Sunday June 26th 2022

09:30 Our scheduled zoom chat with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, doesn't take place - of Francis and Sarah's 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica, Lily has a long list of symptoms and is giving cause for concern, Sarah says. 

Has Lily got COVID? She seems to test negative, but Sarah's not convinced that she carried out the test correctly. So the jury's still out on that one, although later in the day Sarah says Lily has perked up a bit. Jessica's also poorly - she has a heavy cold, and Sarah herself has a sore throat, so maybe it's not COVID after all with Lily, but just the usual things that people catch at the onset of colder weather. They're just coming into winter in Australia, after all.

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 !!!!!

10:00 Mine and Lois's lives are being made slightly gloomy at the moment because of our impending house move and all the legal and other work that it seems to bring with it. No wonder most old people our age prefer to stay where they are and get carried out of their houses feet first, or "les pieds devant" a the French say - what a madness it all is!!!!

General André, being carried out of his house "les pieds devant" 

[Who he? - Ed]

Luckily we have a lawyer for a son-in-law, in our other daughter Alison's husband, Ed, who can explain to us what "trusts" are, something which Lois and I have managed not to find about, in all of our to-date 76 years.

Our buyers are sending a surveyor round to us in a week or two to try and discover if our house in Cheltenham is falling down or not. Lois and I would like to know the answer to that question as well - but let's hope it isn't falling down. What we don't want is for our buyers to try and reduce the price they're paying us. Yikes !!!!!

But how do we choose a surveyor to look at the house we're buying in Malvern? I go on a comparison website and they "match" me with 2 surveyors who are shortly going to be in touch. No, not yet, we haven't thought about it enough yet! Yikes (again) !!!! 

Somebody Lois knows says most surveyors are fully booked for months because of the recent housing boom. Let's hope that proves to be just another dispiriting rumour. My god!!!!

15:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's chair yoga class on zoom. 

Lois's great-niece Molly, her online chair yoga teacher

When it's finished, Lois and I relax on the sofa with a cup of tea and half a snail-bun each. Lois reads out a few articles from her copy of "The Week" magazine, which gives a digest of last week's news from home and abroad.

She says scientists believe people could get slim more quickly if they postponed eating their breakfast till 11 am, after an alleged "14 hour fast", an idea which is not attractive to us. On reading more detail however, we see that this is based on the alleged growing tendency for people to have their evening meal later in the evening than Lois and I do. Apparently a lot of younger people don't eat dinner till 9pm these days. What madness!!!

Lois and I dine at a more suitable time - 6 pm, so an 8 pm breakfast works out just fine, giving us our 14 hour fast without making us start to feel irritable. It makes sense to us anyway - call us unfashionable hicks if you like haha !!!!! 

And we didn't realise that, according to the article, the microbes in our gut have a so-called "circadian rhythm" just like us, and they need their rest just as much as Lois and I do, it seems. Well, fair enough!!!!!

Poor microbes - I know just how they feel !!!!!!!

21:00 We wind down by seeing the first hour of Paul McCartney's 80th birthday appearance at the Glastonbury Festival last night.

Tonight Lois and I only see the first hour of this appearance - and when we go to bed there's still another 100 minutes to go - yikes!

We're amazed at the energy of the guy and how, in the first hour at least, the songs he's chosen are the punchier ones. I guess that that also suits his voice, which, naturally by the age of 80, has lost some of its elasticity of tone and range of notes. Still, great performance, Sir Paul, no doubt about that !

The crowd is enthusiastic, to put it mildly, and it's nice to see how they interrupt his opening words with a spontaneous rendition of the "Happy Birthday" song.

And it's nice also to hear the occasional anecdote from Paul about the early days of the Beatles. He says that when the group walked into the Abbey Road Studios, London, in June 1962, to record their first single, "Love Me Do", they were really nervous - they had never been in a big recording studio before.

Paul says that normally John took the lead on this song, and played the harmonica part as well. In the middle of the recording session, however, the group's producer George Martin said that he wanted to have the harmonica come in one of the "love me do" lines, so he asked Paul if he would sing that line instead of John. 

This terrified Paul, he says, and ever since, every time he hears the record, he can hear the terror in his voice. Who would have thought it, eh?

flashback to 1962: the Beatles record their first UK single

"Love Me Do", with producer George Martin

It's odd but this debut record didn't do that well in the UK and just squeezed into the bottom of the Top Twenty.  I remember at the time reading a minor article about the group in the Radio Times in which John explained the spelling of the group's name, revealing that "a little man standing on a flaming pie had said to them 'You shall be Beatles with an 'A' ' ".

Personally I don't think that that story was entirely true necessarily, but perhaps it's time we should be told, and definitively, and by somebody in authority. And also quickly  - is that too much to ask haha!

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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