08:00 Our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia had her 45th birthday a couple of days ago, and we sent her a voucher for a Spa treatment at a local salon, a voucher which the spa company told us they'd emailed to her. She still hasn't received it, and when I forward to Sarah my courtesy copy, she doesn't get that one either.
There must be something in the spa company's emails that Sarah's email system doesn't like, I guess.
What a crazy world we live in!!!!!
Eventually I send her the gift card code to Sarah via a whatsapp text message, so hopefully she'll be able to use the code when she phones them for an appointment.
Wouldn't that be great if Lois and I got a gift voucher like that! Well, perhaps not! But we can get a vicarious thrill from imagining Sarah being pampered for once, and getting a break from her job and the household chores etc, which is probably better than being pampered ourselves. I think when you get to a certain age - say 90 or more - then pampering probably becomes more of a nuisance than anything else.
Call me "ageist" if you like haha !!!!!
09:30 We don't see Sarah and the twins on our usual weekly zoom this morning. We rolled out of bed in good time for it, but when we get up, we find that Sarah is postponing it till tomorrow - our beloved twin granddaughters, Lily and Jessica are "on a play date" today, 9000 miles away from us, bless their little cotton socks!
Our beloved twin grandchildren in Perth, Australia, in typical poses:
Jessica concentrating hard on her latest design project at the table,
and in the background, Lily, the restless one, is bouncing
around from room to room. How we miss them !!!!!
11:00 Another sign that the pandemic is over (maybe)? Waghorne's, our local butcher's shop in the village, is ceasing its door-to-door deliveries to local elderly residents after today. Luckily we put in a last order just in time, and the delivery arrives about 11 o'clock. Lois thanks the volunteer delivery guy for all they've done for us over the past 2 years, which is nice.
Waghornes, the butcher's shop in the village, acknowledging the end (?) of
the pandemic by stopping deliveries to local elderly residents
Hail to thee, Waghorne's staff! You kept us out of war, and also out of crowded shops haha!
vintage campaign badge from 1916
[Who do you think you're kidding! - Ed]
[And learn to use Photoshop properly or leave it alone is my advice !!!! - Ed]
12:00 Our impending house-move saga is hanging over Lois and me again today. Our buyers want to send a buildings surveyor round to survey our house in a couple of weeks' time. If he or she finds our house to be a crumbling ruin this could scupper the whole plan. Yikes!!!!!
However, this reminds us that we have not yet booked a buildings surveyor to look at the house we're hoping to buy in Malvern. Lois's sect-member contacts in the Malvern area have failed to come up with a trusted surveyor's name for us after several days of texts from Lois, so we'll just have to take the plunge and make a choice using whatever information we can find on the web.
But what a madness it all is !!!!
12:30 We drive over to Lois's fellow sect-member Mari-Ann to drop off some wool that she needs for something or other.
She may be knitting winter woollies for the sect's dozens of recent Iranian Christian refugees. Last time we visited her house, a few days ago, Lois and I met an actual Iranian in the house, studying hard for his latest Home Office English exam. Mari-Ann and Alf had fitted a double sofa-bed into one of their rooms so that the Iranian guy could stay there on a temporary basis.
flashback to May: some of the sect's dozens of Iranian Christian refugees
gather to witness a baptism by full immersion in a back garden hot tub (not shown)
Today we find that there's nobody in at Mari-Ann and Alf's house for some reason, so we leave the balls of wool in a bag in their back garden, and come home.
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch what's become a rare treat in the last couple of years - an actual new archaeology series beginning on Channel 4, "Lost Treasures of Rome".
The style of the documentary isn't entirely to our taste, I have to say. The style they adopt is to tell the story of about 4 or 5 different archaeological sites in Pompeii, but to keep jumping from one of these sites to another one and then back again - you know what I mean! Lois and I have a theory that the people at Channel 4 who make these documentaries aren't really interested in history, so they make the story jump about, because they think viewers will get bored otherwise.
What madness!!!!
However if you piece all the disjointed sequences together, it's mainly the story of one of Pompeii's poorest citizens, Marcus Venerius Secundio, a slave, who made a bit of money, bought his freedom, made even more money, died a rich man, and then got entombed in a recently excavated, prestigious family tomb enclosure outside the city walls - a location which was a sure sign of VIP status in those crazy far-off days.
We see the kind of poverty Marcus would have lived in in his slavery days, with the recent discovery of a tiny room-for-three, where 3 simple beds with their blankets, plus bedroom furniture and storage jars etc, the kind of room that slaves would have been expected to live in. The room and its contents were wonderfully preserved by the volcanic ash of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
So, not a good start for Marcus in his young, slavery days, to put it mildly. But by the time he died, probably in his 60's, Marcus was a VIP, responsible for putting on plays and musical shows at the town's amphitheatres.
Archaeologists have just recently found Marcus's tomb, complete with an inscription telling us about the guy's life, and his rags-to-riches story.
And weirdly, when he died, Marcus was buried, not cremated - the only buried body that's ever been found in Pompeii.
Romans were normally cremated, so the fact that Marcus was buried could indicate that he was Greek by birth. Greeks, in Greece at least, were normally buried, not cremated.
He was buried before the 79AD eruption, so when archaeologists found, to their surprise that Marcus had not been cremated, they were delighted to have a complete skeleton to examine, and not just a skeleton but even some of the guy's hair, and part of his left ear preserved inside.
How weird life is - and such a pity we can't tell the guy that his hair and a bit of his left ear would still be around almost 2000 years after he died - I'm sure he would have been gratified to know that!
And yes, his skeleton was "sporting" hair and part of his left ear. If you're interested, use of the English verb "to sport" meaning "to wear" is relatively recent compared to the length of time Marcus's hair and ears have been around: the use of "to sport" in this sense only dates from 1778.
[Just get on with your so-called "review" of the programme! - Ed]
For me, however, the real stars of this Channel 4 documentary are the awe-inspiring pictures, and computer reconstructions, of the town of Pompeii itself. What a miracle it is that we've got the town still here to look at today after nearly 2000 years - and I'm sure there'll be more surprises to come. A third of Pompeii's streets are still waiting to be unearthed.
a photograph of the ruins of Pompeii as they look today,
under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius
... and a computer reconstruction of how the town
would have looked before the volcanic eruption of 79 AD
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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