10:00 Our local handyman Stephen arrives and carries on his work to "smarten up" our house and make it sellable - is that the word? Or is it "saleable"? Anyway, you know what I mean!
Lois gazes in wonder at Stephen's work aimed at
improving the ceiling in our larder - this is
the bit under where the stairs turns a corner:
what a crazy house we live in !!!!
Otherwise it's a muddling day for Lois and me. We know that our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, has a zoom appointment with a mortgage advisor today, but we haven't heard anything about the result. We, and she, want to know whether she will be able to get a mortgage to buy a house in the UK - her family, i.e. she and Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica, want to move back here after 6 years down under.
Their move depends on us downsizing at more or less the same time, but Lois and I can't decide where we should be looking for our smaller house. We've narrowed it down to three counties along the southern English Channel coastline: West Sussex, Hampshire and Dorset, but how to decide on the town? Oh dear - how muddling! [You've called it "muddling" once already! - Ed].
the 3 southern counties that we've decided to target
for our house move: Dorset, Hampshire or W. Sussex
One obvious parameter is if we can use the internet to find out average house prices for particular types of house for a bunch of likely towns, but it's not as easy as I thought it would be - damn !!!!!
some of the towns we've been considering, including Chichester,
Petersfield (between Chichester and Guildford), and Andover (near Salisbury).
Sarah and family may end up in the Dorchester area.
But what madness it all is !!!!!
It's really scary, the thought of leaving our current house after 36 years. It scares the pants off me anyway, no doubt about that.
And all the houses we look at online have one major drawback - they're not as nice as the house we've got now, that we've been living in since 1986. It's crazy, and hard to believe, but it's true, I swear it haha !!!!
I'm beginning to envy our neighbour Bob, a widower. He said to me yesterday that he has told his 6 children and dozens of grand-children and handful of great-grandchildren that if he ever leaves his house, it'll be "feet first". What a guy!!!!
our neighbour Bob - he says if he ever leaves his house
it'll be "feet first"! What madness !!!!
Way to go, Bob !!!!! Literally haha!!!!
Still we've got to "bite the bullet" at some point, and it'll only get harder, the older we get - YIKES !!!!
13:00 Stephen leaves for the day, and the disappointing thing is that he can't come back to carry on his work until next week - damn !!!! Still, he's done a lot of good work already, that's for sure.
19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's yoga class on zoom, followed by her sect's weekly Bible Seminar, also on zoom.
I settle down on the couch and watch last Friday's edition of Gogglebox, the show in which we see ordinary couples and families watching popular TV programmes and commenting on them as they happen.
I have to say that this show doesn't really work for me in general, because I don't watch the sort of programmes that the Goggleboxers watch - mostly a bunch of stupid dramas and game-shows. On the other hand it does keep me in somewhat tenuous contact with what I like to call "popular culture", so there is a good side to it, that's for sure.
And I feel also, that I have a bit of an intellectual rapport with two of the Goggleboxers, Giles and his wife Mary, who live in Wiltshire, which is nice.
Tonight Giles reports on the woman in front of him at the checkout queue at his local Waitrose supermarket.
I suspect that Giles is a bit of a Francophile, but one thing his wife Mary, a down-to-earth Irishwoman, can't stand about him is when he pronounces French words in a really vigorous and
utterly French way, making all the accompanying energetic lip movements that French people often make.
21:00 Lois emerges from her multiple zoom sessions and we wind down (haha!) with last night's edition of University Challenge, the student quiz. An exciting contest because it's the first semi-final in this year's competition, and it's between Imperial College, London and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
And on the twitter feed from last night it's nice to see once more Kavanagh's live sketches of the contestants - hail to thee, O Kavanagh etc etc haha!
Lois and I are feeling really tired, and we are again not very hopeful when the contest begins, but again, in spite of our low expectations we manage to find 4 answers that the students don't get, which keeps our morale up, that's for sure.
1. Which specific location in New York City is named in the title of a 1999 work by the US author and critic Samuel Delany, which critiques the politics of its transformation from a red-light district to a tourist destination?
Students: Broadway
Colin and Lois: Times Square
2. Influenced by Impressionism, the Heidelberg School of Artists was active in what country from the 1880's? Its leading figures included Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts, painters respectively of The Pioneer and Shearing The Rams.
Students: (Emmanuel) USA, (Imperial) Canada [Say what?????!!!! - Ed]
Colin and Lois: Australia
Shearing the Rams (1890) by Tom Roberts
3. What specific 8-letter term denotes a Latin verb that is active in meaning but passive in appearance, that is, one whose principal parts are all passive?
Students: [pass]
Colin and Lois: "deponent"
4. Trees of what genus of the willow family include the aspen, the white, grey and Lombardy?
Students: [run out of time]
Colin and Lois: poplar
22:00 Heartened once more by our cheap so-called victories, we stagger up to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!!
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