Friday June 17th 2022

 05:00 I get up early and start preparing for the hottest day of the year so far. Just look at this crazy headline!!!! It's going to be hotter here than Budapest, and almost as hot as Philadelphia. 

What a crazy planet we live on !!!!!!

However the end of this mini-heatwave is in sight after today. Temperatures tonight will drop down to about 60F (15.5C) and then hardly rise at all from 60 tomorrow, with light rain probably most of the day, which then will turn heavy towards nightfall. 

How can you plan anything in a climate like this - let's have some sanity back please haha !!!!!

Lois and I would like to hunker down at home today, but unfortunately it's time for my 6-monthly check-up at Gloucester Royal Hospital's cardiology department. Luckily the appointment time is 9:40 am, so we should be back home before it gets too hot, which will be nice, to put it mildly!

We leave at 8:45 am, which is way too early, but Lois knows me well enough after 50 years of marriage to know I like to leave plenty of time to park etc and get my ticket from the machine, and check in at the machines in the lobby etc. It's madness, but it makes me happy, so she goes along with it, bless her little cotton socks haha!

We park in our favourite hospital car-park there, the Orchard - oh it's lovely the Orchard! Such a nice name, although there aren't any fruit trees to be seen. They were probably cut down to create the car-park, which is a pity, but that's progress isn't it haha!

I can heartily recommend Orchard Car Park if you're visiting the hospital. It's got no obstructions in it like dumped supermarket trolleys or shells of downed aircraft etc, like the other car-parks there, which is nice haha! [There's way too much manic laughter today! - Ed]

Another plus is that the Orchard Car Park ticket machine now accepts contact-free credit cards, so you don't have to touch the ticket machine with its potential for harbouring COVID germs, which is a relief! At the time of my last check-up, in December, they were just installing the new machines and the little man doing the work there let me park for free as a special concession. Little did I know at the time that this would be all up and working by the time of my next visit. That's NHS efficiency for you, no doubt about that!

See? Simples !!!!!

I remember how Lois and I resisted contactless payment cards when they first came in a few years ago, because of fears that hackers could stand near you in a shop and steal all your details. But what a boon they've been since the pandemic started, that's for sure.

[This account is getting way too detailed! - Ed]

Anyway my actual appointment only took 15 minutes and so we got back home by 10:30 am. And before you could say "Jack Robinson", here we are, sitting "lightly dressed" in the cool of our north-facing living-room. Job done!

11:00 Lois and I can't fully relax, though, even now, because we're going to be moving house in the next few months - an event that people always say is one of the most stressful things you can do in life apart from divorce and things like that. Yikes!!!

I craft an email to a financial advisor but I'll sleep on it tonight before sending it off tomorrow. I also look at the website reallymoving.com and work out approximately how much it costs to move house, and I get a bit of a shock to put it mildly. My god! Lois and I haven't moved house since 1986, so we're a bit out-of-date on these things.

YIKES!!!! [That's enough yikeses! - Ed]

flashback to 1986: Lois (above) and our two daughters Alison (11) and Sarah (9)

a few months after we bought our current house

17:00 Lois sits down at the computer and does some more genealogical digging on the family history of my late sister Kathy's boyfriend from the 1970's, Richard, which sounds a bit random. However it's an interesting story because his ancestors came from Eastern Europe somewhere, and we're trying to nail down exactly where they came from. [This had better be more interesting than your trip to Gloucester - Ed]

Yesterday it seemed that Richard's grandmother came from a non-existent place, so-called "Nentria", Hungary. But today we get some more clues.

Remember this mysterious family tree for Richard?

And do you remember, we weren't quite sure where Rosa was born in "Austria-Hungary". The UK Government transcriber obviously thought it was "Nentria, Hungary", but there doesn't seem to be any such place. And it hasn't been transcribed properly anyway.

This was the original:

Today, Lois checks the 1921 census, which you still have to pay a couple of quid to do, which is a pity - call us cheapskates if you like! We can see that, 101 years ago, the poor British census-taker had a lot of trouble working out what Rosa was saying to him - what madness !!!!!

From this, Lois and I guess that Rosa was actually Polish, but came from the city of Nitra in Slovakia (called Neutria, or something like that, by the Austrians), a place which we eventually find in our ageing 1997 Europe Road Atlas.

the city of Nitra in Slovakia, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Do you remember those far-off days when Lois and I were using our Europe Road Atlas, and I was driving Lois, and also my friend "Magyar" Mike, and his wife "Magyar" Mary, around Central Europe in rental cars?

flashback to 2002: (left to right) "Magyar" Mike, Lois and

"Magyar" Mary outside a restaurant on Lake Balaton, Hungary,

pictured here by our massive Austrian Opel Astra rental car

2002: Lois outside our guest-house, 

the Villa Mimi in Sopron, Hungary, with our rental car on the left

Happy days !!!!

I think the reason why Lois and I are so fascinated by Richard's family tree is that we ourselves are so boring genetically. As far as we know, Lois is 100% English and I'm not much better, at 65% Welsh, 33% English and 2% Norwegian. What hope is there for us? We can only enjoy life vicariously through the exotic family trees of others haha!

20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch the first programme in the new series of "Hotel Inspector", in which presenter Alex Polizzi looks at failing hotels and advises them what they should do to start making a profit.

Presenter Alex Polizzi is always good value entertainment, no more so than when she's bawling out unfocussed hotel owners and managers, and this opening programme is no exception. My god!

presenter Alex Polizzi arrives at the Thai Derm hotel and restaurant

in suburban Loughborough, Leicestershire

She finds the place plastered with off-putting signs everywhere and generally untidy and not nearly clean enough, and emitting what she calls a seedy "knocking-shop" vibe. Oh dear!

Signs everywhere:

signs everywhere! Owner Bharat at the reception desk

And some of the signs are really off-putting:

And the hotel is generally well-decorated, but a lot of the fixtures and fittings, like the room lights and the extractors for example, are reallly filthy, that's for sure.

a smell of "old socks and stale sperm" - oh dear, that's not good !!!!

But there are also a lot of lovely Thai-themed statuettes, pictures and decor, which Lois and I like.

Lois and I can guess what presenter Alex is going to do to the hotel, and we're right. She gets the owners, Bharat and Hasmeeta, to clean the place up thoroughly, which is good, but at the same time she also makes the hotel into something rather bland and corporate, we think.

And it now has a really boring name, "Loughborough Grange" - yuck!

the remodelled hotel with its new bland name,

"Loughborough Grange" and its rather bland-looking new signage

If it were up to Lois and me, we would just have said, "Yes, clean the place up, by all means, but keep the genuinely Thai "knocking-shop" vibe, which is what makes it unique".

Call us sentimental if you like haha!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!