What a morning - I feel almost as if I'm back at the office again after 15 years of retirement, because I'm having to work through a year's bank statements to calculate our incomings and outgoings. But we've got our first ever meeting with a financial advisor next week, so I've got to keep my nose to the grindstone, that's for sure. But what madness it all is !!!
a typical financial adviser (right) helps an "older" couple
to understand their finances
I ask Lois if she thinks I should try and grow a beard by the time of next week's zoom call. But she says something like "
Stop messing about and just get that form finished!", so I guess the answer is "no" on that one.
Expenditure on the financial advisor's form - the one I'm trying to fill in - is broken down into things like "utilities", "food/drink", "travel", "insurance", and "mortgage/rent". But what is so-called "discretionary expenditure"???? Presumably that means everything else - what madness (again) !!!!!
After 2 hours of this I take a break, but in my so-called "break" I have to work through the set of exercises - the so-called "List B" - that Connor, my NHS physiotherapist has scheduled for me today. What a life !!!!! O misery haha!!!!!
14:30 After lunch it's Skype time with the local U3A Intermediate Danish group that Lois and I run - there are teething problems again this week when Jeanette, the group's only genuine Danish member, can't seem to get into the meeting till it's half over.
Jeannette, who's lived in England since the 1970's, has just found out that Mike, her partner, has tested positive for COVID. And in the discussion that follows, people seem to be saying that our age group is really being targeted by the virus just at the moment - yikes!!!!
Jeanette, our local U3A Intermediate Danish group's only
genuine Danish member: she tells us today that her partner
has just tested positive for COVID
The group's next meeting will be in a fortnight's time, and next time we hope to finish off the Danish crime novel that we've been reading. We like to chat a lot during our meetings - in English, what's more = so it has taken us ages to get this close to finishing the book - it's madness !!!! I look back in my blog and I see that we started on the book a little over 3 years ago, in early 2019, in those carefree pre-pandemic days. Remember those???? No wonder that none of us can really remember the start of the book any more !!!!!
I've got a book of short stories lined up for us to read next, by Danish author Sissel Bergfjord, so hopefully that will work better. But we'll see. I've ordered them as so-called "e-book" versions, so I'll have to draw up vocabulary lists, and then I'll need to email these out to the members - busy, busy, busy!!!!
Sissel Bergfjord, the Danish short-story writer,
whose book we are going to read next
16:30 The meeting ends after 2 hours and Lois and I collapse in a heap on the sofa. Then we try in vain to revive ourselves with a cup of tea and half a currant bun each - yikes !!!!!!
18:00 For dinner we have the "other 40%" of yesterday's "Hellofresh" meal-kit, the thyme-roasted chicken, augmented by a bit of potato and broccoli, and we think about how much money we're saving by eating moderately - what madness !!!!
Then we sit down and look at average house prices in towns over a swathe of southern English counties: West Sussex, Hampshire and Dorset, to which we could perhaps downsize, as well as be nearer to our daughter Alison and family, and maybe even be near to our other daughter Sarah and her family, if they decide to move back to the UK from Australia.
It's just a "first look" to give us a general idea at least - yikes !!!!!
average house prices in various towns: for 2-bedroom, 3-bedroom,
flats, terraced houses and semi-detached in £ thousands - yikes !!!!
20:00 Exhausted by this, we watch a bit of TV, a documentary about actor, director and film-star Laurence Harvey.
I must say I've never been a big fan of Laurence Harvey, but it's interesting to see the clips from all the films he was in during his rather short life - he died in his mid-forties.
He certainly had an odd history - born in Lithuania, growing up in South Africa, and finally coming to London in 1946 to study at the UK's premier acting school RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art).
He was known for his clipped, refined RADA accent and cool, detached, debonair screen persona.
I'm a bit of a language nerd, to put it mildly, and also a bit of an "accent nerd". And although Harvey had a good go at doing non-RADA accents, I never found him totally convincing, either as a northerner in the gritty "kitchen sink" drama "Room at the Top" (1959), or playing Americans in his many Hollywood films.
He apparently got the part of Colonel Travis in "The Alamo" (1960), because John Wayne, who played Davy Crockett as well as directing the film, saw Travis as a fundamentally "aristocratic" character. When I see Travis in the film, however, Harvey still sounds slightly English to me. But what do I know haha !!!!
John Wayne and Laurence Harvey in "The Alamo" (1960)
Harvey's "detached air" was certainly crucial to many of his films, especially "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), in which he played a US army officer captured in Korea and brainwashed by the Communists, before being returned to the US to take part in a political assassination.
He had to play a sort-of semi-zombie in that role - it wouldn't have worked otherwise, that's for sure.
Laurence Harvey in "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962)
Lois and I are always disappointed when these documentaries become little more than a run-through of the person's films, with lots of short clips and little sound-bites from "talking head" critics, but with little information about the actor's private life. Call us nosy if you like!
We do get some hints about the guy himself, however.
Apparently Harvey took his quality of "detachedness" to its limits, not only on screen but also off screen, and he certainly didn't care whether people liked him or not. And although he became a lifelong friend of Liz Taylor, many of the actresses he played opposite said that "acting with Harvey was like acting on your own".
These comments make us wonder whether he was in fact gay, so I check wikipedia quickly on my phone - he was married twice, but there were rumours, apparently. Not that it matters - it's just interesting to us: it's all part of life's rich pageant. But call us nosy if you like! [You've just said that about 7 lines up! - Ed]
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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