On Wednesday (May 4th) Lois and I are going to be visited by Simon, an estate-agent, who's going to take photographs of our house, inside and out, so we've got to get it looking not quite so much like a bomb has hit it. We're finally putting it on the market, after 36 years - we can hardly believe it's happening: my god!
Simon, a local estate-agent
Yesterday we were supposed to start tidying up a bit, but we didn't do anything, as it turned out - we went for a walk in the morning and spent 2 hours in bed in the afternoon, and then watched TV in the evening. What madness !!!!
Today I want to get started in earnest on the clear-up work, but it's difficult: the worst room by far is the dining-room, which doubles as our office, but I can't get into that room to work on it - Lois is taking part in her sect's two worship services on zoom.
And I can't do the vacuuming this morning either, because it'll too noisy while the 2 church services are on - my god (again)!
The carpets in our house are a DISGRACE, a TOTAL DISGRACE!!!! And I've noticed that even after they've been vacuumed, a task which I manage to do about every 2 weeks, they don't look much better.
Maybe the bag needs changing perhaps? I decide to use some of my spare time this morning to put a new bag in the machine - I don't think I've changed the bag for about 3 years, well before the lockdowns started. It's so long since I changed the bag, I've forgotten how to do it, so I waste a lot of time trying to find the "open me" mechanism. What madness !!!!
You would not BELIEVE how full the bag turns out to be, and the contents even have a used-up biro in them: what madness (again) !!!! The only comparison I can make is with a chipmunk - it's crazy!
gratefully I dump the overfilled bag of dust in our green wheelie-bin
included for comparison purposes: a chipmunk
with its cheeks stuffed to bursting point
15:00 Lois's church services on zoom are over now, so I do some shredding of our hundreds of out-of-date documents in our so-called office/dining-room.
I keep two shredders busy simultaneously - that's how I got my nickname: "Two Shredders" Colin. Logical isn't it !!! I wonder if Donald Trump thought of having more than one shredder on the go when he was leaving the White House? I just don't know - but perhaps we should be told???
I showcase my two document-shredders, which I keep red hot
with action this afternoon, shredding eg. our daughter Sarah's
old credit card statements: she's only been in Australia for 6 years haha!
I also throw out our old jigsaw puzzles - or at least put them somewhere where they can be taken away and maybe given to some
really old people, not
slightly old people, like we are haha! This includes an old one of Roman Britain, and a jigsaw we bought in the States in the early 1980's of old American political campaign badges: I'm really not sure why we've still got them still - we never do jigsaw puzzles these days.
16:00 We do the quizzes in this week's Radio Times. The highlight is our best ever score on the PopMaster questions: five right out of ten - not sure if we should be boasting about this, or hanging our heads in shame, so the jury's still out on that one.
This success is balanced, however, by a relatively poor showing on the prestigious "Eggheads" general knowledge quiz - only 6 out of 10 right on this week's.
Well, it keeps us off the streets haha!
17:00 Lois is looking at her copy of "The Week", a magazine that summarises all the big news stories of last week, from home and overseas.
She reads me out an alarming story about an "art heist" with a difference, carried out in broad daylight by French performance artist Yves Klein.
Lois comments, "What's the difference between Yves Klein getting $1.2m dollars for a receipt and then asking you to burn it, and him stopping you in the street and demanding $1.2m dollars?"
I think she's got a point, although I'm not expecting to meet Yves Klein, with a gun maybe, here in the "mean streets" of Cheltenham, so we're probably going to be all right - that's my guess at least! Especially after reading this story about the town in today's local news:
So come here to Cheltenham, Yves, if you dare!
Make my day, punk haha!!!!! [He's not likely to do that, is he. He's been dead for 60 years! - Ed]
20:00 We wind down by seeing a bit more of the retrospective on the life and career of Glasgow-born actor and impressionist, Stanley Baxter, that we started watching last night.
And it's nice, tonight, to see the contributions of actress Miriam Margoyles, whom Lois and I accidentally shared a railway carriage with in 1992 travelling between London and Dover.
We hear Miriam weighing in on her friend Stanley Baxter's qualities.
She says, "In himself he's a very quiet person. He's not a pushy person at all.
"He's reserved and restrained, but not in performance. When he's on stage, when he's in a studio, he gives vent to all those churning emotions that I know he feels inside. He's a very passionate person, but he knows how to control it. So Stanley is skill, and controlled passion."
And it's nostalgic tonight also to see some of his classic sketches like the Nefertiti sketch, where the great woman is interrupted in her work by one of the palace slaves:
Stanley was a boy of 13 growing up in Glasgow when war was declared in 1939. He reminisces about how worried his parents were - they could remember the first war of course. But he remembers how he himself was thrilled at the news, thinking that at last there was going to be something exciting going on in his life.
"What a fool I was!" he says.
The war did inspire many of Stanley's classic sketches, however, like this one, where we see a husband coming home from work in the evening and asking his wife how her day has been.
Tremendous fun !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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