Tuesday April 19th 2022

A quiet day, even by mine and Lois's standards - my god! [Are you planning to say that every day from now on? - Ed]

It's April 19th, and the day draws ever closer - one day next week perhaps? - when we will take the momentous step of putting our house on the market after 36 years. And it's scaring the pants off us, to put it mildly. Somehow we'll have to plan to fit into a house that may be only a third the size of this one. Is that going to be possible????

I do some mild decluttering this morning - our 2-drawer filing cabinet is so full that it's a danger to the health and safety of the entire British Commonwealth, with no exaggeration! One day it's going to collapse on the floor, and I'm just hoping that my toes won't be underneath it when it does - my god!!!!

later today I showcase our 2-drawer filing cabinet (bottom left), officially 

classed (by me) as a danger to the health and safety 

of the whole of the British Commonwealth - my god !!!!

I've decided to just deal with a couple of sections of it a day - it's too daunting to dedicate myself to getting rid of and/or shredding all the unwanted so-called "documents" as one big task - I might never recover from the trauma - yikes!!!!!!

This morning I throw out all our out-of-date address lists of friends and relations, and then get rid of 90% of my so-called "work souvenirs". When Lois and I retired in 2006, I thought I'd keep a few nostalgic mementos, e.g. my old leave cards and flexi-sheets. Bad decision - so now I decide to just keep one example of each and throw the rest out.

Memories, memories! My leave card for 1978-79, when Lois and I were parents of 2 young daughters and didn't have the time or money to go anywhere on leave pretty much, other than to Lois's parents in Cutteslowe Park, Oxford.

flashback to 1979 - Lois and Sarah (2), and me and Alison (4),

just faces in the crowd at a wedding

Most of my leave in 1978-79 was spent in our own little back yard - yikes!

flashback to 1978 - me, Lois, Alison (3) and Sarah (1)

in our own tiny back yard - my god!

Then again there's my leave card for 1992-4, where I see that I twice visited my late sister Kathy and her  husband Steve in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

The weather was against me in 1993. In March I encountered the Blizzard of the Century, and in June-July, when I took Alison and Sarah with me, there was a heatwave, 

First, the blizzard in March - brrrrrrr!!!!

Then, the heatwave in June-July:

flashback to June-July 1993: (left to right) Alison (17), my late sister Kathy (45), 

Sarah (16) and me (47)

the girls and me cooling off in the basement with a game of cards

But what extremes of weather! 

And what a crazy planet we live on !!!!!

11:00 Lois and I are waiting in again, this time for the arrival of Mark the Gardener, but we realise eventually that he didn't say for definite that he would be coming today, so we decide to go out for our walk on the local football field.

Our "semi-official" diet has started - we've both been putting on a few pounds around the tummy, so it's just a flat white coffee for 2 again today, which is a pity!

12:00 We come home and have lunch. Yesterday we filled up the water-butts in our vegetable garden, but the weather's pretty dry generally, with not much rain in the forecast. 

Today we've put our "Save Waste Water" Campaign into operation, collecting in buckets any clean water that we run off while we're waiting for it to get hot, for example. For our morning shower we collected half a bucket and we're doing the same for water downstairs in the kitchen. We can use this bucket to water our flowers and vegetable in the garden.

I showcase the bucket we keep on the floor by the sink

to collect clean waste water

16:00 It's now apparent that Lois has got an upset tummy - it improves in the course of the afternoon, but I prepare myself mentally to "cook" the evening meal: one of my signature dishes - what I call my "Poached Egg Surprise", with boiled potatoes and peas. And, as the man once said, "Peas is [sic] good food". Yum yum!

I cook dinner tonight - one of my signature dishes:

Poached Egg Surprise - yum yum!

19:00 Lois ducks out of her great-niece Molly's zoom yoga class - Molly sends her a link to the recording of it, which Lois will look at another day, when she's feeling better. 

Also, Lois's sect's Tuesday Bible Seminar is taking another break this week, as it's Easter. So we settle down on the couch for an evening's TV.

First we watch the second part of a fascinating BBC documentary series about Czech-born publishing mogul Robert Maxwell and his family: "House of Maxwell".

Lois has a personal interest in this story, because back in the late 1960's and early 1970's she worked for Maxwell in his Documentation Department at Headington Hill Hall, Oxford, in an annexe to the main house, where the great man lived with his wife Betty and their 9 children. And she also remembers Maxwell's sons Kevin and Ian, who inherited the business after Maxwell died in mysterious circumstances in 1991. 

flashback to 1971, the year before our marriage: Lois (24) takes a couple of weeks off 

from her job working for Robert Maxwell to come and stay with me in Japan

And tonight speculates, when she sees Maxwell's furniture and effects being auctioned off in London, as to whether the desks and chairs that she and the Documentation Team worked at were involved in the sale.

Also, when it's revealed that Maxwell routinely bugged the conversations of all his senior employees, and even members of his family, Lois speculates as to whether there were any listening devices in her old team's office - yikes! She says that if so, Maxwell would have heard more than a few of the team's choice comments about him, not to mention a regular barrage of four-letter-words, no doubt about that!!!

This antique dealer bought one of Maxwell's table lamps and found a couple of hidden microphones underneath the shade: my god !!!!

It's a fascinating programme - the only flaw is that there are too many stories for it to pursue, given the activities of Maxwell's children, as well as those of Maxwell himself. And it follows Ghislaine up to, and including the time when she started to be photographed with Jeffrey Epstein and all that business.

One very strong impression that I take from the series so far is that Maxwell was always careful to present an image of supreme self-confidence, relaxed bonhomie and good humour whenever he was on public show, even in the years when he was dealing with, and stealing to compensate for, his empire's 2 billion pounds worth of secret debts. Yikes!

And what a contrast with the off-camera Maxwell that Lois knew, with all his bullying, paranoia and temper tantrums - my god!

We see a fascinating 1984 clip from conjuror Paul Daniel's TV Magic Show, where Maxwell gets to handle some packets from Paul's magic case, each containing hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Tremendous fun for the audience, no doubt about that. Except possibly on re-run, for the thousands of Daily Mirror employees whose pension money Maxwell was stealing - my god !!!!!

There's one more programme in this series still to come. So far Prince Andrew hasn't made an appearance, but maybe that's waiting for us in the last episode. Well, we'll see!

21:00 We wind down with last week's episode of the sitcom "Not Going Out", starring Lee Mack. In this episode Lee is confined to a wheelchair after knee surgery and spends his time spying on his neighbours.

Lois and I hadn't thought of this before, but we can see tonight that Lee is the perfect man to replace the now ailing Michael Caine as spiritual leader of Britain's thousands of "nosy neighbours". 

Here we see a typical shot of Lee monitoring his neighbours at 8 am

as usual, when his long-suffering wife Lucy comes down the stairs.

Poor Lucy !!!!!!

In Caine's absence, all of us nosy neighbours need somebody to inspire us and give us hope for the future of nosiness, that's for sure!

And we take a brief walk down memory lane to rediscover some of the magic of Caine's leadership through the years. "My name is Michael Caine and I am... a nosy neighbour" - that was his catchphrase.

Sadly, a couple of years ago the Danish press broke the story of Caine's retirement from his "nosy neighbour" role, and also from his acting career, but a retirement that was immediately followed by an apparent change of heart.

Caine's other catchphrase is, of course, "Not a lot of people know that", and Caine then capitalised on that iconic phrase in a subsequent response to the "retirement" furore on twitter, which was nice to see. There's life in the old nosy neighbour yet, it seems!

Tremendous fun !!!!!!

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