I don't know it when I wake up, but today may turn out to be a momentous day, when Lois and I may possibly decide which house we're going to try to move to in Malvern. Will it be the old house, which has a ton of defects but is readily available, or will it be the brand new house that may not be ready for another couple of months. Well, we'll see!
05:30 However it's the weather that's the big story again as I tumble out of bed early. As always, I make sure first to check my morning briefing from the New York Times, and I find that the heatwave in Europe is the lead.
The atmosphere becomes even more tense when I see an email from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriendl, which suggests that Britain may become the hottest place in the world today.
The article, from the influential Blikk.hu website, reports that Brits will be "
sweating like hell" today.
London will be one of the hottest places in the world on
Monday, because "the sweltering heat may even exceed the temperature of the Western
Sahara and the Caribbean", says the Hungarian news website.
What a crazy planet we live on !!!
10:30 Sarah, our younger daughter calls us from a rather chillier Perth, Australia, to ask if we've managed to set up any appointments to possibly make a reservation for a "new house" in Malvern, and to tell us what she and her husband Francis think of "the old house" with all its defects.
flashback to March 2018: Lois (right) with Sarah and Francis
and the twins Lily and Jessica waiting for an old folks
evening ukulele concert to start at Hillary's Harbour WA
It's so great to be able to talk the whole moving issue over with somebody. Lois and I don't really have anybody knowledgeable that we can really discuss our plans with, i.e. somebody who knows about houses and building faults - Francis knows all about that kind of thing. In the end Lois and I decide to reserve one of the brand new houses, and we sort out an appointment to go to the builders' marketing suite on Thursday and pay over a deposit.
It's kind of a weird feeling now to suddenly find ourselves in the position of having made a decision, and putting an end to months of shilly-shallying.
16:00 As the afternoon wears on, Lois and I are trying to keep cool. I stay sitting near the open door of the French windows to catch the occasional breeze, and Lois has got her feet in a rapidly melting tub of ice-cubes. What madness!!!!
I sit near to the opened door of the French windows...
...while Lois sits with her feet in a tub of rapidly melting ice-cubes
Even in our supposedly "cool", north-facing living-room with the French window wide open, the thermometer still says it's over 85 degrees. How can human beings survive this relentless inferno of warmth?!!!!
At least Lois and I can feel satisfied that we've come to some sort of decision today on our house move.
One nasty problem remains, however, that if we're buying the brand new perfect house, we'll have to tell the owners of the old defective house that we're withdrawing our offer to them. We hate to have to do this, because the surveyor referred to them as "a lovely couple in their 80's".
My god, that means that they're even older than us - Lois and I have started to believe that we're the oldest people in the world, but as you can deduce, that's really not true, which is a bit of a shock on its own account.
Luckily I find out on the web that the usual way to withdraw an offer is to tell your own solicitor and they pass the message on to the vendors' solicitor.. I plan to write an email to our solicitors tomorrow morning, in any case, to fully explain our decision, so that nobody thinks we're just a couple of heartless selfish swine. Oh dear!
We think that the decision to withdraw our offer is fully justified, because it's based on the findings of a building surveyor's report, a report that detailed things that we couldn't possibly have known from just a 20 to 30 minute so-called "viewing". It's still unpleasant to have to withdraw our offer, but at least we're doing it at an early stage, within about a week of receiving the survey results.
20:00 Phew what a scorcher! And Lois and I feel too hot and bothered to look at any serious TV tonight, so we just watch a bunch of old sitcoms, and one newer one, the start of a new run of Two Doors Down, the series about couples all living on the same street in suburban Glasgow.
The couples in this suburban Glasgow street like to get together in the evenings, at one couple's house or another, and they all sit lounging around on sofas and armchairs, indulging in superficially friendly, relaxed conversation, but it's a conversation that's peppered with barely concealed barbs and criticisms about each other. And it's particularly the older women who seem to come out with the rudest taunts.
However it's all very civilised, and nobody gets angry - the comedy is all in the shocked pauses, the embarrassed looks and the hasty changes of subject, the sighs, the astonished shakes of the head, the polite smiles, and the eyes rolling or narrowing in disbelief, or cast up at the ceiling in despair.
And the comedy is all in the dialogue - nothing much ever happens, so what's not to like haha!!!!
the suburbs of Glasgow, where "Two Doors Down" is set
There's a little bit of an air of excitement tonight, however, because Alan's brother Michael is getting married to his long-term partner, Carol Ann, and, as usual, there's no shortage of inappropriate commenting on the preparations, and plenty of cases of "too much information".
In this scene, best man Alan's wife Michelle is questioning bridegroom Michael about how he and his bride Carol Ann are feeling, ahead of the forthcoming ceremony.
It turns out that that isn't what the bride, Carol Ann, is doing today at the hairdressers, and Michael feels free to explain further.
Oh dear! But don't you just love that Scottish dialect? We don't hear enough of it down here in the south, that's for sure!
Later Eric and Beth drop in to meet the groom and congratulate him, but once again the poisonous Christine kills the happy atmosphere. Oh dear!
Tremendous fun !!!!!
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