April 30th 2022

09:00 Lois and I manage to take delivery of our weekly groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village, and swab a few of them down with disinfectant - yes we're still doing that, what madness!!! - before it's time to start our weekly zoom call with Sarah, our 44-year-old daughter in Perth, Australia. Yes, as we always say, you know you're old when your children start to approach middle-age. 

we talk on zoom to Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia

We also get to chat with our 8-year-old granddaughters Lily and Jessica. However, Francis, Sarah's husband, is going out to take "sunset pictures" on one of the local beaches - Perth is a great place for those because it's on Australia's west coast looking directly on to 450 miles of the Indian Ocean, with nothing between them and Madagascar.

flashback to 2018 - I take this picture from the balcony of

Sarah and Francis's house in Ocean Reef

Sarah is going to have a hard week at work this week, she says - her boss will be in the Philippines talking to the boss of one of their company's subsidiaries. 

Lily wants to know where the Philippines are, and she eventually finds the place on the family's globe.

Our 8-year-old granddaughter Lily locates the Philippines on the family's globe

Isn't it weird to think that Sarah and her family are living on the other side of the world, where travel to places like the Philippines, Malaysia etc is a normal thing to do?!

Sarah says people are always talking to her about places that she couldn't point to on a map, and also that they use mysterious abbreviations that she's had to learn. People say "KL" for Kuala Lumpur, and "PNG" for Papua New Guinea, for example. Who knew that? [I expect a lot of people did! - Ed]

Plus, Sarah says that Australians are currently getting very angry with the people of the Solomon Islands, i.e. a people that they used to be very friendly with, until Prime Minister Scott Morrison cut off their aid. Now it seems the Solomon Islanders are getting more friendly with China - how cheeky is that!!!!  What a crazy world we live in !!!!

Meanwhile, the girls are excited and bouncy. They've been to a friend's birthday party this afternoon (Perth time), and Jessica showcases for us some of the things she came away with in her "goodie bag".

Jessica showcases the spring that she got in her birthday party "goodie bag"

How cute they are!!!!!

We break the news to Sarah that Lois and I are hoping to put our house on the market this coming week. Sarah also has news on their housing front. The lease on the family's current rental in Perth comes to an end at the end of August - so they could take another lease somewhere else in the area, but they are also thinking of possibly moving back to the UK, which would be nice, to put it mildly.

12:00 Lois and I go out for our walk around the local football field - we've already planned to spend the afternoon in bed (well, we've had a punishing week, be fair!), so this is our only chance to get a walk in. We stop for a decaf flat white at the Whiskers Coffee Stand, and decided to share a piece of lemon cake. Well we've had a punishing week! [You've already said that 2 lines ago! - Ed]

we  share a piece of lemon cake with our decaf "flat whites" - yum yum!

Slightly hanging over us is the fact that an estate agent is coming to take photographs of our house next Wednesday with a view to advertising it on the web, and the house looks like a complete disgrace, a COMPLETE DISGRACE !!! Tomorrow we're going to have to draw up a plan for each room, to decide what we need to hide or disguise by one bit of subterfuge or another, not to mention a plan for the garden. My god!!!!

14:30 We have a shower and then spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. Well we've had a punishing.... [Don't you dare say that again! - Ed].

16:30 Feeling refreshed, we get up and have a cup of tea and a currant bun on the patio.

we have a cup of tea and a currant bun each on the patio

It's eerily quiet in the back garden. Although there are cars parked outside both our neighbours' houses, we suspect there's nobody at home on either side. All their windows are closed, and there isn't any noise coming out from anywhere - why can't people be straightforward, and  make sure that they are in if their cars are there parked in their driveways! How can we guess what our neighbours are up to if they don't observe the most elementary rules of standard predictable behaviour! What a crazy world we live in !!!!

Meanwhile Lois and I haven't done a thing today towards our goal of making the house look nice on Wednesday for when the estate-agent comes to take his pictures. 

What madness!!!! And we're going to have to pay for this idleness over the next few days, that's for sure !!!!

20:00 We relax on the sofa with a retrospective on the life and career of Glasgow-born Scottish actor, impressionist and author Stanley Baxter, now 95 years old and still going strong.

