Danskcolin: Monday May 30th 2022

09:00 A bad start to the day - my belt buckle comes apart. That's something that I can never remember happening before in my life. And here Lois and I are, 100 miles from home, and pet-sitting for our daughter Alison and her family in Headley, Hampshire. And I've only brought one pair of trousers with me: my jeans, actually, so I haven't got another belt with me. What a foolish decision, seen in retrospect!

my busted belt - pictured here on Alison's kitchen table

There's no use raiding our son-in-law Ed's wardrobes and drawers - I'm a logic-defying 5'10" tall, and Ed is only about 5'4". Lois says that Ed is also considerably slimmer round the waist, but I demand a second opinion on that one one!

But now my jeans keep falling down - oh dear, what can I do?!

I decide to order a belt from Amazon but it won't come till late tomorrow, so then I decide to do what I imagine a young person would do. I search "men's clothing near me" on my smartphone, find the Peacocks store, and I also call them, but their number must have changed - why don't people ever update their obsolete info on the web?!!!!

Then Lois and I jump in the car and again I do what a young person might do, and press "directions" on my smartphone to hear a voice that tells me the way. Unfortunately the voice wants me to drive across a ford, which looks very deep and swollen with rain, to put it mildly. I turn the car around, but the voice keeps directing me back to the ford. Eventually I have to get the car's ageing TomTom out of the glove compartment, and thankfully that directs me on to a more sensible route. What madness !!!!

We take the "blue route" to Peacocks, avoiding the swollen river

near the so-called "Deadwater" area, whatever that means!

What madness !!!!!

the Mill Chase Road ford, seen here in happier times,

during the so-called "dry season"

I can't risk going into the store and having my jeans fall down, so Lois goes in for me, and finds me a nice belt for £10, which is good.

I stay in the car while Lois goes into the shopping mall

to find the Peacocks store

the Bordon branch of the Peacocks clothing chain

What a weird day it's proving so far !!!!! For a start when do belt buckles ever fail? It's never happened to me before in my life!!!! Can you BELIEVE it ???!!!!!

[Is that it? Have you finished telling us about your belt now? - Ed]

It's quite a nice belt, my new one, and I'm fairly happy with it!

nice belt, isn't it! And kind of groovy with it !!!!

(I've taken the price tag off now, incidentally, I'm not the mad hatter!)

[I'm not so sure about that! - Ed]

included for comparison: the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland

showcasing his hat, which cost 10s 6d in that style

[That's enough about belts! - Ed]

13:00 Our lunchtime is enlivened when Lily, one of our two 8-year-old twin granddaughters in Perth, Australia gets hold of her mother Sarah's phone and presses "call" instead of "text". If only she knew what great joy it gives us when she does that! And it's so nice for Lois and me to suddenly find ourselves chatting with her.

Interestingly, Lily says that her father Francis had spotted a mouse under the fridge in the family's kitchen and he has been trying today to tempt it out with a carrot, so far without success. I send Lily a picture of the mouse Lois and I caught in a trap on Saturday morning - it's a "humane" trap, and we had managed to release the mouse back into the wild at the bottom of the garden.

flashback to Saturday, we catch a mouse in a "humane" mouse-trap

and then release it back into the wild at the bottom of the garden

14:00 I check my emails. Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, has sent me the results of an interesting survey carried out in Hungary on the eve of the Queen's platinum jubilee, 70 years after her succession to the throne, indicating that almost half of the 1438 Hungarians responding would be happy to see Queen Elizabeth made the Queen of Hungary too, which is heart-warming.

And I hope Hungarians wouldn't be offended if I said that heart-warming as these responses may be, and much as I love Hungary and Hungarians, I personally wouldn't want to see their crazy Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the British throne. Is that being Anglocentric? I don't know - but perhaps I should be told, and quickly!

14:30 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent us another of the amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors on the web.

I have to say that much as I like Boris as a person, I concede that the darts analogy (diagram 3) has a lot of substance to it. Oh dear! Poor Boris !!!!!!

