Today's been quiet for Lois and me compared to the excitement of yesterday's "secret" Golden Wedding celebration for two - we've got to wait till next year to celebrate it properly with our lovely daughters and their families, when hopefully Sarah will have moved back from Australia.
somewhere in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, in the days
when we four were the centre of the universe
copyright Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, as sung
by Judy Garland in the 1944 film "Meet Me In St Louis" (adapted)
You know it's a quiet day when the highlight is the daily "weird vegetable" competition at the end of the daily harvesting session, but I have to admit that today's is a real "doozy", no question about that haha! See today's winners in the photo below.
We do also make a bit of progress with our part of our plans to downsize and move to a smaller house in Malvern. Our old Chinese-made artificial 5 ft tall Christmas Tree has today been re-assigned as a charity donation, in favour of Woolworth's "cut-down" (not literally) smaller 3 ft tall artificial version - you know, the one that Sarah and Francis left with us when they went to Australia in 2015: this shorter one we've decided to keep.
I "eavesdrop" as today's King of the Tomatoes chews the fat
with today's King of the Cucumbers.
The stories they can tell you about life in our greenhouse -
YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE haha !!!!
It's a no-brainer really, isn't it. You have to admit haha!!!!
Yes, I'd forgotten, but yes, I did do a lot of pre-emptive decluttering before March 2020, the month when the pandemic hit and the county council temporarily closed a lot of their household waste and recycling centres.
[That's enough selfies! - Ed]
Back in the first century AD, Emperor Nero had one of the most scandalous reigns in Roman history, that's for sure, and he built a lot of extravagant buildings in which to stage his orgies and lead his scandalous lifestyle in. One of these was his "Golden House" - a building which has lain buried beneath Rome for two millennia, and which is only now being excavated and explored by archaeologists.
Didn't George Orwell say in "Animal Farm" -
"3 ft tree good, 5 ft tree bad" ? [No! - Ed]
Also I have a stroke of luck today, with one of the jobs I was most dreading, i.e. clearing out the under-bed storage of one of our 3 single beds. To my surprise, the storage compartment turns out to be completely empty - what are the chances of that happening, eh?!!!! I must have cleared it out in an early decluttering phase before the pandemic, and I'd completely forgotten I'd done it.
I open up the storage compartment of one of our single beds,
and find to my delight, that it's already empty (see photo above, bottom left).
What a piece of luck !!!!
flashback to July 2019: some of my so-called
"early period" decluttering in the attic
17:15 At last we hear from the local roofing firm that we contacted on Monday about issues with the roof, issues that our buyers had raised with us after their home-buyer's survey. They email us with a quote, so we now have the option of getting the work done ourselves, or reducing the price of our house, if only by a relatively small amount, admittedly. Decisions, decisions - oh dear!!!!!
21:00 We decide to go to bed on a bit of Emperor Nero [Which bit exactly? - Ed], so we watch the fourth episode in the occasional Channel 4 Saturday night series all about "Lost Treasures of Rome", which aired on August 6th.
The Golden House was certainly massive, with its enormous "famous lake", and a hard-to-ignore gigantic bronze statue of Nero himself, put there just to remind people who was the boss, I guess.
a reconstruction of Nero's "Golden House", with its
hard-to-ignore statue of Nero himself
This programme seeks to answer the question as to how and why Nero's massive Golden House got deliberately buried and filled with rubble nearly 2000 years ago.
Was it buried because it was, even by Roman emperors' standards excessively opulent? Or was it mainly because Nero's successors wanted to totally obliterate his memory?
The answer seems to be the latter - his successors wanted to totally obliterate his memory. One of the emperors that followed Nero, for instance, Vespasian, deliberately filled in Nero's "famous lake" and built the Colosseum on top of it - which seems as good a way as any of obliterating something, if you ask me!
the Colosseum - burying Nero's "legacy"
And tonight Lois and I ask another question - might President Biden eventually decide to bury Donald Trump's estate at Mar-a-Lago under a billion tons of rubble, and build something else on top of it? A football stadium for Joe perhaps, and maybe also a cats' hotel for Jill?
Joe Biden, as a young football star...
...and meet Willow, America's "First Cat" - awwwwwww !!!!
We're just asking. But perhaps we should be told. Because maybe, just maybe, the Bidens would like to do something completely different on top of it.
Ideas please, and on a postcard preferably: have some pity for our poor local postman haha!
We look forward to hearing your suggestions!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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