Baxter was Glasgow-born, but he's also bilingual in both English and "Glasgow", which makes him an invaluable aid for any "Sassenach" wishing to holiday in the sunny city - see this excerpt from the travel programme "Holiday '81", where Baxter showcases his own little phrase-book for visitors, "Simple Little Glaswegian Phrasebook".

And he shows us how to find our way through the Phrase Book with a few simple examples.

For example, what if the visitor wants to order a cup of coffee in a bar, café or restaurant? Well, you start by looking up the word "coffee" in the index, and you find you're redirected - "coffee - see under bevvy".

GAUNAGIEZACOFFAY [Go on and give us a coffee]

Baxter then reminds us that each request to the waiter should be preceded by the beckoning call, "Hey Jimmy".

See? Not so complicated as you thought, eh?

But Baxter's biggest contribution was in the popular 1982 BBC language series "Parliamo Glasgow", which attracted hundreds of viewers with its sketches featuring the adventures of a typical Glasgow family, a middle-aged couple with a teenage daughter Ella. 

In this scene, a young man (played by Baxter himself) picks up a girl, Ella, and takes her home, only to find, to his disappointment, that she still lives with her parents. Baxter then tries to persuade her parents to go out to the pub so that he and Ella can have a bit of privacy.

= "Oh, Ella's fellow lumbers her home with an umbrella"

Note: "to lumber" means "to pull" in the sense of picking somebody up

with a view to a romantic or sexual liaison.

= "Oh give us it. You're not going out?"

= "No, no money"

= "Here's a pound. Off you go and get drunk"

A touching scene, which at the same time really brings home some of the complexities of the Glasgow language, no doubt about that!

Luckily for the young man, Ella's parents agree to go out and leave the couple to themselves in the house. Before the young man "makes his move", we have Baxter on hand to explain some of the more difficult phrases that we hear the young man using.

A crucial word is undoubtedly "Whirraborra", which the visitor should take time to master. In the scene, the young man embraces the girl and uses the key expression, "Whirraborra bashatra pash?"

We don't get an explicit English translation of this phrase, but Lois and I think it probably means something like, "Let's do it now, while we've got the chance!" 

And again, as the girl starts to "warm up", the simple word "Whirraboorrit?" (= "What about it?"), can be used tenderly in her ear, if possible, like this:

Fascinating stuff !!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!

Friday April 29th 2022

A day that turns into something other than what Lois and I had planned - morning was going to be ordering next week's groceries by phone, and - more momentously - ringing an estate agent and saying that we want to sell our house after 36 years. And after lunch was going to be our twice-weekly shameless self-indulgence of a shower followed by the rest of the afternoon in bed.

The planned lazy afternoon doesn't happen, however - at about 10 am we get a call from our friendly local handyman Stephen, who says he'll be turning up about 10:30 am to do more of his patching-up jobs on our house's decoration and paintwork etc. He says he'll only be with us for about a hour, but he actually doesn't go till about 3 pm, so we have to postpone the shower-and-nap plan till tomorrow. Damn!

Still, no matter, because while Stephen is touching up the floor of our front porch and the surface of the front door, and one or two other jobs, Lois and I are able to do some more de-cluttering work.

Stephen has managed to touch up the floor of our front porch,

which has been an utter disgrace, an UTTER DISGRACE,  for years...

...and he's also managed to touch up the surface of the woodwork 

on our front door

Yes, so while Stephen is beavering away here and there, Lois and I get the chance to go through the letters we wrote to our parents while we were living in the States from 1982 to 1985. 

Memories! Lois says, however, that she finds the letters I write rather unsatisfactory, because, allegedly, I'm always trying to be funny [subtext: and not succeeding!!!]. Oh dear, but never mind!

Most of the letters we can safely throw away, but I've decided to keep my very first one, written home after our first 2 weeks or so in the US, and giving my first impressions:

What a buffoon! And what childish handwriting - my god! And I wrote that letter on August 25th 1982, mine and Lois's 10th wedding anniversary, as it happens. 

But oh, the memories! This is what Lois (37) and our daughters Alison (8) and Sarah (6), and my sister Kathy (35), looked like in 1983:

flashback to 1983: Lois and me, and Alison and Sarah, stand 

in front of our huge detached house waving goodbye to my sister Kathy:

our  car can be seen parked to the right, on the driveway, 

and I think that's Kathy's car, parked on the street to the left. 

