Danskcolin: Tuesday March 29th 2022

16:00 Lois and I sit down on the couch with a currant bun and a cup of tea, and do a "lessons learned" exercise on the day so far. Mostly we've been thinking about the visit of our third estate agent tomorrow at 11 am, when we'll get our third valuation. The first 2 agents miraculously gave the same minimum and the same maximum price as each other, so it'll be interesting to see whether the third guy falls in line with those figures or not.

Both agents emphasised the meteoric rise in house prices over the last year or two, mainly driven by the lockdowns. They compared the situation in the UK housing market with that in the States, as highlighted by the influential American news website Onion News, which has made clear to the agents that the drivers over there are essentially the same as here.

The past year has seen the most demand for housing since before the 2008 crash, and both real estate market experts and potential home-buyers are trying to understand what’s driving it. The Onion looks at the factors driving the competitive housing market.

1. Particularly good episode of House Hunters that HGTV aired last night.

2. New bench ad from realtor Deb Carmona, complete with updated headshot.

3. Nation eager to get next financial crisis going.

4. Can’t bear to look at these same godforsaken walls for one more second.

5. Droughts throughout country resulted in poor house harvest this year.

6. Americans found themselves flush with cash after switching to making coffee at home.

7. Once you get in the habit of buying stuff online, you just sort of start clicking on anything that pops up.

8. Desire among Americans to upgrade home before next pandemic.

Lois and I discuss this article. We admire the analysis that it showcases - it's up to the Onion's usual standard, no doubt about that. And we think the market is broadly the same over here, and that we've got to "bite the bullet" and sell up before the pandemic goes away.

But overall, has today been a success for us? The jury's still out on that one, we think. We try to summarise:

Biggest minus: we haven't really done anything like as much as we planned, but then it's been drizzling lightly all day - typical English weather: oh dear!

Pluses: I've mostly vacuumed the whole house apart from our 2 so-called "guest bedrooms" (formerly our grown-up daughters' rooms); Lois has dusted the whole house. She's also cleaned out all the drains outside the house. We've packed a load of unwanted things into 3 suitcases, but on the minus side, I haven't yet stashed these suitcases in the garage out of sight. I've put our waste bin and garden waste bin and food-waste caddy out by the kerb for collection tomorrow. Mark the Gardener has come and done a couple of hours weeding and bedding in of the plants we bought yesterday.

Lois gives Mark the Gardener his instructions for this morning

Well, we'll see!

17:00 All of the above is trumped, however, by an email from our gas and electricity supplier, who say they want to triple our monthly direct debit payment to them. Say whaaaaaaaaaaat?????!!!!!

YIKES !!!!!

Then later I remember that when our supplier went bust in the autumn, and we were taken on by a new company we didn't pay anything for 2 month during the switch-over, and that after that the new company were initially only charging us about two-thirds of our previous monthly direct debit, so I guess it's just catch-up time - damn !!!!!

18:00 We have another Cookshop meal: "mac cheese" with bacon and garlic croutons - yum yum!

18:45 Then I go and wash up, while Lois settles down to take part in her great-niece Molly's chair yoga class on zoom, followed by her sect's weekly Bible Seminar, also on zoom.

Molly's chair yoga

I settle down on the couch and watch some TV - last Friday's edition of Gogglebox, in which a set of ordinary TV viewers are filmed watching TV programmes and commenting on them live.

I always tend to say that Gogglebox doesn't really work for me, because the Goggleboxers have always watched the sort of programmes I don't look at - mostly stupid dramas and game-shows. However this time I find that they've actually watched something that I also watched last week: the second programme in Joanna Lumley's new series about "Great Cities of the World", this particular episode being about Rome.

The focus, however, is on the scenes where Joanna visits Rome's alleged "King of the Pizza", some guy pizza chef called Gabriele, who shows Joanna his latest creation.

Disappointingly perhaps Gabriele's new pizza turns out to be a mix of "radicchio" (a kind of brittle, very bitter, red lettuce thing) plus hummus, chickpea paste, and honey [???? - Ed].

And I think it's fair to say that the Goggleboxers' reactions are generally not particularly favourable to Gabriele's recipe.

And unfortunately then, we have to watch Joanna trying to eat a piece of Gabriele's so-called pizza - oh dear!

In general I find I don't tend to have much in common with the views of most of the Goggleboxers, but I do tend to have a bit of a rapport with Giles, an early retiree, who lives in Wiltshire with his wife Mary, whom he affectionately calls "Nutty".

Tonight Giles reminds us and "Nutty" about what happened to Ed Miliband, the Labour Party politician, after he was famously filmed trying to eat a bacon sandwich ahead of the nationwide local elections in 2014.

Good comment, Giles !!! And it's very nostalgic to be reminded of those days again, no doubt about that!

And just one year later, Ed was forced to resign as Labour Party leader.

Poor Ed !!!!!!!

21:15 Lois emerges from her multiple zoom sessions, and we watch the second semi-final of this year's competition of University Challenge, the student quiz. The competing teams tonight are from Edinburgh University and Reading University.

Lois and I are both feeling really tired, but somehow we manage to pull enough out of the bag to get 6 questions right that the students get wrong, which is something of a miracle, I have to say. Some of these are lucky guesses, though, I have to say. But my god!

1. Previously thought to be the only extant wild horse, which horse taxon was genetically determined to be a descendant of the Botai horses [from the 4th millennium BC steppes culture], suggesting it is a feral population of a once-domesticated animal?

Students: Ozaki

Lois and Colin: Przewalski

2. A question on the comparison of different species' emotional capacities: EQ values (emotional quotient) are normalised to an average species, such that values above one are considered large-brained. Which domesticated animal is traditionally used as the reference species, giving it an EQ value of one?

Students: dog

Colin and Lois: cat

3. On the EQ scale humans have a value of 7.5 . Species belonging to what family of animals have the largest EQ after humans, reaching values as high as 5.3 ?

Students: primates

Colin and Lois: dolphins

4. To the nearest 100, what is the sum total of all of the following: the number of Psalms in the King James Bible, the number of Shakespeare sonnets in the 1609 quarto, and the number of tales in Boccaccio's Decameron?

Students: (Edinburgh) 30, (Reading) 300

Colin and Lois : 400

5. Coloured signs carried by demonstrators gave Kuwait's 2005 "Blue Revolution" its name. The aim was not to overthrow the government, but to achieve what end?

Students: democratic vote in elections

Colin and Lois: women's right to vote.

6. Alive in the Cretaceous period and growing to a height of 8 feet, the dinosaur struthiomimus was so named because of its superficial resemblance to what large bird?

Students: emu

Colin and Lois: ostrich

Colin comments: Were the students perhaps misled here by the name "struthomimus", therefore deciding to go for a specifically Australian large bird? I think we should be told!

Urban dictionary gives a good example of the exclamation "Struth!" [literally 'God's Truth'] in Australian slang: