Tuesday April 5th 2022

A spookily quiet day - after all the excitement of recent weeks centring on the plans of our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, now Lois and I find ourselves suddenly becalmed. 

Our daughter Sarah, husband Francis and their 8-year-old twins

Lily and Jessica, out sailing on the Swan River last Saturday,

with the skyscrapers of Perth's Central Business District in the background

The tumult started a few months ago when Sarah, our daughter in Australia, said that she and her family were thinking of moving back to the UK, and specifically to the Cheltenham area - this started us thinking of downsizing locally, so that she and husband Francis could buy our house.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Francis said he didn't want to settle in Cheltenham, but would prefer to be  somewhere like Dorset, a county on the south coast. This started Lois and me researching houses in Dorset we might downsize to.

Then 2 days ago Francis said the plan had changed again - the family were now thinking of settling in the Cheltenham area after all: this might make their return simpler, given that Sarah has been offered her old job back by her former accountancy firm in Evesham. 

I asked them to put their plans in an email, so that Lois and I could more easily digest them - we admit that in our mid-70's we're not the sharpest pencils in the box any more: my god !!!!

Until they do that, Lois and I can't really plan anything, so everything's on hold at the moment.

11:00 We've been doing a lot of work in the house recently, getting a handyman to patch the decoration up a bit, and choosing which of our hundreds of books we will have to throw out, when we downsize. Yikes !!!!

Well, we mainly take a rest from that today, although we do do some minor work on Sarah's old bedroom, throwing out all but a few of her many children's stories etc that she left behind in her bookcases.

we begin to stack some of Sarah's dozens of childhood books on her old bed

her old bookcase in its "slimmed down" form, with only

a minority of Sarah's old books, and a better book-to-ornament ratio,

showcasing all the ornaments she brought back from her Overland Africa

group truck holiday in 1995 - what madness !!!!

14:00 Awful, crazy corrupt Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's election victory in Hungary this week is still casting a black shadow over the day. 

Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend forwarded to me a desperate tweet from Python star John Cleese at the weekend, in which he pleaded with Hungarians not to vote for Orbán, who of course has been cosying up to Putin.

Cleese presumably thought that this point should make the election a no-brainer for Hungarian voters, although Tünde points out that, in 1956, Ukraine was still part of the USSR - Cleese appears to have forgotten this!

16:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch with a cup of tea and a piece of bread and some of our home-made gooseberry jam.

Excitement is mounting, because soon, possibly tomorrow, we can get the chance to watch the start of the BBC's new documentary series about Ghislaine Maxwell's father Robert's publishing empire, where Lois worked up until our marriage in 1972.

Until our marriage, Lois worked for Maxwell's Documentation Department at Headington Hill Hall, Oxford - he was a frequent visitor to the office, she recalls, normally flinging the office door open in the hope of catching somebody not working. However, it was Lois's boss Jane who bore the brunt of the Czech-born mogul's temper tantrums - he once smashed her phone against her desk, breaking it, Lois remembers.

Czech-born publishing mogul Robert Maxwell

In 1972 Maxwell congratulated Lois on the excellence of her work, and invited her to accompany him to the Leipzig Book Fair, and Lois says she has never been happier in her life to be able to say no, with the valid excuse that she was about to get married. Maxwell had quite a reputation with his female staff about his dreaded "late-night knocks on their hotel room doors", on his foreign trips. My god - the traditional "fate worse than death" - yikes! 

16:30 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent me another of the amusing Venn diagrams he spots on the web.

Steve apologizes for the lack of an Orbán-themed Venn this week, but it's hard to think of one that isn't in bad taste, with all that's going on in the world at the moment. Putin has now congratulated Orbán on his victory, which must be a bit of a "poisoned chalice" for Viktor, I suspect. If it isn't, it certainly ought to be.

19:00 Lois disappears back into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's zoom chair-yoga class, followed by her sect's weekly Bible Seminar, the last in the current series, also on zoom.

Lois's great-niece Molly's chair yoga class on zoom

I settle down on the couch and see last week's edition of Gogglebox, in which ordinary viewers are filmed watching, and commenting on, their favourite TV programmes.

As I always say, "Gogglebox" as a programme doesn't really work for me, because the Goggleboxers tend to watch all the programmes that Lois and I don't watch - stupid dramas and daft game-shows typically. Nevertheless I feel that it's useful, because it keeps me in touch with what 95% of the population are spending their time on every evening.

Tonight I realise particularly how desperate programme-makers are becoming in their search for new series ideas. The Goggleboxers are watching the first programme in a new series, "The Great Big Tiny Design Challenge with Sandi Toksvig". 

The contestants, eight amateur craft makers, are set the challenge of converting what the show calls "an empty house" into "the ultimate fantasy mansion".

That sounds just about okay, if a bit desperate, as an idea for a series, until we find out that the house is just a doll's house, and the contestants will be making tiny doll's furniture. My god!

Here we see seasoned Anglo-Danish TV presenter Sandi Toksvig explaining the idea behind the series:

How silly can you get? Well, you can get a lot sillier than that, because in this first programme in the series contestant Bexie has a minor disaster making a tiny set of chairs, and then has a major emotional "meltdown".

Bexie's glue isn't working and her little chairs keep falling apart - oh no!!!

Eventually one of the show's technical experts gives Bexie a hug, which cheers her up slightly. 

But my god - is this the ultimate "silly idea" for a series? I don't know, but maybe I should be told. My god (again) !!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her multiple zoom sessions, and we watch an old episode of the 1970's sitcom "Butterflies" starring Wendy Craig as bored housewife Ria, with Bruce Montague as Ria's would-be lover, Leonard.

This is one of Lois's favourites from the late 1970's - it centres around the malaise that married women were feeling at the time, when the feminist movement was still on the rise, but when most women's lives had not much changed, as yet, from the traditional roles they'd been limited to for centuries. 

Ria is stuck in a middle-aged marriage with an unromantic husband and 2 selfish teenage sons. A cleaner does all the cleaning jobs around the house, and Ria is stuck mainly with shopping and cooking - and cooking is an art she has never really mastered, nor ever wanted to master, come to that. 

Oh dear!

Ria's life is brightened up a bit by Leonard, a man she meets by accident in town, and who makes romantic gestures to her, e.g. buying her flowers, although Ria tells him firmly that she's not interested in taking the relationship further.

The series was a bit of a favourite locally, back in the 1970's, because all the outdoor scenes were shot in Cheltenham. Here we see Leonard pretending to bump into Ria "accidentally" when she's shopping on the town's High Street.

And it's fun tonight to try spotting all the chain stores that used to be here on the High Street, many of them now defunct or "rebranded", like what used to be called "Chelsea Girl" - the clothing chain for trendy young teenage girls - and Woolworth's of course: although Woolworth's is still going in Australia, happily!

Lois's life at the time wasn't exactly like Ria's - Ria has teenage sons to cope with. But I think the series still resonated with Lois when it began in 1978, because, with one little daughter, Alison, aged 3 and another, Sarah, aged 1, Lois's life certainly wasn't all peaches and cream, that's for sure!

flashback to us in the late 1970's

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