Alison and Sarah on the pavement in front of our house. On the grass verge 

I can see a bag of groceries from the local Giant supermarket 

that's just been unloaded - it must have been a Saturday

(left to right) my sister Kathy, Alison, Sarah and Lois

- I'm guessing this was taken at Washington Zoo: there certainly weren't 

any lions in our neighbourhood in Columbia, as far as I know, which was nice

Happy days !!!!!

Otherwise today - not a wasted day, from all viewpoints - we take the momentous step of telling an estate-agent that we want to sell this house after 36 years, so the die is now well-and-truly cast. 

Simon is coming to see us next Wednesday to explain everything and take photos, so that gives us about 3 days to make the house look less like the Book Depository in Dallas or the Lost Property Office at Waterloo Station, London - yikes!!!! And yikes again !!!!!

a typical Lost Property Office - this one 

belongs to Transport for London

Plus - another triumph: for the last 5 or 6 years, we've suffered from having a living-room door that keeps opening of its own accord, which doesn't matter most of the time, but on chilly evenings when we're on the sofa watching TV with the gas fire on, it's annoying to hear the door slowly opening and letting a cold draught of air come in from the hallway.

We've lived with this problem for years by using a door-stopper in the form of a stuffed toy that looks a bit like a Beatrix Potter character: I've always thought it was "Mrs Tittlemouse", and that's what I've always addressed her as, although Lois tells me that Mrs Tittlemouse is never seen wearing a bonnet, so the jury's still out on that one.

Now, at last handyman Stephen has fixed the problem today, and the door shuts good and firmly, which is nice. At last Lois and I can be really truly cosy in the evenings and can create on the sofa our own version of the Danish concept of "hygge", to put it mildly.

flashback to what could have been any chilly evening over the last 5 years:

"Mrs Tittlemouse" acting as a door-stopper to keep the living-room door closed

As for Mrs Tittlemouse herself, I've officially "pensioned her off", and with a short speech I wish her a long and happy retirement. She now sits in one of our armchairs in a good position for watching TV, which is nice.

"Mrs Tittlemouse" - now, as a new retiree, the "old girl" can sit in one

of our armchairs and she even gets to watch TV with us, which is nice!

Lois and I discuss and we think there's no other task that Stephen could possibly have done today that could match the enormous convenience of, at last, having a living-room door that shuts properly. It's like magic, no doubt about that !!!!

20:00 We watch some TV, the 1st part of an interesting 3-part documentary, presented by Lucy Worsley, about the restoration of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which was badly damaged by fire in 2019.

A fascinating programme, just the first hour of this 3-hour series, far too detailed and nitty-gritty to be summarised - you'll have to watch it yourselves haha! But wouldn't it make a fascinating step-by-step YouTube video "How to restore your local badly-damaged cathedral" - I bet that would get lots of "views" haha (again) !

And it would probably start like this: (1) assemble your 2,000 oak trees haha [That's enough hahas! - Ed]

Presenter Lucy Worsley, who is Joint Chief-curator of the UK's Royal Palaces, is certainly passionate about the subject. We see her reminiscing about how she first saw Notre Dame as a 16-year-old on a school exchange trip.

Presenter Lucy Worsley on a trip to Notre Dame as a 16-year-old schoolgirl

Lois and I were hoping to see Lucy's 16-year-old hands to see if she was already wearing gloves, but we just get this head shot (see above), unfortunately.

It's been a vexed topic on the internet for some time about why Lucy is always seen wearing gloves on TV, and recently she weighed in with her own answer to the question. 

However  I'm waiting for one or other of our favourite quora forum pundits to weigh in with their own angles on this. Come on, pundits, get your finger out!!!!

There's a more serious question here, however - does Notre Dame need a spire? Lois and I think the building is trying to do too much. In British terms, it's trying to be Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral at the same time. But we're not sure - perhaps we should be told. Answers (on a postcard) please!

Does Notre Dame need a spire? The jury's still out on that one,

as far as Lois and I are concerned!

21:00 We wind down with an old episode of the 1970's sitcom "Butterflies", all about Ria, a 40-something bored housewife with an unromantic husband and two selfish teenage sons.

In tonight's episode, Ria again suspects that she's on the verge of a breakdown, so she visits her doctor, Gordon, who's an old college friend of her husband Ben's. However Ria doesn't feel the visit achieves anything very useful to her.

