVE !!!!
19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's online yoga class on zoom, followed by her sect's Tuesday Bible Seminar on google meet.
I settle down on the couch to listen to the radio, today's programme in Michael Rosen's interesting series about language, "Word of Mouth".
No fear of that with today's show, where the guest is Birmingham University psycholinguistics lecturer Gareth Carrol, who's written a book about idioms, especially modern idioms, many of which I've never heard of, which is nice.
Gareth Carroll, author of "Jumping Sharks and Dropping Mics"
And by one of those coincidences that, according to some people, "proves the existence of God", one of the idioms that comes up is "Have you tried turning it off an turning it on again?", a phrase I used earlier today in my blog.
What are the chances of that happening, eh?
Who knew that inviting somebody round for a bit of "Netflix and chill", was a euphemism for having casual sex? [I expect a lot of young people know that - I wouldn't expect you to, Colin haha! - Ed]. I suppose it's the modern equivalent of what "Boomers" (products of the post-WW2 baby boom) might remember as, e.g. Private Eye magazine's "discussions about Uganda" or the old "Come up and see my etchings".
And talking about "Boomers", who knew that "OK, Boomer!" was a phrase? It's what younger people say, in an ironic tone, to some old codger who's criticising them for something or other. Apparently the phrase was first used in the New Zealand Parliament by a young woman MP, Chloe Swarbrick, when she was heckled by an older MP during a debate on climate change.
The US sitcom "Happy Days" inspired the phrase about "jumping sharks". The long-running series seemed to lose its way with a crazy episode in which Fonzie jumps over a caged shark. My god! And the phrase, "jumping the shark" is used when somebody does something a bit ridiculous, outrageous or generally misguided or out of character, and thereby loses their credibility. In this case, it was the sitcom itself which had "lost its way".
Fonzie "jumping the shark"
And I've never heard of "a dead cat strategy" - which apparently refers to the strategy much used by politicians when they want to distract the media from some scandal or gaffe they are associated with : they launch some new initiative or go on a controversial trip somewhere, you know the kind of thing. The idea stems from the concept that if you arrive at a dinner party and throw a dead cat on the table, everybody stops talking and looks at the cat.
Poor cat !!!!!!!
And there are lots, lots more interesting idioms that are discussed in today's programme, like "park the bus", and "squeaky bum time" from soccer, and the better-known "ballpark figure", "hard ball", and "slam dunk" from US sports.
But what a crazy world we live in, and what a crazy language we speak !!!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her multiple zoom sessions and we watch today's programme in Michael Portillo's new series, "Great Coastal Train Journeys".
When Michael visits the seaport of Blyth, he finds out that it was a man from Blyth, Captain William Smith, who discovered Antarctica by accident in 1819. [Well, you can't really discover somewhere on purpose, can you! - Ed]
Blyth, the home town of Capt. William Smith,
who discovered the continent of Antarctica in 1819
Michael talks to Astrid Adams from the Blyth Tall Ships Charity. Astrid tells Michael that Smith was taking some cargo from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso, when he sailed further south than he would normally have done, in order to take advantage of some favourable winds, and he discovered land.
Well, what do you know! Smith is truly one of the forgotten men of history, no doubt about that.
And doubly a pity because arguably Smith was ahead of his time, with his more "woke" discovery of a continent, seeing that Antarctica didn't have any "natives" living there, unlike America and Australia, whose original residents had already discovered their continents for themselves, thousands of years earlier thank you very much haha !!!!
And the Admiralty never acknowledged his discovery. Was this because he didn't go to the "right schools", and didn't even have a hoity-toity "degree" in Discovery? I think we should be told!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!! [That's enough now! Go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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