Also, neither Lois nor I knew what "ghosting" means (diagram 2), so it's nice to pick up another modern phrase.

Who knew that? [I think everybody did, except for you two noggins! - Ed]

15:00 Some charming pictures appear on social media from our daughter Alison, whose house we're staying in. Alison, with her husband Ed and their 3 children Josie (15), Rosalind (13), and Isaac (11) are staying the week near Hay-on-Wye near the English-Welsh border.

Today the family went to a session at the Hay-on-Wye festival about the "His Dark Materials" (?) series/books (?), which Lois and I know nothing about, but we feel it's probably something similar to Harry Potter. We'll just have to ask Alison about it when the family gets back here on Friday.

the trip to the Hay on Wye area on the English-Welsh border,

that Alison and family took last Friday evening

is this something to do with "His Dark Materials"?

- or is it just somebody with a pet monkey?

I think we should be told !!!

(left to right) Rosalind, Josie and Ed

Alison and Isaac

Oh dear - it's really time that Lois and I got more up to date, no doubt about that!!!!

16:00 We have tea on the terrace.

Today is our last "easy day" for a while. Tomorrow we have a couple of "heavy" duties: someone will be coming to take away Ed's broken ride-on mower, and we've got to give the guy the ignition key. Then late in the evening we've got to put Ed's recycling bins out on the kerbside. I don't know, at our age - it's still busy busy busy!!!

20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch TV. For some reason, Alison's family have chosen not to get a feed of live TV at their house, so everything we watch has to come off the internet, but this includes catch-up TV apps like BBC iPlayer, so we can watch most BBC programmes after they've been broadcast on their live channels, which is nice.

It's an exercise in pure nostalgia for Lois and me tonight to see this programme, originally broadcast on New Year's Eve 1976, celebrating songs and singers from the first 25 years of the Queen's reign, in advance of her Silver Jubilee in June 1977.

Oh, the nostalgia to see celebrities that we recognise!

Nowadays Lois and I can't identify the modern "celebrities" - mostly we haven't a clue who they are. But these 1970's celebrities' names were on everybody's lips in the UK in 1976-7, and here we see them again tonight, fresh-faced and still in their prime, and at the height of their powers.

It's pure magic, I tell you !!!

Our award for best performance on the night goes to Lulu, reprising her first hit, "Shout" (1964), with real gusto:

Lulu, with her backing singers, reprising her

first ever hit, "Shout" (1964)

Our award for best tear-jerker of the night goes to Norman Wisdom, the Albanian national hero, with his performance of his early hit, "Don't Laugh At Me, 'Cos I'm a Fool" (1954).

Our "booby prize" of the evening goes to Cliff Richard, who probably refused to come on the show unless he was allowed to plug his latest release, "Hey, Mister Dreammaker", which didn't turn out to be a hit, as far as we can remember. Poor show, Cliff - and serve you right that it wasn't a hit !!!!!

The most moving moment of the show for me comes near the end when presenter Vera Lynn, the "Forces' Sweetheart" from World War II, brings this New Year's Eve show to a close by wishing her audience, and also the Queen, a happy new year for 1977.

Don't you just love seeing New Year's Eves from long ago, and thinking, "Ah yes, on December 31st 1976, nobody knew what was in store for them, or for the world, in 1977. If only they had known then what we know now" haha!

Ah the memories! On New Year's Eve 1976, Lois and I had just one daughter, Alison, aged 16 months, but our second one, Sarah, was on the way - she was born in June 1977, the Silver Jubilee month.

flashback to the winter of 1976-77: me (30) with little Alison (16 months)

flashback to June 1977, the Silver Jubilee month -

Lois and me (both 31), with the new-born Sarah, and Alison (22 months),

in the little back yard of the first home we ever owned,

in Windsor Street, Cheltenham

In August 1977 there was a celebration of the Queen's Silver Jubilee in Pittville Park, and we took Alison (2) and Sarah (2 months) along to join in the celebrations.