Tuesday May 3rd 2022

16:00 Only 21 hours now till our house is visited by an estate agent with a camera to take some misleadingly wide-angled pictures of our little old-school non-Grand-Design-style rooms - what madness! Yes, hold the front page - after 36 years, we've decided to sell up and move to somewhere smaller.

Poor us !!!!!!

flashback to 1986, the year we moved into this house:

Lois is pictured here on our holiday in Devon - happy days!!!!

1986: our 2 daughters, Alison (11) and Sarah (9) in their school uniforms

Lois and I have a cup of tea and a currant bun on the sofa, and look back on today as it's worked out so far - a horrid experience of trying to clean anything that moves, but mainly things that don't move. I suppose that's good, largely: you don't want to have too many moving things in a house, do you - what a nightmare that would be haha!

I vacuum the whole house, and I learn how much better a vacuum cleaner

works if it's got an empty dust bag inside it: my god, it's like a miracle haha!

I must try changing it again sometime haha (again) !!!!

we form a twosome to clean the gas cooker: Lois at ground level

cleaning the rings, me on the kitchen steps cleaning the so-called

hood that we never use, and it's in a disgusting state, no doubt about that - yuck!

Lois goes outside to clean the inside of the kitchen window - what madness!!!

We're both a bit tired anyway because we were again frustrated in our desire to go upstairs and have a nap in the afternoon. We wanted to do it, but Stephen the handyman said he might call in to do some jobs for us. He said the same thing on Sunday and then didn't show up, and he didn't show up today either. But I'm going to let that one slide, because when he is here, he works like a Trojan: my god, what a guy!

flashback to April 26th: Lois and handyman Stephen examine

our garden trellis, which has been blown down in a storm

It's a pity that Simon the estate agent won't see the house at its best anyway, due to all the damage in the garden from the recent storms. But we've decided to go ahead with putting the house on the market anyway - and shut our eyes to any obstacles that may occur due to the house's very obvious imperfections. We live in an imperfect world, as my work colleague Alan East used to say.

Our secret fear is that Simon will say that we could get £10,000 more for the house if we didn't put it on the market till all the storm damage has been fixed, which would just postpone the whole business even further - oh dear!!!!

And Lois and I would be the first to admit that we're not very good at "handling" all the people like Stephen, the handyman, who comes and does jobs for us. Neither of us has come from very wealthy families, and we missed out on some of the training in this field that goes on these days, which is a pity. Kids today are so lucky!

Remember that story that was featured on the influential American website Onion News, the story that broke a few years back, and hit headlines around the world?

SCARSDALE, NY—Touting the ordinarily trade-school course as an opportunity for students to learn practical life skills, administrators of the Scarsdale Public School District confirmed Thursday that their curriculum’s shop class teaches students how to deal with general contractors.

“We’re happy to equip these kids with real-world skills, such as how to repair cabinets, fixtures, and shelving units by calling up local contractors and negotiating with them for the best rates,” said shop teacher George Sachs, adding that coursework would also cover popular music history in order to help students reference working-class bands such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Lynyrd Skynyrd in casual conversation.

 “Our class runs the gamut from leaning on your marble counter while a handyman repairs your garbage disposal to figuring out how much to tip based on how nice the proletarian keeps his truck. We even cover workplace etiquette, like the importance of offering your maintenance drone a glass of sparkling water.” 

That's the kind of training that just wasn't available for kids like Lois and me when we were growing up in the so-called "mean streets" and "middle-class ghettoes" of Oxford and Bristol. 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's chair yoga class on zoom.

flashback to last week - Lois doing chair yoga 

under the direction of her great-niece Molly

We found out recently that Molly has also started a chair yoga class at her workplace in Leeds - she has a job in the city's Social Services, working with the local homeless population. We think that she probably holds the sessions at lunchtimes for her work colleagues. We're sure this must relieve some of the stresses of their jobs - my god!

Molly's lunchtime chair yoga class for her work colleagues

Meanwhile I settle down on the couch and watch last Friday's edition of "Gogglebox", the show where ordinary TV-viewers are filmed watching, and commenting on, some of the week's programmes.

I have to admit I don't always get a lot out of Gogglebox personally, because the Goggleboxers tend to watch so-called "popular" programmes, that Lois and I don't normally watch, as well as watching lots of pay-to-view channels like Netflix, which we're not interested in, either - oh dear!

Some weeks, however, I pick up some gardening terms from Giles, whom we see each week watching TV with his wife Mary - or "Nutty" as he sometimes calls her. Learning this specialist language is useful to me because I can impress Lois later with remarks displaying my "awareness" of the gardener's world, which is nice.

Giles and Mary are a more elderly couple than most of the Goggleboxers, but Mary seems to still have a job, while Giles spends much of his time in the garden, doing bits and pieces of gardening work, while Mary is out during the day.

Tonight we see Mary criticising Giles's hair - she says he looks like he's been "dragged through a hedge backwards". And Giles explains that he's been doing some pruning of their clematis plants which had been hit by the recent frosts. The frosts have killed the growing shoots of the clematis, so Giles has had to cut off the dead bits so it will "shoot" again. The frost has "set it back", he says.

Giles makes "set it back" his gardening phrase of the week, for Mary to learn. Last week he tried to teach her the word "tilth", but we hear tonight that it's a word she just doesn't like.

Poor Mary!!!!! 

I have to say, however, that I rather agree with Mary on this one - "tilth" is so reminiscent of "filth" isn't it. And maybe Mary, like me, is subconsciously thinking of Robert Graves's famous 1959  poem on the subject - who knows?

Poor Mary (again) !!!!!!

20:00 Lois emerges from her chair yoga session on zoom, and we wind down with an old episode of the 1980's political sitcom "Yes, Prime Minister", all about the fictional PM Jim Hacker, and his civil servant "advisors", Sir Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Woolley.

Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington - centre), with his advisers

Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne - left) and Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds - right)

It's amazing for Lois and me to see again tonight how "politically incorrect" this series was, and we often wonder how it would be looked on today.

Tonight Sir Humphrey explains to Bernard how politicians and civil servants can succeed in discrediting a candidate for a top job in public life, even when the man superficially seems to have no defects. In this case they're talking about a candidate for the job of head of the Bank of England.

"You list all his praiseworthy qualities, especially those which make him unsuitable. You praise them to the point that they become a vice..... Charming man, he hasn't an enemy in the world! But is he up to dealing with those rogues in the City??? 

Sir Humphrey continues: "Then you EXCUSE all his 'bad points' : e..g. 'it doesn't matter that he was a conscientious objector - nobody questions his patriotism! I think the criticisms about him bankrupting his last company weren't entirely fair! And you can always hint at a hidden scandal - if he's not married, hint at homosexuality. If he is married, hint at adultery, with a lady who is beyond reproach, one of the royals, for instance, or a television news reader!"

Oh dear, Lois and I don't think that all of Sir Humphrey's remarks would necessarily go down at all well today - my god!!!

There's also a nice review by Hacker of the British press of the era:

"The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; the Guardian is read by people who think they should be running the country; the Times is read by the people who are running the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.

"The Morning Star is read by people who think the country should be run by another country; and the Telegraph is read by people who think that it is!"

Then Sir Bernard asks about the readers of the Sun.

Oh dear, Bernard, we don't say things like that any more now, do we!  

My god, the 1980's eh! What a crazy world we lived in, back in those far-off days!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - it's going to be another horrid day tomorrow, with Simon the Estate Agent's visit, but we can't do anything about that now - oh dear (again)! 

Zzzzzzzz!!!!!!