He says, "Well, Ria, it's fairly obvious what's happening to you. You are suffering from nervous exhaustion...

There's no medical cure as such - I can only offer you assorted pills, which will comatose you until the anxiety goes. But you wouldn't want that?"

To which Ria replies, "Oh no, I definitely want to be around to see the anxiety go!".

She asks Gordon if he thinks she's going insane. He replies, "We are all standing on the edge of that pool. Some of us unfortunately fall head first. Most of us peer at it and decide not to go. Some of us, aided by those around us, just dip our big toe in. We go around screaming for a time, until the pain gets better."

After Ria leaves the surgery, Gordon phones Ben, Ria's husband. He says, "Don't worry. Expect a few more outbursts, and then she'll be fine - all right?"

Ben protests, "I'm not good at this... you know...the complexity of a woman's mind. If she had a cold or something I could put a bandage on, but emotions, frustrations, all those things, delving into her mind is almost as bad as delving into her handbag."

Gordon: "Don't do anything - just think of her as a kind of female Vesuvius. When she erupts, all you can do is watch!"

Oh dear, and the conversation brings back to Lois all the times that doctors dismissed her issues as "imaginary". And she says that even the medical books for girls in her school library told its female readers that their period pains were just their imagination. In fact, she says, they only really go away for women when they start having babies, she says.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!

Thursday April 28th 2022

09:00 It's getting closer - yikes!  Mine and Lois's plan is to ring up an estate agent's tomorrow and ask them to put our house on the market, after 36 years, during which time we've accumulated enough stuff to fill this house twice over, at the very least. Oh dear! 

a typical estate-agent touting for business

The first thing our estate agent will want to do is to take pictures for the advertising, so we've got to make sure they give us a few days to make the house and garden look less cluttered, and hide a bunch of stuff out of sight: under beds, in wardrobes and suchlike. 

And after that, the die will be cast (phrase copyright: Julius Caesar). [That copyright will have lapsed by now surely? - Ed]

YIKES (again, only louder!) !!!!!!!

We spend the morning doing fiddly little clear-up jobs around the back garden: trying to wind up the garden hose on to a reel, and failing (the rubber or plastic or whatever it's made of is as hard as anything - my god!); filling with earth and stones the hole under the wire fence, where foxes and/or badgers tunnel through at night to have a jolly good time at our expense; and, finally, putting all the broken glass from February's storm plus a broken flowerpot into the bottom of our green wheelie bin, which luckily was emptied yesterday by the Borough Council's contractors.

Exciting stuff isn't it !!!!

I try - and fail - to coil up our garden hose around its reel -

it's so hard it's like steel !!!!!!

...and in the end I have to just squash the whole lot into a big cardboard box

which I can now hide in the garage. What madness !!!!!

into the green wheelie-bin goes all our broken glass from February's

storm, plus a huge broken flower-pot: goodbye, and good riddance haha!!!

By an odd coincidence, Lois's cousin in Adelaide, Stephen and his wife Diane, have just decided to embark on the same process, selling their house and disposing of 60% of their possessions. They're both members of Lois's sect, so they've decided to move into a retirement complex run by their church.

Lois and I visited Stephen and Diane in 2016. I don't think any of us were talking about selling up and downsizing at that stage. It just sort of creeps up on you doesn't it! Yikes! [That's enough yikeses! - Ed]

flashback to 2016: (left to right) me, Diane and Stephen, 

out in the countryside near Adelaide: in the far distance is the Southern Ocean

April 2016: (left to right) Lois, Diane and Stephen. We're queuing up

to "hug the koala" - Lois here is psyching herself up to do her "koala face".

What madness !!!!!!

Come on now, get ready for it Lois haha !!!!!

maybe a bit more work needed????!!!!

Attagirl! - that's the one haha!

included for comparison purposes: Sheldon Cooper's "koala face"

from "Big Bang Theory": the French subtitles have Sheldon saying, 

"when they start chewing their eucalyptus..." Awwww !!!!!

Awwwwwww !!!!!

15:00 In the afternoon Lois and I sit and plan how to make our living-room look less like a warehouse or the book depository that Kennedy was shot from, but we don't come to any firm conclusions.

