A quietish morning but Lois and I are able to cross a few things off our mammoth to-do-lists. The big thing is that I remember our car's annual big service and MOT test is going to fall due next month, and my great coup is that I don't have to drive it to the garage - the guys from Blade Honda (Gloucester) will just appear at some time in the morning and take it away. Then at some time during the day I'll get a phone call and I'll pay by card over the phone. And then they'll bring it back in the late afternoon.
Yes, you have to pay a bit extra for this service but how fantastic it is that all that car work gets done without my presence and without any need on my part to chat to mechanics about things I can't understand.
How great is that haha!!!!!
What's not to like!!!!!
Last year I rang them up too close to the appointment time, and all their drivers were fully booked. As a result, Lois and I had to spend a miserable time sitting in the Blade Honda waiting-room-area for hours, killing time, keeping socially distant from other customers, and wondering if we dared even use the dealership's coffee machine or use their loos, for fear of the COVID. What a madness it all was !!!!!
flashback to those dark days of 2021: the perilous journey
to the Blade Honda dealership just outside Gloucester
the Blade Honda dealership on the Gloucester ring-road
2021: we sit nervously in the customer waiting-area, expecting
to be attacked by COVID germs at any moment
2021 - the dark days: a good shot of my knees and cup of tea is here
unfortunately being "photo-bombed" by genial Customer Interface Manager
Martin - but he's such a nice chap, I don't bear a grudge.
2021: I read my book.....
ramped up, with somebody about to look under the bonnet,
which is a good sign - things must be happening, hopefully
[Haven't you got any news from today? - Ed]
I think Lois and I have had enough of days where we've just been killing time, mainly when we've been house-hunting in Malvern and finding that we've got 4 hour gap between viewing-appointments - that kind of thing, you know! That's why we want our car collected and delivered next month, really, to be frank.
10:00 A couple of other tasks come off our to-do-list this morning: at last I catch our neighbour Bob the ex-Builder, and ask him to repair slight damage to our garage rendering. Although we've officially sold our house now subject to contract, there's always a chance that the sale will fall through, in which case we want to make sure the house makes a good impression on prospective buyers.
We sit down "for a bit of Danish" on the sofa - the next 2 pages of our short story, all about some outwardly stolid but inwardly passionate Danish vegetable-growers and their allotments.
This puts us in the mood to do some harvesting of our own: more bowls of gooseberries from the back garden.
armed with some fearsome secateurs
we harvest some of this year's gooseberries
And Lois, who's her sect's treasurer for its Bible Seminar accounts, fixes up for us to go and see her fellow sect-member Marie-Ann, to get her signature, so that Marie-Ann can be a reserve treasurer, and she can also take over from Lois seamlessly if we move to Malvern as planned.
flashback to 2020: we visit Mari-Ann's house and we road-test
Mari-Ann and Alf's new double-hammock in their back garden
13:30 I look at my smartphone - last year my sister Gill in Cambridge discovered from a DNA test that we had a cousin we didn't know about: he's David, a retired BBC online journalist, who'd been born to our unmarried Aunty Joan in 1959, and then adopted as a baby.
David, who until that moment had no idea who his "real" relatives were, was astonished to find he had around 30 cousins, living all over the UK and Ireland, with some also in the USA and Australia.
flashback to late 2021: David and his wife Zanne meet
my sister Gill (right) for the first time after their DNA results came up trumps
All these cousins are not only quite separated geographically, but also ageing rapidly, albeit no faster than anybody else, I have to say, which is nice. But there's no doubt that communications between our widely-dispersed cousin community have become a bit spasmodic in recent years, not helped at all by the COVID pandemic.
And it's taken newcomer David to start various initiatives to bring us all a bit closer together, at least online. Today he sets up a whatsapp group, to begin with just consisting of the cousins in the south of England - he plans to extend it later to cousins further afield, most of whom he hasn't met yet. And a physical get-together of these "southern cousins" is planned for late August or early September.
The surviving southern cousins to be invited to the get-together are Jeannette (born 1937), Liz (1939), John (1950), me i.e. Colin (1946), Gill (1958), Kate (1947) and Jonathan (1959).
Needless to say such a shock discovery of David finding out he had 30 or so cousins could never have happened without DNA science. Isn't technology wonderful? It's really changed David's life in a way that could never have happened in previous centuries or even decades, that's for sure.
Another bit of news comes later when I talk on the phone to my sister Gill. She says that David and his wife Zanne, have arranged to meet David's half-brother Jonathan, also adopted at birth, who lives in Barcelona. An astonishing coincidence is that both David and Jonathan have spent time teaching English in Spain: Jonathan in Bilboa, and David in the Balearic Islands.
What are the chances of that happening, eh? There must be a "language gene" somewhere in the mix, that's for sure.
