Wednesday July 13th 2022

A muddled and muddling day, taken up with house-moving issues. The building survey done on the house in Malvern we've been interested in buying has come up with loads of defects that need "urgent" attention, so what do we do now? I pass the surveyor's report to our conveyancing solicitor Sue, and she manages to put a brake on legal searches into the Malvern house, until we've made up our minds whether to proceed or not.

And we must also consult our daughters and their husbands. What a madness it all is !!!!!

Sue - our conveyancing solicitor

Lois also starts looking online to see if there are any attractive alternative properties, if we do decide to give up on the "defective" house that we've been looking at up until now. 

Also, we feel unsettled because we haven't got a car out the front of the house, so basically we're "marooned". Colin, the guy from Heritage Honda came at 8:10 am to take away our Honda Jazz for servicing and MOT test, and it doesn't come back till 4:45 pm. 

Still, it's much better than having to take the car into the Honda dealership ourselves and having to kill time there while they do the work - of course they do it much more quickly if you're a "while you wait" customer, I realise that.

Oh the memories from July last year - at the time it was our most audacious outing since the start of the pandemic.

Flashback to those dark days:

flashback to those dark days of 2021: the perilous journey

to the Heritage Honda dealership just outside Gloucester

the Heritage Honda dealership on Gloucester's northern by-pass

2021: we sit nervously in the customer waiting-area, expecting

to be attacked by COVID germs at any moment

2021 - the dark days: a good shot of my knees and cup of tea is here

unfortunately being "photo-bombed" by genial Customer Interface Manager

Martin - but he's such a nice chap, I don't bear a grudge.

"Old" Martin  - he doesn't have an easy life, poor soul!!!!!!

14:00 It's a sad reflection on mine and Lois's quiet life during the pandemic aftermath, that the arrival of next week's Radio Times magazine creates such a frenzy of excitement in our house.

our copy of next week's Radio Times (centre) arrives in the post

creating a frenzy of excitement on our sofa

In the new issue, journalist Jane Garvey, one of our favourite Radio Times columnists,  comments on the new "thriller" series, "Undeclared War", which features mathematicians at the Government's Cyber Defence organisation, GCHQ, trying to thwart Russian cyber attacks on the country's internet services.

Jane Garvey, one of our favourite Radio Times columnists,

comments "as an insider" on the new BBC series "Undeclared War"

Lois and I didn't know that Jane has herself spent some time at GCHQ, although the exact circumstances of her experience there aren't clear. Have the full facts been censored for security reasons, or was it not that glorious an episode in her life? We don't know, but we think that maybe we should be told - is that too much to ask? [Yes! - Ed]

Although Jane thinks that, viewed overall, the series creates a very believable picture of life inside the Department's  "Doughnut" building, she disagrees with the programme-makers' assertion that the workforce there are overwhelmingly "pale, stale and male", i.e. a bunch of mainly white, old, men.

Jane's impression was my own impression also, as witnessed by an earlier entry in my blog.

See? Simples !!!!!!

19:00 We settle down on the couch and watch another programme in art critic Waldemar Januszczak's series on "The Art Mysteries". This one is all about a young Caravaggio's 16th century painting "Boy Bitten By A Lizard".

It's a painting that's baffled many experts for years. Why would you paint a picture of a boy who's just had his finger bitten by a lizard? It seems an unlikely subject.

Well, according to Waldemar, lizards are more common in art than people realise. And once you notice one in a painting, you start seeing them all over the place, in other paintings supposedly not about lizards at all but about other things. 

And you don't notice them because they're often put in dark corners of pictures, especially in "still life" paintings, skulking about among the vegetables. What madness !!!!!

Yuck!!!!

As an example, here's a painting by one of Caravaggio's more mysterious 16th century contemporaries, a guy who's known only  by his brush-name of "The Hartford Master". 

And if you like vegetables, this is the picture you should have this one on your wall, that's for sure! Vegetables, it's got 'em haha! But it's also got lizards: "Lizards R Us" - 

The lizards are locked in gladiatorial combat, unseen by 99.9% of the people who look at this painting. And what do all these lizards "mean"?