Then, to make ourselves feel as though we've achieved something today, we order a bunch of Platinum Jubilee mugs online, two from the Australian Amazon for our twin grandchildren in Perth, Australia, and four from the charity RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) headquarters in Poole: three of these will go to our 3 grandchildren in Headley, Hampshire, and one will go to Lois herself.

the RNLI mug that will go to our 3 grandchildren in Hampshire,

with a fourth mug for Lois herself.

and this from the Australian Amazon: one each for our twin

grandchildren Lily and Sarah in Perth

Lois is keen to supplement her own existing collection of royal mugs: her coronation mug from when we was a 7-year-old at primary school, a diamond jubilee mug (2012) and a golden jubilee mug (2002).

(left to right) Lois's school Coronation Mug (1953),  

our Diamond Jubilee mug (2012), and our Golden Jubilee mug (2002)

What madness !!!!!

20:00 We watch some TV, the third programme in the series "Art That Made Us", which showcases works of art from the last 1600 years' history of the British Isles, and bringing in modern artists to comment on them and sometimes create new works inspired by them. This third programme focuses on the 16th century - in England this is dominated by the reign of Elizabeth I.

Yes, it was very much a period of "England against the World" - a newly Protestant country in a Europe dominated by the Pope and the big Catholic powers of France and Spain, a country long regarded as a cultural backwater by the peoples of the Continent, "Oh that country we get our wool from!", a country now trying desperately to come up with a defiant national identity, and a unique image and presence. 

Poor England !!!!!!

Elizabeth's reign (1558-1603) had followed that of her sister Mary, a Catholic who had had hundreds of Protestants martyred, and the first cultural artwork in this programme, as Lois had feared, turns out to be the dreaded Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563). 

Foxe's book gave all the gory details about the deaths, by burning, of many of the Protestant martyrs that had taken place during Mary's reign - the book was designed to consolidate the hold of the country's new Protestant national church, the Church of England, of which Elizabeth was now the head. The Church had copies of the book placed in all its churches - my god! And it's an incredibly long book: the second edition of the book is four times the length of the Bible. My god!

Lois turns the sound down on the TV as some of the gory details in Foxe's book are read out, but we still have the subtitles, so she has to look away as well. My god (again) !!!!!

The book had a huge impact thanks to the innovation of printing, introduced to England by William Caxton - and the programme's contributors compare this revolutionary development to the coming of the internet - the big best-sellers were suddenly being read everywhere around the country.

And we hear the comments of modern-day writers and academics on Foxe's book. 

Stephanie Merritt, best-selling author who under the name S.J. Parris writes thrillers  set in the Elizabethan period, says she gets the sense that Foxe really relishes the impact on the reader of his gory descriptions.

Yes, Lois says that Foxe's illustrations are the worst part, she thinks! 

And it's true that the copies of the book dating from Elizabeth's reign that we still have around in libraries and museums etc confirm that it's the pages of illustrations that show the most wear - those Elizabethan readers must have really loved them! They're the pages that show the most traces of candle-wax, and traces of food, even. 

Some readers coloured in some of the faces of the martyrs, or "defaced" the faces of the Catholic persecutors - my god! [That's enough 'my god's !!! - Ed]

Also in tonight's programme it's interesting to see poetry that the Queen wrote herself in her 40's, when she realised she might never have a husband or children, poetry that reveals her as a sensitive soul underneath all the outward nationalist bravado. 

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant.

I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate,

I am, and not.

I freeze and yet am burned,

Silence from myself, another self I turned.....

My care is like my shadow in the sun,

Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.

His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

(from "On Monsieur's Departure", c. 1582)

Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies, says "This kind of poetry is recognisably something modern, people thinking about their inner life, their souls. And this is something in the period that we see being played out in all the creative arts, in literature. 

"Poetry is endlessly thinking about questions of love, but asking, "What does the beloved think? Does she love me, does she not? What is my feeling now? Am I in love? Am I not? Is this just really about desire?" "

Another pundit looks at what these cultural trends meant for Elizabeth herself. 

"For Elizabeth I don't think there's a particular distinction between what is personal and what is political, and that's what her poem is about. The fact that, as a queen, her emotions as a woman are caught up in matters of state, and vice versa - she does not have the luxury of separating the two. and that's the tension that you see throughout her poem."

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

22:00  We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!