Sundays are always a difficult day or us timing-wise, because Lois takes part in her sect's two worship services on zoom. Traditionally, the first one ran from 10:45 to 11:45 am, and the second one from 12:30 to 1:45 pm with more recently some members taking part in person at the Ashchurch Village Hall.
flashback to last August: we visit Ashchurch Village Hall
where the sect's services are held
In the last month, however, a bunch of Iranian Christian refugees, who like to be known as "The Persians" - just like in Aeschylus's play haha! - have been attending in person, and have to make their way to the village hall at Ashchurch by train from the Government Asylum-Seekers Hostel in Gloucester, and sometimes the trains are running late. What madness !!!!
In case you're interested, don't forget that "The Persians" is the oldest drama in a European language that we possess. [Okay, I'll try and remember, but I'm not making any promises! - Ed] It was first performed in 472 BC, i.e.. 1549 years ago, and first read by me at grammar school in about 1963, ie 59 years ago. [Well I'm not going to try and remember that! - Ed]. It commemorates the occasion that a small, democratic European city-state (Athens) fought off an invasion by a despotic Asian superpower - could it be a metaphor for the war in the Ukraine, or is that too fanciful? [Yes! - Ed]
a typical scene from Aeschylus's play "The Persians" - a despotic Asian ruler and Putin-prototype gets himself into an almighty "strop" at the failure of his forces to crush a much smaller democratic state!11:30 Sundays are for the above reasons awkward when we come to trying to schedule a zoom call with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, where the clocks are 8 hours ahead of GMT (Greenwhich Mean Time).
Sarah and her husband Francis want to speak to us about houses. They're thinking of moving back to the UK after about 6 years down under, and one plan is for Lois and me to downsize and move south at the same time, so that we both live reasonably near to each other somewhere in one of the south coast counties like Dorset, Hampshire or West Sussex.
England's southern counties
As it happens, both Sarah and Francis say they are really tired right now, after a day of tidying up their house and garden in preparation for an "owners' inspection" due on Wednesday. This is a big deal in Australia, where the owners of rented property send their representatives round periodically to check that the tenants are looking after it. I've never heard of anything like that happening in the UK - I'm assuming it's an exclusively Australian thing. Because of all this hard manual labour they've been doing today, they're asking to postpone our zoom with them till tomorrow.
Instead of today's zoom, Sarah herself calls me briefly on whatsapp in the break between Lois' two worship services, and we chat to the twins, Lily and Jessica, as well. They've been helping Mummy clean up the house today, and they tell us also about the fun day they had yesterday, when they finally managed to take their 18 ft boat Rioja out on the Swan River, not once but twice. Unlike the previous weekend, they launched the boat successfully and did two trips - the first one wasn't ideal because the mainsail wasn't fully raised: it got stuck apparently, but the second trip went like clockwork, with both sails fully up and functioning, which is nice to hear.
one possible route the family could take to get from the suburb
of Tapping, where they live, to their sailing club on the Swan River
the Rioja, the family's 18 ft boat, seen here last year
on the old launching ramp - now decommissioned
Sarah and Francis are keeping the twins off school till the week beginning March 21st - by which time they'll both be fully vaccinated: their second anti-coronavirus jab is scheduled for this coming Wednesday.
15:00 We suddenly realize that we haven't used our car for about 8 days. Mostly we don't want to go anywhere anyway: we've got institutionalized into a lockdown mentality and we get all our fun indoors thank you very much! And it's so much fun to order things online, things which magically arrive a couple of days later! Today we order a new shower mat, some baths sponges and some tea bags - tremendous fun haha!
However, annoyingly we feel the car needs to be taken out for a spin every so often. And the coming week is Gold Cup Race Week in Cheltenham, when we'll be in any case "prisoners in our own homes" for much of the day because of the traffic jams.
So we decide to take the car out to the Court Farm Shop at Stoke Orchard, posting a letter on the way, and then spend some time in the Farm Shop car park taking souvenir photos of each other, and then we come home again. It's an adventure compared to most of our afternoons, that's for sure!!!!
we spend time in the car-park of the Court Farm Shop,
taking souvenir pictures of each other - what fun we have !!!!
