Saturday July 9th 2022

Hurrah - it's Saturday, and today we don't need to think about our planned house move the 25 miles or so from Cheltenham to Malvern. No solicitor or estate-agent will ring us up today. Nobody's going to come along to unblock our drains. What a relief!

flashback to yesterday morning: two guys arrive at 8:40 am 

to flush out all the kitchen sludge and gunk in our drains

But it will be "warm" here today - in UK terms, at least, although not as warm as Sunday, Monday and Tuesday will be.

We decide to enjoy our "day off" as much as we can, although later Lois starts some perfunctory downsizing by going through our so-called "hat drawer": and she comes to me for some decisions here. I decide to jettison the warm furry hats I bought to cope with Copenhagen in the winter and also the cork-swinging hats I bought to cope with the flies in Perth, Australia in the summer. 

flashback to February 2013: the furry hat I take

with me to Denmark to cope with the cold snowy winter,

when we visited our elder daughter Alison and family in Copenhagen

not to mention my Australian "bushranger" hat minus the corks (2018)

...or my unwise purchase in St Malo, France (c.2010)

And even after all that, our "hat drawer" still looks ridiculously full in my opinion. How many hats do two people need? But I'm going to let that one slide for now. We'll have other chances to get rid of hats, so let's leave that for another day.

09:30 Our weekly zoom call starts with Sarah, our daughter in Australia. Sarah's been recovering from what was first thought to be possible COVID, but was later diagnosed as "just" Australia's latest, nasty flu variant.  She's still coughing a lot so we let her go after about 30 minutes.

we talk on zoom with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia,

and with her 8-year-old twins, Lily and Jessica

Sarah says that this strain of flu has cut a swathe through Perth's workforce, and the symptoms have generally been reported to be "worse than COVID". Oh dear - poor Sarah. Unfortunately she works as an accountant, and the end of June was also the end of financial year in Australia, so she wasn't able to take as much time off work as she would have wanted. 

10:30 I look at my smartphone. Boris Johnson resigned yesterday as leader of the Conservative Party, and late last night Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, sent me an article from the Hungarian news periodical Blikk, pointing out that Boris will soon be far better paid outside of politics than he's ever been paid when in office.

Apparently, before 2019, Boris was earning about £830k a year from newspaper articles, books, speeches and TV appearances, and when he became Prime Minister, that income was reduced by about 80%. 

So not only is his annual income likely to bounce back and increase five-fold when he leaves Downing Street, but also he can expect to be able to demand £1 million from any publisher that agrees to print his memoirs.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!! Money goes to money - that's what they say!!!!

12:00 Lois and I go for a walk to the local football field to see what's going on there today - it's the Parish Festival starting at noon. Nobody's quite sure what it's meant to celebrate or commemorate or whatever, but I suppose that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

The first thing we see when we walk into the field is the bar, but we feel it would be a bad start if I stopped here before we'd seen anything else haha!

"Bar this way!", but it would be a pity to

hang around here and not see anything else haha!

The next thing we see is the local belly dancer show, which makes a complete change from seeing the local geriatric Old Codgers soccer "squad", which is what we normally see at the field during our walks on weekdays. My god!!!

the local belly-dancers do their show, and as you can see,

Lois and I have already begun to acquire cakes: what madness !!!!

Apart from the belly dancers, there are lots of other attractions, as well as lots of stalls selling knick-knacks, baked goods etc, and also organisations advertising their services like the Gloucestershire Constabulary, the Scouts, the St Johns Ambulance, the Women's Institute, the County Library etc.

stalls advertising the services of the local police, the scouts etc...

...and lots of games for the kids, plus a giant dart-board

for the adults.

We stop for a caramel-flavoured iced coffee in the shade by the Pavilion

After our caramel-flavoured iced coffee, we have to leave the field however. We've made the mistake of buying various cakes and pastries during our stroll round the stalls, and now we've got to get back home quickly, to put them all somewhere cool. What madness !!!!!

13:00 We have lunch on the patio, and then come in and do a bit of work on the crossword in next week's Radio Times. After that it's time to go to bed for a nap.

we have lunch in the shade on the patio...

...and then get on the sofa to make a start 

on the crossword in next week's Radio Times.

16:00 We come back outside again and sit on the patio with a cup of tea and two of the little caramel millionaire shortbreads that we bought this morning at the parish festival. 

afternoon tea and caramel millionaire shortbread on the patio

This time we try and simultaneously exercise our brains on a quiz that Steve, our American brother in law emailed to us at lunchtime. The results are nothing short of tragic, sadly. We score zero out of eight - are our brains becoming pure mush? I think we should be told!

But the questions are really hard, we think, to put it mildly.

This is how days should be, however - not filled with annoying "moving house" visits, appointments and emails. But it'll be back to reality next week. Damn !!!!!!

20:00 We wind down on the couch again with an interesting documentary about Mick Jagger, and his life as a Rolling Stone. Other episodes will follow in the series, featuring other surviving band members Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.

It's fascinating tonight to see a really old clip of Mick - he's one of that select band of celebrities that happened also to appear randomly on TV as a child - as an ordinary schoolboy, taking part in a children's programme that explains all about how you do rock-climbing.

According to the programme, at this time Mick is just a swotty, sporty schoolboy with academic ambitions, and his sights set on higher things.

And you can see why Mick is known for "controlling" the band and all it's appearances down to the last detail. He didn't really want to do that initially, he said - he just wanted to concentrate on being a good musician and a good performer. 

His mania for organising came simply because the band were let down in their early years by people who didn't do their job. The tragic security fiasco at the Altamont concert in 1969 in San Francisco, for example, or the subsequent realisation that the band's taxes had not been paid for several years, and that they weren't as rich as they themselves, or the UK Inland Revenue believed that they were. Incredibly the band had no money in the bank.

At a press conference dating from this time, Mick was asked if the band were any more satisfied now.

Oh dear! But now Mick's desire to take full control of the band's tours and appearances down to the last detail starts to make sense.

But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!

Many of the artists who performed with Mick over the years have some interesting insights to share. And tonight we hear backing vocalist Lisa Fischer commenting on Mick's dancing style.

Lisa says she thinks Mick is a great dancer in the way he expresses himself. "It's like when you see a young child", she says.

"The way that he dances, " she says, "is just a total belief, and freedom of expression and individuality".

Well, anybody who's had the experience of bringing up young children knows exactly what Lisa means there.

Now Mick's old, of course, but he isn't slowing up, which is nice. Reporters have been asking him for decades about what he'll be like when he's "really old" - i.e. 60, for example. Yes, I remember being 60 myself once - just about.

Good answer, Mick!

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