Apparently lizards were the way Italian painters of this period referred obliquely to the serpent in the Garden of Eden story - the horrid little thing that spoilt paradise: the serpent tempted Eve, with the result that she and Adam got kicked out of the garden. 

And in Caravaggio's painting of Boy Bitten By Lizard, the "boy" is painted in the conventional guise of a slightly effeminate Bacchus, the god of wine, and also the god of general debauchery and sex. 

See? Now it all starts to make sense, doesn't it haha! "Have too much pleasure and you're in for trouble." There's been at least one other painting in this Waldemar Januszczak series that had the same message, we think, but we can't remember which one. I hope this isn't what all paintings mean, underneath, because people are going to stop looking at them if it does, no doubt about that!

Certainly Lois and I don't want to find lizards on our dinner plates in the evening amongst all the home-grown vegetables. It's a bit like ordering a meal at a fancy restaurant, only to discover that a bunch of snails have somehow made their way onto your plate, as Steve Martin found out:

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

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room tot take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle back down to watch the second episode in the new Scandi thriller series "Trom".

I tend to get muddled when I watch crime series, because I often mix up any characters where the actors or actresses playing them look vaguely alike, as they often do. But this series has been fairly simple so far.

An animal-rights activist called Sonja has been found drowned, probably murdered by a conspiracy involving whale-hunters, corrupt police and corrupt government officials in the faraway Faroe Islands, a Danish dependency. So the plot so far has not been too hard to follow, which is a relief to put it mildly.

It's interesting that the investigators of Sonja's murder are quite limited in their technical capabilities and anything too difficult has to be referred back to somebody in Denmark.

For starters, they don't seem to have any police forensics experts on "The Rocks", as the locals call their homeland. Why not? Don't they have murders there? I think we should be told, and quickly!

And then, when investigators find murder victim Sonja's mobile phone, they have to send it to Denmark to get it analysed, and then potentially wait weeks to get the data back. What madness !!!!

What a crazy world they live in, up in those faraway Faroe Islands !!!!!

21:15 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we sit down to watch what we're expecting to be the final episode of all time of the 1970's-1980's sitcom "Butterflies", a series all about Ria, a bored Cheltenham housewife, who does all the shopping and cooking for her grumpy, unromantic dentist husband Ben, and their 2 selfish and lazy teenage sons, Adam and Russell. 

Ria's tedious and uninspiring life is lightened by the attentions of her would-be lover, local rich business-man Leonard, but so far she's managed to keep Leonard at arm's length.

This is going to be the final episode in the saga. Will Ria finally give in to Leonard's attentions and go to bed with him? Will she leave Ben, Adam and Russell behind for ever?

Well, we don't find out, because the Drama Channel, which has been re-broadcasting the whole three seasons of this sitcom, have, for some crazy reason, substituted the final episode and shown instead a 1979 special Christmas edition of the show. 

What utter madness !!!!!

It's still nice, however, to see street scenes from Cheltenham and the Christmas shopping crowds of 1979. Just think, Lois and I could have been two of the shoppers filmed going into or out of Cavendish House, or "Cav" as the locals called it - at the time it was the only real department store that the town had.

Ria, in the pale outfit in front, emerges from "Cav" with a bunch of

Christmas presents she's bought there

Ria opens the driver's door of her car, parked illegally outside, 

but then finds a note inside from her would-be lover Leonard

Do you remember those days, when there used to be those 6 red telephone boxes on the pavement of the Promenade, opposite the main entrance to "Cav" - in front of the old Post Office, sadly now replaced by shops and restaurants?

Ah, the memories!!!

This is the episode where Ria rests her shopping temporarily on top of the car, but then gets distracted by the note from Leonard, and so she drives off with the Christmas presents still on the car roof.

And do you remember when buses used to be green because they were owned by the Bristol Bus Company?

What wild and crazy days!!!!

[That's enough craziness for one day. Just go to bed! - Ed

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