Danskcolin: Friday July 8th 2022

08:00 Eight o' clock already and Lois and I have to roll out of bed. What madness!

We've been retired for 16 years, and we're 76 - you'd think we'd be able to stay in bed a bit longer than 8 am, but today is the third morning in a row where we've been expecting somebody to be ringing our doorbell at 9 am. What a crazy world we live in!

Luckily I'm dressed, although still unshaven, at 8:40 am - the guys who've come to unblock our drain have arrived 20 minutes early: they want "to make an early start".

They need to flush all the gunge and sludge through the system, but luckily we've got an outside water tap, just by the back door, that they can use to attach their 30 foot long hose. This means that the guys can stay outside, and Lois and I can stay safely inside the house without fear of catching COVID off them, which is reassuring.

They advise us not to use the downstairs loo while they're working, and warn us to keep the toilet seat down. They don't want to "redecorate" our utility room, they say - yuck, what an unpleasant image !!!!!

10:00 The drain guys are gone, and my wallet feels considerably lighter (just figuratively - I pay the company online: I don't keep that amount of cash in the house haha!).

Money is just pouring out of our bank account at the moment - and it's all to do with trying to move house: money for this, money for that.

10:30 Meanwhile, in politics, it's Boris's first full day as not-the-Conservative-Party-leader, so I guess it's the start of a great period of adjustment for the poor guy: and today is the first day of the rest of his life.

flashback to yesterday - Boris announces

his resignation to the press

But what does a guy do, after he's quit what he himself has called "the best job in the world"?

Steve, our American brother-in-law, reminds us later today that before Boris became Prime Minister, he was viewed by some as a promising middle-aged poet, who found time to win the occasional poetry competition.

Now that Boris is free of his leadership responsibilities, could this become the start of a new career for him as one of our most promising middle-aged poets? Lois and I aren't sure, but we definitely think we would like to be told. Answers on a postcard please haha!

11:00 We go for our usual Friday walk round the local football field. And guess what? We see a lot of preparations in train for tomorrow's Parish Festival - a marquee has been erected, and about 20 "portaloos" have been set down in various parts of the field for the expected crowds.

It's warm at last - up in the 70's F - Lois isn't wearing a coat, and she's wearing the Australian sun-hat that our 8-year-old twin granddaughters bought for her in Perth. As for me, at one point I succumb to the temptation to take off my sweater. Call us reckless fools if you like haha!!!

the entrance to the field has been decorated with bunting

and a colourful sign

in the background you can see the newly-erected marquee

and some green "portaloos" scattered here and there

me in my shirt sleeves, we share a treacle tart, and a flat white coffee

in our reusable so-called "e-mugs", at the Whiskers Coffee Stand

Half way through our coffee and tart, Lois begins to find today's sudden warmth a bit too much for her, and she wants to seek shelter by the Pavilion. There's a nice man there - we don't know who he is - who explains to us about the Parish Council's plans for the Pavilion, and we try to make some intelligent comments.

a mysterious nice man (left) explains to us about the Parish Council's

plans for the Pavilion. Is he an angel perhaps, e.g. the one from "It's A Wonderful Life"?.

Well maybe, but it's also true that the parish council are currently conducting

a consultation with local tax-payers about the various options available

15:00 We get on the sofa and try to do some of the puzzles in next week's copy of the Radio Times. It's a bit of a sad commentary on our lives, but this is often the highlight of our week. Oh dear!

What madness!!!!

we get on the couch with a Magnum ice-cream each

and tackle the puzzles in next week's Radio Times

On the PopMaster questions, we get a 4 out of 10, which is respectable at least, without being brilliant.

And on the Eggheads questions we get a 7 out of 10, which is just about acceptable, given the tendency of the question-setters to ask about popular culture: a bit of a shame, because we know for a fact that only old people buy the Radio Times, so it's obviously only old people that do the puzzles [how do you know that, may I ask? - Ed]

19:00 Our son-in-law Ed rings and we arrange to talk to him on Sunday about possible changes to our wills - it's all because of Lois and me trying to move house to Malvern, but Lois and I feel brain-dead tonight. We explain to Ed that we've exhausted ourselves on the Radio Times puzzle pages. Hopefully we'll be feeling a bit brighter on Sunday, but don't bank on it, Ed haha!

