Friday July 29th 2022

10:00 Lois and I venture out of the house to fill up with petrol and buy an exercise book and some other groceries at the Sainsbury's Local mini-supermarket in Grayshott.

We've more or less decided not to worry about catching COVID any more - things seem safe enough. We don't wear masks, and we pay "contactless" every time now, to minimise the risk.

Call us daredevils if you like haha!!!!

Instead, we take refuge in words like "rare" and "minimal". We rarely go shopping, and we have minimal contact with others, and mostly it's like we're living on a desert island, which is nice.

There's hardly anybody in there this morning anyway, as it turns out - which is also nice.

We're staying the week at a crumbling Victorian mansion in Headley, Hampshire, where we're pet-sitting for our daughter Alison and family, looking after their 2 cats and their tropical fish, which is fun.

Ali and Ed and their 3 teenage children have meanwhile been staying for a Friday-to-Friday week in a self-catering college in Shanklin, Isle of Wight, but today they've been packing up their things and have got on their way over to the west of the island - to Yarmouth. 

When they arrive at this tiny harbour, Alison puts a charming picture of the boats there onto social media, while the family waits to take the ferry over to Lymington on the mainland.

Alison puts this charming picture of Yarmouth harbour onto social media

while the family waits for the car ferry to take them back to Lymington on the mainland

After they land at Lymington, they'll drive over to Christchurch, near Bournemouth, to stay a couple of nights with Ed's parents which will be nice. They'll be arriving home on Sunday afternoon, but we won't see them on their return - we've got to travel back to Cheltenham for an appointment on Monday. 

Oh dear - busy busy busy!!! But we'll leave the cats a load of biscuits to keep them going. We're all heart haha !!!!!!

11:00 We come back and use our shiny-new exercise book to record our thoughts on the options available for the shiny-new house we've part-committed to buying in Malvern, Worcestershire, in the next couple of months or so.

I showcase our shiny-new exercise-book

for recording our aspirations for the new house we're hoping to buy

Things like doors, tiling, lighting etc they want us to choose. Yikes! And how big a fitted wardrobe do we want in our bedroom and which wall should it go on?

We need to decide which way our bed is going to stand - should be on a north-south axis or an east-west one? I think we should be told. We'll probably need the best possible "karma" as we age more and more, that's for sure. 

My god !!!!

We've got to go over to the marketing suite in Malvern on Monday, when they'll be expecting our final decision. Hold the front page haha.

should we sleep on a north-south axis (first option)

or an east-west one (second option)? At the moment

we're leaning towards Option 2. [measurements not to scale]

We only bought the exercise-book this morning and it's already a complete mess: every page is a total disaster, which is a pity. We'll have to buy another one tomorrow and start again, no doubt about that.

18:00 We have half a Cookshop ready-meal for dinner, salmon and asparagus gratin. We're saving our last Cookshop meal - lamb moussaka - to take home with us on the back seat of the car. It should defrost nicely by the time we arrive. Let's hope it doesn't "cook" as well - we need a bit of time to take our cases back into the house before we start eating haha!

we have a salmon and asparagus gratin CookShop meal for dinner

20:00 We leap onto the sofa in a haze of post-gratin excitement, only to remember that we can't watch regular TV - they don't have a regular TV feed here. So we're reduced to watching another episode of "Who Do You Think You Are", the series which traces the family tree of celebrities. In this programme they're studying the ancestry of camp comedian Joe Lycett.

Lois and I have read that the programme-makers in this series do the research first and decide whether they have enough material to make up an interesting programme or not. Then they ring up the celebrity they've been researching and tell them whether it's a yes or a no. 

Sometimes they find they have several generations of interesting stories in some cases, and in others it's just generation after generation of so-called "ag labs", i.e. agricultural labourers.

In Joe Lycett's case they've got basically one story-line, and it's all about his great grandfather, Robert Wilkinson. But what a story.

Joe starts by having a chat with his mother Helen.

I recommend this particular episode to anybody who takes pride in Britain's 19th century industrial heritage or in the Empire's so-called civilising mission to the world. My god!

Find out the real truth here, if you don't know it already - my god (again) !!!!!

Robert Wilkinson was a child chimney sweep for starters, employed by his own family. This was the 19th century practice of sending little boys,  sometimes as young as 4 years old - up chimneys where their flesh was bruised and scratched so bare that it was frequently bleeding, until such time as it eventually hardened - a practice regarded as barbaric and illegal in the cities by an 1840 law passed by Parliament, but a practice which continued unpoliced in country areas.

After 1840, it was illegal to send children under 16 years of age up chimneys,

and mechanical brushes were normally used instead. However, in rural areas

young children continued to be employed in this work.

And after that, in his late teens, Robert joined the Royal Marines helping to protect Britain's "trade" in opium with China. Britain grew opium on a huge scale in India and then shipped it to China - and after two successful "Opium Wars" we forced the Chinese to take this opium in exchange for tea. My god!!!! [That's enough my gods for one day! - Ed]

From 1866 to 1867 Robert was a Royal Marine on HMS Sylvia, which was sent to the China Seas to protect this trade against any local resistance, whenever and wherever it broke out.

Robert sees a report about a typical "policing action" by another naval ship, HMS Cockchafer.

When the ship came under attack by stone-throwing villagers, the ship's commanding officer wrote that "it became apparent that these villagers had to be punished, and detachments were sent in to burn the village".

The report continues, "A great number of the inhabitants, both male and female, were killed, wounded or carried off as prisoners", although from what I can see, from the brief glimpses we get of the text, this wasn't the Royal Navy that was doing this, which is some comfort. Robert himself, however, must no doubt have witnessed a lot of terrible things going on, or seen the aftermath, at the very least.

And it's interesting that, in later years, Joe's great-great grandfather Robert had a very chequered career: starting with a violent attack on a fellow-marine back in Portsmouth, and spells, in his later life in rural Cambridgeshire, both of rampant alcoholism and of years employed as a pub-manager (not an ideal combination, I would imagine). 

Robert finally died in 1908, victim of a so-called "softening of the brain", probably a heart attack caused by his alcoholism, the programme says. But was he a victim of what people call nowadays "PTSD" - post-traumatic stress disorder - after what he had done, or witnessed, in the Far East? I think we should be told, but of course this programme hasn't got the facts to decide for us, which is a pity.

However, let's face it, to be fair, Robert was about 67 or so when he died, so not too bad an innings for those far-off times.

21:00 We wind down with an old 1998 episode of the sitcom "Dinnerladies", based around the working lives of staff in the kitchens of a factory in the Manchester area. 

Lois likes this series, because it reminds her of her time working in the kitchens of a local old retirement home for Anglican vicars. She says it's very true to life.

In this episode young blonde kitchen assistant 'Twinkle' (played by Maxine Peake) is worried because she's 3 weeks late getting her period. And in this clip assistant manager Bren (Victoria Wood) chats to her about it.

Tremendous fun !!!!!!

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