16:00 Only 45 hours to go now, till we get visited by Simon the Estate Agent and his camera - he's going to be taking visually deceitful pictures of our house, both inside and outside.
estate agents taking pictures of a normal, uncluttered house,
with unbelievably large rooms - my god!!!!
Before Simon comes, Lois and I have the task of disguising the fact that, looking at the sum total of all our furniture, accessories and ornaments etc, we've got approximately two or three times as much of what would normally be the contents of any sane couple's 3-bedroom house, i.e. if we were talking about a couple with normal needs, urges and desires: a normal couple, not one like us haha!!!!
My god!
It's now 4 pm. Lois and I sit on the sofa with a cup of tea and a piece of bread and jam, and look back over our miserable efforts today to prepare for Simon's visit, as well as our normal efforts, also pathetic, our normal efforts to keep going with our pandemic-style-lives.
I did manage to check the tyre pressures on our car, but we failed to take it out "for a spin" - it hasn't been used now for 10 days, and it's probably falling to bits inside - yikes!!!
I check the tyre pressures on the car that we've hardly used
since the pandemic started. I get down on the ground to do the work,
and I manage to get up again afterwards, which is one of today's triumphs,
and something to be celebrated for its own sake, let's face it!
We also put in the garage one of my two document-shredders, so I can no longer claim the allegedly prestigious title of "Two Shredders Colin". Damn!
flashback to yesterday: me in happier times,
with my two shredders going like the clappers
on years-old or decades-old financial records
The snag with this plan is that there are still some things in the garage that we need to access - only this morning we had to navigate our way through the jungle of boxes etc to get a couple of paint pots right at the back - what madness !!!!!
our garage as it looks this evening - and if you want to try and find something
really useful buried in the back there, like an old pot of paint in just the right colour,
well good luck to you: you're going to need it haha!!!
the top of our piano this evening, with its much cut-down number of framed photos
flashback to yesterday: our piano-top in happier times,
a real old-couple's piano top with a real "busy crowd" of faces
- what madness !!!!!
But we were cheered to see the local Old Codgers turning up for their Monday soccer practice session, even though it's a public holiday.
Lois (left) gets our coffees from Ewa, the Polish girl, while the Old Codgers (right)
begin to foregather on the Buddy Bench for their weekly practice soccer session
Lois says she thinks the Codgers don't care about the public holiday, they just want to get away from their wives - what madness !!!! As we left the park there were no medical emergencies to report, but we assume that the County Air Ambulance was on standby for the Codgers just in case, public holiday or no public holiday - that's what we pay our local taxes for, after all !
Poor Codgers !!!!!
as Lois and I leave the field, the Old Codgers are hard at it
in the netball court behind us - we're happy to report that
at that stage, no medical emergencies had occurred, which is nice!
Some of the most prominent practitioners of the look:
former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair
Bob Geldof
UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson
How "cool" is that?! haha!!!!
19:30 We speak on the phone with our daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children Josie (15), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11).
Josie is apparently getting ready for her weekend trip to Box Hill, Surrey, with fellow schoolmates hiking and organising their own food and camping arrangements, as part of her qualification for a Duke of Edinburgh's Award, a scheme set up in 1956 by the late Prince Philip to provide sets of challenges for young people.
Ali reports that Ed, who works as a legal adviser to Scottish Railways, has returned from his two-day conference and networking sessions in a hotel by Lake Como, Italy. The meetings went well, and Ed thinks he also managed to avoid seeing a celebrity couple also staying there at the time, although he's not sure he would have recognised them anyway, being Ed. Well done, Ed!
Ed has been to conferences at the hotel a couple of times or so before. Here's a kaleidoscope of souvenir pictures and social media posts from some of his previous visits:
souvenir pictures from Ed's previous visits to the hotel
And rumoured (truthfully as it turns out) to be in the area at the time were celebrity couple Kourtney Kardashian and her fiancé Travis Barker.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
21:00 We wind down by watching some TV: the latest programme in the series "Art That Made Us", which is chronicling some of the the works of art and literature from the British Isles over the last 1600 years, and getting modern artists and writers to comment on the inspiration that these works still provide. This episode is all about the 16th century.
As the Radio Times "blurb" says (see above), this is a series that avoids the usual art-history documentary clichés. So, while we get a nice piece all about Milton's famous poem Paradise Lost, we also get features on less-well known works from the time.
Who today has ever heard of graphic artist Wenceslaus Hollar's "The Teares of Ireland" (1642) for example? [I expect a lot of people have! - Ed]
Wenceslaus Hollar (crazy name, crazy guy!) produced this book, which consisted of pictures of naked people in Ireland, specifically Catholics attacking, and doing awful things to, a bunch of Protestants whom they've usually stripped naked - there was also a pornographic side to the work.
Interestingly the Irish Catholics in the book are often dressed like English Royalists, the so-called "Cavaliers" with the big hats, cloaks and beards etc. This is because the book was calculated to play on all the prejudices of Hollar's Puritan Protestant readership in London, prejudices not just against Catholics but also against English Royalists.
It was a work of pure propaganda - and one pundit tonight compares it to the "Dodgy Dossier", knocked together by Tony Blair's government to justify war against Iraq on the grounds of the so-called "weapons of mass destruction".
We also hear tonight about art, literature and architecture in the Restoration Period, after Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan Republic were finally laid to rest by the return of Charles II from exile in 1660.
Cromwell and the Puritans had famously tried to make "fun" illegal, and had closed all of London's theatres. But with Charles II's return to the throne, "fun" was back in fashion, in a big way, no doubt about that - my god!
But surprisingly perhaps, one of the bawdy playwrights to produce for the new restored London theatre scene was actually a woman, Aphra Benn. Born in 1640, she had an adventurous life, travelling to Antwerp to work as a spy for Charles II.
Benn's most famous play was "The Rover" produced in 1677, and based on a love triangle. It became a massive hit on the London stage at the time.
The plot follows two sisters and their amorous activities at the carnival in Naples.
The "Rover" in the play's title is Willmore, an "awful man with a roving eye", says Australian pundit Claire Bowditch. And he's "absolutely looking to get laid", she says.
And in her writing, Benn is showing the ways that women of the time were continually constrained, says Bowditch. Says one of the sisters in the play:
"'Tis true, I never was a lover yet, but I begin to have a pretty shrewd guess what it is to be so: long and wish to see the man, and when I do, look pale and tremble..... I love mischief strangely, as most of our sex do, who are come to love nothing else....
" The giant stretches itself, yawns and sighs a belch or two, as loud as a musket, throws himself into bed and expects you in his foul sheets. And this man you must kiss. Nay, you must kiss none but him, too, and nuzzle through his beard to find his lips!"
Oh dear, poor sisters-in-the-play !!!!!!!
What the play shows us, say the programme's pundits, is essentially the darkness at the heart of a woman's role in Restoration Comedy, which is that she can't be free. Oh dear!
Poor women-in-the-17th-century!!!!!
But fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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