Danskcolin: Monday August 8th 2022

Here beginneth the second leg of mine and Lois's allegedly "epic" 160-mile journey home from attending my niece Maria's marriage to Tom at Newmarket on Saturday.

flashback to last Saturday's wedding reception: in a still from some rarely seen footage,

the photographer is distracted by a bird who's somehow got into the reception room,

and the bride takes the opportunity to threaten the groom with the cake knife -

"all in good fun" luckily !

It's not that I'm trying to "make a meal of it" in my blog, with my route maps and all etc. It's genuinely "a big deal" for me to drive across the country now after 2 years of lockdowns, whereas Lois and I used to do it without blinking, flinching or nodding even. What a madness it all seems now!

We didn't enjoy last Thursday's drive where we were forced by our GPS satnav to sample 3 motorways: the M1, the M6, and the M69, plus the A14, which is just another name for a speedway track for lorries bound for the North Sea ports. What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

So we decide to "go the quiet way" home from Harrington, Northamptonshire, and visit, en route, Lois's ancestral roots in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire: the town of Buckingham where her mother's Cox family forebears hail from, and Banbury, where her father's family originated from.

leg 1: Harrington to Buckingham where Lois's mother's

Cox family forebears originated from...

leg 2: Buckingham to Banbury were Lois's father's family came from

- and we managed to refuse the satnav's recommendation of using the M40, luckily

leg 3: from Banbury home to Cheltenham - see? Simples!!!!

On leg 3 we see that it's getting near lunchtime, so we stop in at Daylesford organic farm shop complex, which Lois has always wanted to try, but has never had the opportunity to do so before now. It's near Chipping Norton, just off the road from Banbury to Cheltenham.

we have lunch at Daylesford organic farm shop complex near Chipping Norton

It's a great place with a massive selection of organic produce, and it's been described as "the UK's poshest farm shop". Lois takes the opportunity to stock up, because tomorrow we're expecting a visit from one of Lois's oldest friends, Jen.

I have to break it to you gently, however, that Daylesford organic farm shop complex is not a cheap place to shop. In fact it's famous, locally here in Gloucestershire, as the place whose high prices convinced Top Gear veteran, TV's Jeremy Clarkson, to open up his own farm shop in Chipping Norton, by way of competition.

Poor Jeremy!!!!!!!!

13:00 We go home and go to bed again for the afternoon - oh dear! Still it's hard for an ageing, lockdown-ravaged couple to suddenly sample normal life for a brief 4 days when they're not used to it. It's bound to make us "tired and emotional", when the fun is suddenly snatched away again - it's more excitement than is good for us, and unless we manage it carefully it's all going to end in tears, you mark my words haha!

Poor us !!!!!!

Luckily, when we get home, there's an email waiting for us from Steve, our American brother-in-law, passing on to us the latest amusing Venn diagram from the weekly website that he monitors.

Yes, what do you do with old Prime Ministers, after they're no longer functioning and/or are past their "best by" date? Is there a special "skip" for them - in London somewhere maybe? I think we should be told!

I remember I read recently that Michael Gove's wife, at least, has gone on record with her belief that putting Boris in a skip would be cruel. So maybe the party will find some other, more humane, place for his "deposal" - let's hope so!

Poor Boris !!!!!!!! [Don't get yourself over-excited again, Colin. That's enough fake pity for one day! - Ed]

20:00 We wind down by watching the rest of a 90-minute documentary about Pompeii, which we started before our trip to Newmarket.

We hear a lot more tonight about the status of women in Pompeii in those far-off days, which is interesting. There seem to have plenty of powerful, wealthy women in the town: Julia Felix, Eumachia, owner of the town's largest building, for instance, and Poppaea Sabina, a "local girl who made good" by having an affair with, and later marrying, Emperor Nero. But there were undoubtedly also a tremendous number of prostitutes in Pompeii.

I think it's fair to say that, in the early days of Pompeiian archaeology, Victorian archaeologists were quite taken aback by the wall-paintings recovered from the town, with all their depictions of sex and the sheer number of phalluses depicted. Many of the depictions found were "kept under wraps" in Naples Museum's "secret cabinet" room until as recently as 1967, to avoid injuring the sensibilities of history-lovers, with their often relatively quiet upbringings. Oh dear!

However, tonight's presenters don't think that Pompeii was particularly unusual in the Roman world. It was a port city, visited by sailors and traders, so you would have expected a fair amount of prostitution to be going on. And Lois and I didn't know that the word "fornication", derives from the Latin word "fornix", which meant an archway, a favourite place for prostitutes to tout for business.

At Porta Marina's suburban baths, there was a whole series of cell-like, really narrow rooms, all measuring just the width of a bed, which archaeologists have decided couldn't have been for anything else than prostitution, which sort of makes sense.

the cell-like rooms at the back of Pompeii's Suburban Baths

By contrast, however, Lois and I like to have bedside tables on either side of our bed, to keep various things on - a clock maybe, or clock radio, a couple of books, and a place for a glass of water, a glasses holder, a box of Kleenex etc, but then we're quite refined - not everybody is interested in that kind of stuff obviously!

And we hate having to crawl down to the end of the bed to get off it, like in some caravans we've stayed in - call us sophisticated fops if you like haha!