Danskcolin: Friday May 6th 2022

We know this is going to be an awful day - we've got Tim the Energy Inspector coming at 1:30 pm, and prospective buyers coming to view our house at 4 pm, 4:30 pm and 5 pm. What kind of a day is that supposed to be?

I spend the morning getting ready for Tim, assembling all sorts of documents, and opening up the loft so he can have a poke around up there.

I open up our loft hatch and loft ladder, so that

Tim the Energy Inspector can have a poke around up thee

13:30 We welcome Tim to the house. He turns out to be a nice guy with a sense of humour. He does his survey and says our house is 62% energy efficient, which surprises us, but he tells us that the UK average is only about 60% anyway. He also says that the maximum efficiency that any of our buyers can achieve with this house is 80% - a figure which Tim again says is close to the national average.

But what a madness it all is !!!!!

While Tim is here, Lois and I enrol him as a temporary third member of our puzzles team, which is fortunate because he gets one of the Popmaster questions right in next week's Radio Times, the question about Leo Sayer, and the one about Jimmy Nail. This enables us to get a personal best score of 6 out of 10, which is nice, to put it mildly.

15:30 Tim the Inspector has gone, but now, for the next 2 hours or more, our home is not our own - the first of three of our prospective house-buyers is coming in 15 minutes' time, and we have to get out of house, and we can't come back for a whole 2 hours minimum.

Tomorrow will be even worse - we'll have to out on the "mean streets of Cheltenham" for FOUR AND A HALF HOURS!!!!

YIKES !!!!!!

Let's just hope it doesn't tip us over into a life of crime haha!!!!!

Ahh you've gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you're gonna have to get used to it

When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal

How does it feel?

Well, it feels a bit annoying, to be honest, Bob!

Luckily Cheltenham has been reported recently to be a fairly safe town, which is nice!

flashback to last Sunday: Cheltenham reported to be the second safest

town or city in the UK

15:45 Nevertheless the dangers are sure to be out there lurking somewhere, so we try to avoid getting mixed up in anything too violent by going to Gotherington Nurseries - Lois wants to buy some plants. You may be surprised to know that she still wants to be planting things when our house is on the market - I know I was! But it shows her dedication to her garden, that's for sure!

My job, as always, is to stand with the trolley at various central points in the nurseries while Lois whizzes around finding what she wants.

When we go to the checkout, we see we can get a couple of Cornetto strawberry ice-creams. We haven't had a Cornetto for years, so we decide to indulge, and we eat them in the car to kill a bit more time.

17:00 We still can't go home yet, so we need to find somewhere else to get our "kicks". We decide to go to the Apple Tree pub in Woodmancote. We haven't been in a pub for 2 years - ie since the pandemic hit.

the Apple Tree pub in Woodmancote, seen here in happier times,

years before the pandemic started

Soon after we moved to Cheltenham in 1972, the Apple Tree became one of our favourite pubs, and it's a place also that I used to go for lunch to numerous times with the office crowd when I was still working - for countless "farewell do's" and "birthday do's" for my work colleagues and myself.

It's Friday stopping-on-the-way-home-from-work time, so the pub is pretty full. Lois and I intend to play it super-safe and stay outside the pub, sitting down at one of the outside tables, and ordering our drinks using an app, just like our daughter Alison and her family do in Headley, Hampshire.

Unfortunately I can't get the app to work for some reason, so we have to go inside. But a nice waitress lets us sit by the outside door in the so-called "quiet part" of the pub, and she brings her card-machine to the table so we can pay without going to the counter, which is nice!

Lois orders a decaf cofffee...

... but who's that little old man over there with her haha!

According to my blog, Lois and I last visited the Apple Tree in 2019, on a visit with members of Lois's sect. But the last time we ate there as a couple on our own was in 2015 - what happy days they were haha!!!

flashback to 2015: the Apple Tree in happier times -

Lois and I having fish and chips and a beer

20:00 We wind down by watching the second part of a documentary about veteran anti-porn campaigner Mary Whitehouse, the housewife and ex-teacher, who, incredibly, started her campaigns in the early 1960's and kept them going till the 1990's - what a woman!!!!

It's interesting that, at last in the 1980's, Mary could feel she had a kindred spirit in the seats of power after Maggie Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. The irony of this was, however, that although Maggie sympathised with anti-pornography campaigns, she was at the same time wedded to the idea of a free market economy, and this type of economy tended to help some of what the programme's pundits call the UK's "porn barons" to make even more of their millions - oh dear!

Another irony is that Mary always refused to identify as a feminist, even though today many feminists acknowledge and appreciate what Mary achieved in her efforts to protect vulnerable women.

And it's interesting also to see again some of the scandalous "porn-celebrities" of the times as they are now. Yes even "nude actress and men's magazine columnist" Fiona Richmond is looking considerably older now, to put it mildly haha! [Why is that surprising! - Ed]

Fiona, a vicar's daughter who grew up in what she calls "a draughty vicarage in Norfolk", performed in numerous nude stage revues like "Come Into My Bed", "Pyjama Tops" and "Wot! No Pyjamas!".

Fiona also became a journalist working for men's magazines, where she used to write salacious stories about her so-called "sexual adventures around the world", all fiction apparently - what madness !!!!