Jonathan (centre) with his Spanish wife and family at Bilbao, Spain
When I'm on the phone to my sister Gill, we gossip a bit about our late sister Kathy's 1970's boy-friend Richard, who Lois recently discovered is still alive, at 84 years, and still living in Bristol. Gill remembers the early days of Kathy and Richard's relationship, which started when Kathy was only 17. She remembers going out of the house with Kathy in the evenings to find a public phone-box where Kathy could phone Richard without our mother knowing about it.
What crazy times they were in those far-off days haha!!!!
Richard came from a Jewish family whose members, Lois has discovered, had been refugees arriving in England from Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century. An interesting bunch including Richard's great grandfather - Joanna's husband - who was a rabbi, and who practised in East London in the early years of the 20th century.
Gill tells me of a couple of recent TV programmes about a couple of UK comedians, whose ancestors fled Europe and/or Russia in this way, as a result of various persecutions and pogroms etc. One is Sue Perkins, and the other is Matt Lucas of "Little Britain" fame. So Lois and I decide to watch these genealogy programmes on catch-up BBC iPlayer, when we've got a free evening. It's a subject we've both become interested in, because of the research Lois has done into Richard's ancestry.
Richard the Boyfriend with my sister Kathy (right) outside a club in Las Vegas
in the early 1970's : and Lois and I have now nailed the exact year down to 1972.
The picture above, that shows Richard with my sister Kathy outside a club in Las Vegas is the only photo I've got of him, I think. But when was it taken? The clothes scream "early 1970's", and Lois and I have realised today that it was probably 1972. Lois and I got married in August 1972, and Kathy wasn't able to attend our wedding because she was on holiday in the US with Richard. Instead she sent us a telegram, which was read out at the reception.
Yes, suddenly it's all starting to make a kind of horrible sense, doesn't it. What crazy times!!!!
at our wedding 50 years ago in Cutteslowe Park, Oxford,
my brother Steve was there....
...my mother and my sister Gill were there
...and a whole bunch of other people were there....but where was my sister Kathy?
My brother Steve was there on our wedding day, my sister Gill was there, but where was my sister Kathy? Answer: in Las Vegas with Richard. Now this whole crazy story begins to make sense haha!
16:00 Lois and I sit down on the couch and have a cup of tea and a slice of the Fathers Day cake that Lois baked for me. The cake is now just about ready for its final fate: as our entry for that jewel of the Art World, this year's Turner Prize: just the smiley-face installation art section naturally, not "the big one" of course - call us overly unambitious if you like haha!
20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch but I'm feeling a bit tired and listless. It's been another warm day.
My sister Gill says she quite looks the modern "two day" mini-heatwaves that we seem to get these days, and I can see her point. It gives you a flavour of summer but then things go back to normal before you have the chance to get used to it, which is nice.
Tonight and tomorrow will still be warm however, and tonight I can't face anything too intellectual, so I decide to watch last Friday's "Celebrity Gogglebox", in which celebrities and their families are filmed viewing, and commenting on, some of the week's most popular TV programmes - all the ones that Lois and I don't watch.
TV generally is really rubbish at the moment, and I suppose it's because it's summer - I'll just have to start listening to the radio again to find something intelligent.
I cast an eye over next week's Radio Times, which was delivered yesterday, and the cover confirms my worst fears - yes, wall-to-wall Wimbledon coverage is just a few days away. What madness !!!!
21:30 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch an old episode of the 1970's-1980's sitcom Butterflies, all about bored Cheltenham housewife Ria's life with her undemonstrative dentist husband, Ben, and two selfish and idle teenage sons, Adam and Russell.
I think that Lois and I have become quite good at spotting emotional undercurrents in the scenes from "Butterflies". And we think we can tell that Ria is a little bit jealous about Ben's week at Cannes. You will let me know if you think we're reading too much into it, won't you haha!
Tremendous fun !!!!!!!
Ria's routine and unstimulating existence is enlivened by her would-be lover, local rich businessman Leonard, whom Ria has so far managed to keep at arm's length, just meeting up with him in town for lunch or coffee during his lunch-hour, but refusing to take their gently simmering "affair" to the next level.
It's a crunch episode for Ria. Her husband Ben is off for 5 days to a dentists' conference to be held on a yacht at Cannes, with lots of extra-curricular fun activities planned for the dentists' afternoons. And, while Ben is away, it's possibly Ria's last chance to take the plunge and sleep with her would-be lover, local rich businessman Leonard, who says he's leaving Cheltenham for New York, and maybe never coming back.
Ria is obviously anxious about her husband Ben's upcoming 5 days on a yacht moored at Cannes, and she asks him at the dinner table about those exciting extra-curricular activities planned in the afternoons for the 150 participating dentists.
Ben, however, is more interested in stressing the serious side of the week: i.e. the lectures.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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