Thursday July 14th 2022

10:00  Lois is going to have a coffee with her old workmate Sheila in the open-air café, the so-called "Orangery" behind the Town Hall this morning, so I drop her off there at around 10:30 am after the 10-minute drive from Prestbury. Lois retired in March 2006, and Sheila was already retired before then. However, I know they're going to have the usual discussion about "Have you seen anybody from work?" Sadly, they're probably the only two left survivors from that whole era - sob sob!!!!

Sheila and Lois used to work at a local Retirement Home for Anglican Vicars. 

flashback to circa 1995: the local retirement home for Anglican vicars,

seen here in happier times. Female staff have dressed up as schoolgirls

for the charity "Red Nose Day": Lois is on the right, wearing one of my old school ties

Yes, do you remember that particular Red Nose Day? It was rumoured at the time that the County Air Ambulance was put on standby, in case of any medical emergencies among the home's ageing vicars, while the staff of "schoolgirls" were servicing their rooms.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

11:00 After dropping Lois off outside the Town Hall, I come home and relax with a coffee and a digestive biscuit.

When I go down to town again to pick Lois up, I hear the latest about Sheila's husband Chris. Whereas Sheila, who's in her 80's, is as sharp mentally as she ever was, the same thing can't be said about Chris, who, according to Sheila, sometimes carries a massive woollen "security blanket" around with him. Oh dear - poor Chris. But I sympathise haha!

Is retirement harder on men than it is on women? Do women carry on regardless, with many of their old "duties" in the home remaining, while men fail to adjust to a life without the disciplines of their old job? Perhaps we should be told? [No, you'll have to find out for yourself! - Ed]. 

Chris was a lecturer at a local college before he retired. Sheila was a nurse / carer at that care home for vicars where Lois also worked, so both Sheila and Chris had professional careers. But Sheila has coped with retirement, while Chris hasn't, which is interesting. 

Lois tells me about the Orangery, which she says is very nice - and there are tables outside looking out onto the Imperial Square gardens, which means the experience is safer from the COVID standpoint. Lois had a coffee with a pain-au-chocolat, which sounds good. Yum yum !!!!!

the Garden Bar at the Orangery - Cheltenham Town Hall, dating

from Victorian times, can be seen in the background

Do you remember about the Orangery and the Garden Bar? It opened in August last year, when people thought the pandemic was as good as over.

The Garden Bar is doing very well, Lois reports, and there was quite a crowd of customers that collected outside even before it opened this morning, at 11 am.

Lois says she and Sheila swapped reminiscences about some of the care home's more colourful Anglican residents, like Deaconess Larkin, who as a young girl was a member of the Hitler Youth. Her father was working in the British Embassy, and this was in the days when it was looked on by some in Britain as a more disciplined but essentially harmless equivalent of Britain's girl guides. What madness!!!!

14:00 Lois and I are hoping to move to the Malvern area later this year, but the building survey done on the house we have been interested in has come back this week with a large number of defects that have to be addressed "urgently", according to Jonathan, the surveyor. Today, however, we arrange to talk to Jonathan direct tomorrow, and hopefully this will clarify a few questions.

Lois, however, is saying that she has "fallen out of love" with the house having read the report, and I know how she feels. And she's started looking online at possible alternative properties.

Decisions decisions - yikes !!!!

20:00 Lois and I have been watching old episodes of the 1970's-1980's sitcom Butterflies, all about Ria, a bored Cheltenham housewife, who shops for, and cooks for, Ben, her grumpy and unromantic dentist husband, and Adam and Russell, the couple's selfish and lazy teenage sons. The burdens of Ria's uninspiring life are, however, somewhat relieved by the attentions of her would-be lover, rich local businessman Leonard. Ria always manages to keep Leonard at arm's length, nevertheless.

These old episodes have been screened by the Drama channel, but for some reason that we can't fathom, the channel stopped short of rebroadcasting the entire final series, so we haven't been able to see either the penultimate, or the final, episode, in which Ria reluctantly "breaks up" with Leonard and goes back to resume her uninspiring life as Ben's faithful wife.

Tonight we watch the "missing" last 2 episodes on YouTube, and then follow that up with a nostalgic look at an special reunion episode that the cast performed in 2000 for a BBC TV charity evening for Children in Need.

It's always nice to see other people get older, isn't it! How reassuring to have it confirmed that we've all been doing it haha!

Ben and Ria in bed...

...Ria with Adam, son #2...

...Ria with Russell, selfish son #1....

...and Ria with her would-be lover, Leonard, 

meeting up again in Hatherley Park, Cheltenham

Happy days!!!!  

21:00 We wind down with the last programme in art critic Waldemar Janoszcsak's fascinating series on "The Art Mysteries".

This final programme in the series is all about Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp" (1632).

Lois and I didn't know that in those far-off days in the Netherlands, public anatomy lessons involving dissection of the corpses of criminals was a popular form of entertainment - and a fashionable place to take your new girlfriend on a first "date". What madness !!!!

Dr Tulp (right) demonstrating for his students 

which muscles control which fingers - fascinating stuff haha!!!

All rather gruesome, but presenter Waldemar is, however, quick to point out that there's something missing in this picture. Tulp is there on the right, and his students are there too, gathered round the corpse of a shoplifter - like the shepherds at the Nativity, Waldemar says. 

So what's missing? Well it's the audience of ordinary Amsterdammers, of course, the courting couples and other people who may have wandered in off the street into the lecture hall on a Saturday night to buy a 1.50 guilder ticket and watch the "anatomy lesson".

We know that the audience are there in the hall, however, because Tulp is looking into the middle distance, not at the students themselves. The guy to Tulp's right - the one with the ginger hair and beard - is looking at the audience too, and the guy right at the top of the picture towards the left is not only looking at the audience, but he's pointing to the corpse at the same time.

And yes the audience is us - the people looking at the painting. And the message? It's simply "Look at that corpse - you're going to be just like him sooner or later haha!!!"

YIKES !!!!!!!

The programme ends on a lighter note, however, which is nice. Apparently, the building where the dissection took place is now called the Waag, and it's a lovely restaurant in Amsterdam's red-light district.

Comforting to know that the hall is now a place where people can have proper fun on a Saturday night, getting to know somebody over a delicious meal haha!

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