Another punishing day for Lois and me in Malvern looking at houses-for-sale. We've already sold our own in Cheltenham, so we can't afford to wait too long in finding somewhere for ourselves, which is a bit stressful, to put it mildly!
At least in the end, after a 4:45 pm viewing - my god what a long day! - we find a house we actually like. This is a first for us after about 3 weeks of looking online and going round a selection of the houses on the market.
It's got a super big shower room and raised vegetable beds in the back garden which is nice, and a big garage we can use to store our stuff in till we sort it out and throw it away haha! And the south-facing part of the roof is covered in solar panels, which will leapfrog us into the ecological age if we manage to buy the property, but this is by no means a certainty. Houses get snapped up pretty quickly in the current state of the market, so somebody else may beat us to it.
Still we feel it's a step forward to actually find somewhere nice, even if we don't manage to buy it. And as back-up we looked at some brand new houses also today, which are certainly another option if our first choice falls through, although the house isn't officially finished yet - what a crazy world we live in!!!!
second on the left - the brand new house that we could buy as a Plan B -
although it won't be finished till the end of June - what madness !!!!
Halfway through the day we have lunch at the Three Horseshoes pub, which we visited once before on a house-hunting trip.
we have lunch at the Three Horseshoes pub again -
Lois has the scampi and chips, I have the ham, egg and chips
18:00 We arrive home again. My god - are we tired, or are we tired?
20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch an interesting and nostalgic documentary about the Icelandic Ash-cloud crisis of 2010, which grounded Britain's air traffic for a week or so.
Oh, those were the days! Airport check-in halls deserted, just like in the early days of COVID haha! People, including children, desperate to get back to Britain from European holidays, and injured soldiers waiting to be airlifted back to the UK from Afghanistan - my god!
flashback to 2010: volcano Eyjafjallajokul erupts in Iceland...
The ash cloud starts to make its way over to Scotland, and pretty soon all flights to/from Britain are cancelled - yikes !!!!!
Do you remember those days? Ah, the nostalgia!
And it's also nostalgic tonight to see again the Prime Minister of the day, Gordon "Gordo" Brown, doing his best to calm the nation's anxieties. He said, "We are doing everything we can to make the arrangements that are best for passengers". And I'm sure that made people feel a whole lot better haha!
Ah, happy days, when good old "Gordo" was still in charge, and Brexit was little more than a gleam in Boris's eye!
The ash cloud, however, came at a bad time for my late sister Kathy and her American husband Steve, who were visiting Cheltenham from their home in Pennsylvania USA. And it wasn't clear, to start with, how easy it would be for them to get home to the States.
Kathy and Steve had had a nice few weeks' holiday here in Cheltenham, though, and I remember that coincidentally during their time with us, we made a trip to the Malvern area to see the Malvern Flower Show at the Three Counties Showground.
flashback to 2010: (left to right) Kathy, Lois, me and Steve
Steve and Kathy relaxing at the Flower Show
As far as I can recall, the four of us saw a lot of fashionable models of gardens on display at this flower show, but one garden we didn't see was the "Downing Street Garden", as imagined, as part of the current Chelsea Flower Show, by cartoonist Nick Newman in the Sunday Times last week:
In those days, i.e. 2010, obviously, it was "Gordo" still in charge at No.10 - and Boris was still serving as Mayor of London (2008-2016), and he therefore hadn't yet had time to develop the "Downing Street" model of garden style, which he adopted later, of course.
Happy days!!!
21:30 We wind down with the last programme in the current series of the sitcom "Here We Go", starring Catherine Parkinson, one of our favourite comedy actresses, as embattled middle-aged mum, Rachel Jessop, and Jim Howick as Rachel's ineffective husband, Paul.
This week the family are having an un-sunny camping holiday in Scotland. Don't ask why haha!
It's an odd coincidence that Lois and I have been watching a lot of the "Springwatch" programmes this week, a series in which a team of wildlife presenters monitor the state of Britain's wildlife with the help of a network of hidden cameras.
And in tonight's "Here We Go", coincidentally, when the Jessops' teenage son Sam sets up a hidden automatic motion-activated night-vision camera to try and catch the appearance of a rare Scottish bird, the capercaillie, he happens to catch on camera no rare birds, but just his parents having sex outside their tent late at night.
And this causes a lot of embarrassment later when the whole family unsuspectingly start watching the clip in the car.
Oh my god, that's one of the problems with modern technology isn't it - it always creates more problems than it solves, doesn't it.
Oh dear!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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