07:00 Well, Lois and I have now been retired for over 16 years, so you wouldn't think we'd be having to roll out of bed at 7 am at our age, would you now! But we each have appointments with our respective podiatrists at 8:40 am, so there's no time to lose. Lois has been going to these for years, but this is only my second experience, and my first with Sally.
we wait nervously in the Village Clinic podiatrists' waiting-room
surrounded by adverts for foot-care products and leaflets about foot health
Has Lois got more foot issues than I've got? Is it because Jo is chattier? Would Sally be more at ease treating a woman patient? We don't know, but it would be nice to be told!
After Sally's finished with me, I sit and wait for Lois to come out, and stare longingly through the window as Lowry's café staff set up their outside tables in the little yard that the two businesses share.
as I wait for Lois to come out of Jo's treatment room,
I stare nostalgically through the window at Lowry's café,
where Lois and I spent many a pleasant hour before the pandemic started
flashback to February 2020 - us at Lowry's café, just before
the pandemic hit. Little did we know what was just around the corner
- YIKES !!!!!
and flashback even further back to 2017,
when pandemics were something mysterious that only happened
thousands of miles away - happy times !!!!!
I'm trying to nail down what furniture will fit into our new home, which is much smaller than the house we've got at the moment. I decide to try and work in millimetres and then translate the result into feet and inches, so that I can really understand and visualise how much space we'll have left at the end of the day, between all the bits and pieces.
Luckily in mine and Lois's bedroom, we'll have room for the bed, with a bedside cabinet either side, and also, on Lois's side, a chest of drawers, possibly Lois's octagonal table (although it's hanging on by a thread and may not survive the move), and also a chair for her to put her clothes on.
On my side there's room for a trouser press and a clothes stand, I think.
But what a madness it all is !!!!!
In the living-room, there will be room for our sofa and two armchairs, plus a piano and a TV table I think, but it'll look massively overcrowded with all this furniture, there's no doubt about that.
I imagine that the builders aren't expecting us to be moving in a traditional 3-piece-suite of sofa plus 2 armchairs. They're expecting younger couples with those horrible modern sofas - long and straight and then continuing round at right angles, and all massively deep so that they're not comfortable to sit on.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
a typically uncomfortable modern sofa
books and "historic" newspapers are being moved at a tremendous rate,
and piles of books are appearing in various odd places around the house
- what madness !!!!!
I foresee that after we move, we'll be surrounded by boxes and boxes of books all round the house for several months at the very least, possibly years, but I sympathise with Lois over her problem - books are more important to her than they are to me. I seldom read them more than once, and I get a lot of information from the web nowadays. Yes, I'm quite modern underneath my fuddy-duddy exterior haha!
One of our big problems today is that we're trying to do two contradictory things at once - we're trying to sort out our possessions into various piles, but at the same time trying to make the house look nice for the visit of our elder daughter Alison and her 3 teenage children, starting in 2 days' time. We're also hoping that Alison will help us out by taking away some of our unwanted books, CDs, DVDs, furniture etc, if she has room for some of them in her car when she goes home on Friday. So we'll see!
By coincidence it's Alison's birthday today - she's now into her upper 40's: Lois and I always say, you know you're getting old when your children start to approach middle age - oh dear! Still she puts a charming photo up on social media showcasing the presents we got her this year, which is nice!
it's our elder daughter Alison's birthday today -
here she showcases the presents that Lois and I got her
Alison tells us she and the children will be visiting Jane Austen's house today, at Chawton. It isn't far away from where they live, but they've never been - in the way that people often haven't, to their local "tourist sights". It turns out that it's less than 10 miles away. This will be a fun birthday outing for Ali - she's a big Jane Austen fan.
12:30 Another amusing Venn diagram comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, who monitors these diagrams for us on the web, on a weekly basis, and looks out for possible trends.
Lois and I often imagine that we're shrivelling up physically these days, but we don't have any objective evidence for that, as yet - it's just a feeling. It was nice this morning, however, that Sally, my new podiatrist, complimented me on my long legs - she had to crank out the extension to the special patient chair I was sitting on, so that my feet weren't too much "in her face". I wonder why - I'm sure I gave them a thorough wash this morning haha!!!!
I must say I can think of more pleasant occupations than looking at other people's feet from a few inches away, especially if they've got something wrong with them. Still, each to their own - it may have been Sally's dream since childhood to "work with feet". Potentially it's a bit of a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it, haven't they. And I expect it can be fun sometimes, especially if the patient is ticklish.
This is a longer poem than the ones Simon has discussed so far. He interprets the title, "To The Sea", as a dedication, or as a celebratory toast.
"Tickle tickle tickle!" - yes, podiatry can be fun tee-hee!
It used to be said that feet were an "unsung" part of the human body, until Bernard Bresslaw's touching tribute song "You Need Feet" was released in 1958.
21:00 We go to bed on another Larkin poem, the sixth in poet laureate Simon Armitage's series of 10 radio programmes.
"The quack" - Larkin is referring to a phrenologist who used to give performances at the beach. Larkin's parents, Sydney and Eva, met when attending one of the phrenologist's shows.]
Larkin at the beach
the photo Larkin took of his novelist friend Kingsley Amis's wife Hilary
And as Larkin says, seaside resorts don't really change very much - the stalls are still selling the same kind of things as they were selling 100 years or more ago.
Visiting the beach as an adult, Larkin remembers his childhood holidays and the delightful solitude of wandering around the beach on his little private searches. And he thinks about his parents, who met at a quack phrenologist show on the beach at Rhyl in North Wales.
Yes, that was little "snowball-headed" me in the above photo, still an only child at that stage, 17 months old, although my mother was 6 months pregnant with my little sister Kathy. I must have found plenty to look at and wonder at on that Bournemouth beach. I can see that something had grabbed my attention, over towards the right, as the photo was being taken - I wonder what it was.
flashback to August 1947: me, aged 17 months,
sitting on my mother's knee, at a Bournemouth beach
flashback to 1950: Lois, aged 4, coincidentally on another beach
at Bournemouth, with her little 2-year-old brother Andrew
Lois and I particularly like Larkin's image of the little children experiencing the seaside maybe for the first time, "grasping at enormous air". Perhaps they were accustomed only to life in little houses and gardens, and then, once a year, they were suddenly being exposed to the salty sea air, the wide open spaces of the beaches and the dramatic grandeur of the sea.
I have to admit, we aren't little children any more, Lois and I [You don't say! - Ed]. We're more at the stage of being what Larkin calls "the rigid old" being "wheeled along to feel a final summer".
YIKES !!!!!!!
Apparently Larkin is on record as saying, as an adult, that these holidays were a waste of time, usually initiated by the woman in a couple, with the idea that "everything is better at the coast".
Lois, however, makes the point that, particularly for women in Larkin's day, these holidays were a rest from all the cooking and cleaning. And she points out that, for a week or two every year, the women, like the men always did all year round, had the privilege of meals being prepared for them by other people, in this case by landladies in seaside boarding houses, or by cooks and chefs in beachfront cafés.
Fair point!!!!!
22:00 And on that, we go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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