Danskcolin: Monday March 14th 2022

08:00 Lois and I roll out of bed early because Stephen, our friendly local handyman, is due to arrive at 9:30 am to make our shower look a bit nicer, for selling the house when we take the plunge to downsize. As it turns out, he phones to say he's running late, so he doesn't get here till 10:30 am, which is a pity.

We're quite happy to leave Stephen on his own in our house when later we go out for our walk. Lois used to teach him in Sunday School in the late 1970's / early 1980's, before we moved to the US for 3 years in 1982.

Here's a picture of him after his Aunty Mari-Ann's wedding in 1979:

Flashback to 1979: Stephen, our friendly local handyman,

at his aunty's wedding (front, extreme right of picture)

He doesn't look like that now - he's much taller, and he's lost all his hair for another thing: my god !!!!

And here we see Lois and me in the same group: I'm carrying our daughter Alison (4) and Lois is carrying Sarah (2). Happy days !!!!!

in another part of the same wedding photo: Lois carrying Sarah (2)

and me carrying Alison (4), near the back towards the right - happy days !!!!

Awww! Just look at little Sarah and little Ali - awwwww (again) !!!!!

11:15 We go out for our walk, and after a couple of minutes, we glance backwards and happen to catch sight of the Borough Council Bulky Item Removal Truck loading up our old dead chest freezer which handyman Stephen helped us to carry outside the house last week.

we glance back, and happen to catch sight of the Borough Council's

Bulky Item Removal service taking away our old chest freezer

flashback to last Friday - I prepare the freezer for

its removal through the narrow entrance-ways,

by clearing a pathway through all the obstructions.

What madness !!!!

with Stephen's help we dump the freezer in our driveway

It's always been a dream of Lois's and mine to become the sort of couple who dump electrical appliances in the front garden, and so for 3 days we were "living the dream". And I think it earned us a bit of "street cred" in our neighbourhood.

We even had the experience of an East European scrap-metal dealer with little or no English ringing our doorbell and offering to take it away for nothing, which was a pity because we'd already paid the Borough Council Bulky Item Removal Service a non-refundable fee for its removal by them today. Damn - we should have waited a bit before contacting them, that's for sure !!!!!

11:30 We continue our walk round the local football field. We become a bit over-excited when we see the big crane is operating again today on the adjoining building-site.

And we abandon our resolution of last week to just buy drinks at the Whiskers Coffee Stand, and not to get any eats - oh dear, that didn't last long!

Later, Steve, our American brother-in-law, sends us the latest display in that series of three amusing Venn diagrams that he's spotted, and by coincidence the third of these three refers to "choosing not to exert one iota of self-disciple", the sort of thing that has made us by a milk chocolate cookie today.

These Venn diagrams not only give me a laugh, but they also allow me to monitor my gradual loss of grip on popular culture and life in general.

I completely get the first diagram - the one about being too slow when swatting a fly. But in the second one, I didn't know about a "jump in global coal demands" and I haven't got an iPhone (diagram 3), and don't know what these "social media limits" might be, when they're at home. Oh dear, I must be getting "past it"! [We've all known that for decades! - Ed]

But perhaps I should be told???

12:15 We arrive back home after our walk. Stephen has nearly finished his work for today - he's probably going to be back on Thursday. We have a look at what he's done today.

Stephen has started to make our shower and shower tray

look not so horrible, which is nice...

...and he's started the first layer of patching over the crack

by the bay window in our bedroom

What we're doing is trying to make the house look "cared for", rather than to do any large-scale updating. Obviously the house is the kind of house that only old codgers and old crows like to live in, but when young couples buy houses like this they like to do the updating in their own way, so it's a waste of time and money to try and do it for them in advance.

And when, a few minutes later, we speak on zoom to our daughter Sarah and her husband Francis in Perth, Australia, they confirm that this is the right approach: i.e. to make the house look "cared for" rather than try to update it in general.

flashback to last month: Sarah and Francis take their 18 ft boat

"Rioja" out on the Swan River

Sarah and Francis and their 8-year-old twins are planning to maybe move back to the UK in the next year or two, and hopefully Lois and I can both (a) downsize and (b) move to an area nearer our 2 daughters, which will be a comfort to us as we become more and more feeble - yikes !!!!

20:00 We watch some TV, tonight's programme in the series "University Challenge", the student quiz. It's the last quarter-final in the current competition, and it's between Reading University and St John's College, Cambridge.

As always Lois and I are trying to get correct answers that the students fail to get, but we realise from the start that it's going to be an uphill struggle tonight. One of our problems is that, while the St. John's team's average age is 22, as you'd expect from a bunch of students, the Reading team's average age is 38 - my god!

Usually Lois and I score by virtue of being able to remember events that happened before the students were born, but tonight we've got some stiff competition, particularly from Ounsley on the Reading team, who is perhaps the oldest person competing tonight. Yikes !!!!!!

And so it proves. But incredibly Lois and I still manage to get 4 answers tonight that the students don't get, which is encouraging. We're not "finished" yet, that's for sure!

1. Similar in spelling, which two terms mean, respectively, an irregular heartbeat, and the practice of using the hands or fingers when performing a medical examination as an aid to diagnosis?

Students: arrhythmia (St John's), [pass] (Reading)

Colin and Lois: palpitation and palpation

2. In 1638, Gentileschi helped her father, Orazio, to complete his paintings for a ceiling of the Queen's House in Greenwich. Which queen commissioned those works?

Students: Queen Mary

Colin and Lois: Queen Henrietta Maria (the wife of Charles I).

3. According to the glossary in James Mill's work "The History of British India", a term increasingly used in Mills' time to denote Europeans who made their fortune in India, what word is given its original sense of "a very great deputy vice-regent, the governor of a province under the Mogul government" ?

Students: maharaja

Colin and Lois: nabob

4. Derived from the Sanskrit word for knowledge, what word does Mill define simply as "a learned Brahmin" ? In modern speech it denotes an expert on a particular subject who provides their opinion via mass media.

Students: guru

Colin and Lois: pundit

This last question is a gift for me, because "pundit" is one of my favourite words, like all words that start with pun-, almost all of which I have a soft spot for.

Even "Punjab" is a nice one, I think - it has a certain "ring" to it. It always makes me think of Peter Sellers when he played an Indian doctor trying to treat his wealthy Italian patient, Sophia Loren, in their recording of the song "Goodness Gracious Me" (1960).