Our delightful stay in the shop's car-park brings back happy memories of a visit we made here in July 2019 back in those happy, carefree, pre-pandemic days, buying some beer for my friend "Magyar" Mike's birthday, and checking out the local sow, Flora, and her latest brood of piglets in the barn.
Memories, memories !!!!
flashback to 2019: the Court Farm Shop in happier times
the beer I bought for "Magyar" Mike's birthday...
We have a coffee at an outside table, almost as if we knew
there was a pandemic on the horizon haha!
...before checking out Flora's latest brood of piglets in the barn
Happy days !!!!!
18:00 Time for dinner, and tonight it's another Hellofresh meal-kit - the first in our second week of free or reduced offers: tonight we have the BBQ Sausage Skewers with Cheesy Wedges and Rocket Salad.
They tell you to put the uncooked sausage pieces on the same skewers as the veg elements before cooking them, but just to be on the safe side we separate them out and put the sausage pieces on separate sticks from the veggies. Call us risk-averse if you like!
19:00 We watch some TV: today's edition in the Countryfile series, all about the now annual instances of severe flooding that occur every year up and down the River Severn, Britain's longest river, and the River Wye, which are both quite near to us.
As the programme makes clear, the increased flooding, due to climate change and crazy building on flood plains, means that the farmers are effectively "storing" gallons of excess river water on their fields to stop it flooding out nearby some of the neighbouring towns and villages with their larger populations. What madness !!!!
Some towns are affected also, none the less. One of the presenters talks tonight to a home-owner at the notorious Beales Corner at Bewdley.
Beales Corner, the most notoriously flood-prone location
in Bewdley, Worcestershire.
We see that the home-owner has built barriers on all the doors and put in entire new floors for the ground floor of the house, consisting of porcelain tiles, that are impervious to water, and he has also put in a new concrete sub-floor under that.
He also and put hooks in the beams, so that when there's a risk of flooding he can raise all the furniture off the floor, using ropes and pulleys.
What madness !!!!!
Lois and I, however, find ourselves worrying about the man's cat, which we see in the programme but for which we don't hear about what the rescue plan is - will the cat itself be lifted up on pulleys, or just its bed? I think we need to be told ! And we sense that the cat also wants to know, and we don't blame it for that. My god !!!!
the home-owner's cat: why isn't there a plan to save it?
Poor Kitty !!!!!!
20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's hastily-arranged 10-minute prayer meeting on zoom, which turns out to take 40 minutes. I think it's to pray for the sect's members in Ukraine - there are about 100 apparently.
I settle back down on the couch and watch the first ever edition of a brand new quiz show, a sort of new take on the old "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" show. This series is called "One and Six Zeroes" - geddit?
Somehow I can't see this programme achieving the same success as "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" - it's incredibly slow-paced. Tonight's family are likeable enough, but they are given oodles of time to discuss their answers to the show's total of 7 multiple-choice questions, and this becomes quite boring after a while, to put it mildly!
Another annoying feature is that the programme often goes to a commercial break before revealing whether the family's answer to a question is right or wrong.
I suppose it's all designed to "build up the tension", but I think that affable Irish presenter Dara O'Briain isn't the right person for that. You're just too laid-back and friendly, Dara!
I find myself soon reaching for the "fast forward" button on the remote. What a godsend that button is !!! So I see this hour-long show in about 20-25 minutes, which is a relief. What madness !!!!!
In the end the family comes away from the show with £20,000. It would have been £200,000 if they'd got the right answer to this final multiple-choice question: which of these 7 musicians was born in the 1930's?
The family plump for Tom Jones, which Lois and I suspect isn't right, although we're not sure what the correct answer is.
There's a few nail-biting minutes to wait now, before the correct answer is revealed:
Oh dear - it turns out that the right answer is actually Tina Turner, who was born in 1939. Damn !!!
So the family come away with 100,000 x 20p, which is £20,000. But a bit heart-rending when they were hoping for £200,000.
Like life itself, game shows can be quite cruel sometimes, can't they!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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