22:00 We recharge our batteries on the sofa by seeing another programme in Waldemar Januszczak's new series "The Mysteries of Art".

This one is all about Venetian artist Giorgione's 16th century painting "The Tempest", which art critics and pundits have argued about for years. What's the meaning of the painting? Is the meaning that it has no meaning?

"The Tempest" shows a nearly-nude mum breast-feeding her little boy on a grassy bank, while a tall young man in nice clothes stands on the left. The sky in the background suggests an imminent thunderstorm.

What could be simpler? And Lois and I didn't know that this was Lord Byron's favourite picture.

Waldemar hypothesises that Byron found himself falling in love with the mum on the right. He was famous for having an eye for "the ladies", and the mum's little boy is helpfully standing a bit to the side, so as not to obscure the woman's pubic area, which Byron no doubt fully appreciated.

Byron thought the painting was a picture of Giorgione ("Big George") and his wife and baby. A lot of people have thought the same. Waldemar, however, disproves that theory in an instant by showing us a bit of Giorgione's self-portrait, now reduced to fragments, but clear enough to suggest he's not the young man in "The Tempest".

Waldemar thinks he has the answer to the riddle, after 400 years, and as this is only a 30-minute programme including extensive adverts, he can't waste too much time telling us about the dozens of unlikely interpretations that pundits have come up with over the years.

One of these popular interpretations was that the picture was a depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with Cain being the baby - it used to be thought that the painting showed a serpent in the bushes, but after the painting got cleaned it became clear that the "serpent" was just a nasty stain - what madness !!!!

So tonight Waldemar gets straight to the point, which is nice.

The Venetian school of artists liked to update stories in the Bible and Greek mythology in their art works, in order to make them seem "real". And Waldemar thinks that "The Tempest" is referencing the Ancient Greek legend of Iasion, a mere mortal who had had the cheek to have intercourse with a blonde goddess, Demeter, the goddess of fertility, during a wedding feast. The couple had slipped out of the hall, hoping that nobody would notice them going.

Iasion (left) seen here in happier times: before he was struck by lightning

Unfortunately Zeus found out about Demeter's indiscretion. When the couple came back to the wedding feast, Zeus noticed that Demeter had mud on her backside - the couple had been doing it in the ploughed field outside, which was total madness !!!!

And Zeus wasn't too pleased about Iasion's part in it either - Zeus liked to have sex with humans himself, in a myriad of disguises, but he thought it was a breach of etiquette for mortals to reciprocate by initiating sex with gods or goddesses. So he punished Iasion for this breach of etiquette by killing him with a thunderbolt - seems a bit harsh by today's standards, but that was the crazy world they lived in in those far-off days!

In "The Tempest", Zeus's thunderbolt is just about to strike - hence the stormy clouds in the background. And Demeter is seen in the painting in the act of feeding the couple's child, Plutus, later the god of wealth ("plutocracy", "plutocrats" etc? You know it makes sense!).

And there's a nice touch, Waldemar explains, in an often-overlooked feature of "The Tempest": a white crane perched on the high roof of a high building behind Demeter and the baby.

a detail of "The Tempest" that is often overlooked:

a white crane standing on a tall building behind the mum suckling her child

Waldemar explains that cranes were famous in those far-off times for standing on one leg.

And during the Renaissance, Waldemar explains, people thought that in its other foot the crane held a stone. So if it ever fell asleep, that stone would drop, hit it on the other leg, and wake it up. See? Simples!

As a result, the crane became a symbol of vigilance. And the painting's meaning, Waldemar thinks, is simply "Watch out, always look around you, you never know what's going to happen just around the corner".

It could be a thunderbolt that's just about to kill you haha!