Danskcolin: Monday Augut 22nd 2022

Yikes - just another day in the life of an ageing couple - me and Lois - who are trying to move house and downsize at the same time.

First, the couple buying our house are trying to negotiate a price reduction because of repairs needed to the roof and garage, so we have to get up early to talk to some roofer guys who are going to give us a quote.

vans belonging to a typical local roofing firm

Secondly we're trying to plan the move into our new but much smaller house, which is probably only about 60% of the size of our current house. The immediate plan is to fill our current garage up with all the things we need to have collected and thrown away - but unfortunately Lois has put some stuff in the garage that she wants to donate to her church and its charities: books, tapes, baby clothes etc. These donations are already buried under a pile of other unwanted stuff, so we have to get them out of there before even more unwanted stuff gets piled on top of the other unwanted stuff.

What a madness downsizing is !!!!

We unearth the donations and pile them into our little car - filling the boot and the back-seat. We're not going to take the stuff anywhere, at least not for the moment. But we need to get them out of the garage before they get submerged for good, and are never seen again !!!!!!

I stuff Lois's charity and other donations into our car,

just to stop them being submerged by the mounting rubbish in our garage.

What a madness downsizing is !!!!

11:30 We come back in the house and relax with a cup of coffee. Luckily the mood is now lightened by an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law, containing the latest in the series of amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors on a weekly basis, partly on our behalf.

Haha - another good one this week!!!

Steve has seen the first episode of the Game of Thrones prequel and says it's a good setup of the characters and plot of the show, but be warned, he says - in this first episode the series has already filled up its quota of gore and nudity. Also beware if you're on holiday in Devon, in case you run into the filming of one of the gory beach scenes that the Sun newspaper has been showcasing recently. Oh dear!

the red carpet premiere of House of the Dragon,

the Game of Thrones prequel

There's no danger of Lois and me watching it, however. We have plenty of gore and nudity in our private life already - only joking, there. [But can you prove it's a joke? - Ed] Plus, we're too mean to pay out for Sky Atlantic, or whatever channel it's on. Call us cheese-paring skinflints if you like!

We can't help noticing, however, that the prequel's first episode is due to air in the UK tonight, because it's all over this week's Radio Times.

[That's enough about things you can't watch! - Ed]

13:30 We have an hour and a half's nap in bed to escape all the madness. Well, we have been retired for 16 years, you know! [You'll have to stop telling us that eventually! - Ed]

15:00 We get up and I remember something else I have to do. At the moment our bank account is haemorrhaging money at lightning speed - it's money for this, money for that, all the time, when you're trying to move house.

Yikes!!!!!!

I have a go at transferring money online between accounts, to make sure I can do it, and it seems to work, which is a relief. I must try and do it again, but not too often - it could become addictive.

17:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's chair yoga session on zoom. Molly has been really branching out with her sideline as a yoga teacher. If you're walking in the park in Leeds be careful where you step - you many trip over some of the students at one of her "cake and yoga" sessions: warning - cake not shown.

cake and yoga in the park - courtesy of Lois's great-niece Molly

[cake not shown]

21:00 We decide to go to bed on another Larkin, the last programme of the series, which is all about one of Larkin's most famous works, "The Whitsun Weddings", presented by poet laureate Simon Armitage.

In this poem, Larkin describes a train journey he took from Hull to London one Whit Saturday in the late 1950's. For Larkin, it's a perfectly ordinary train journey to start with.

As the journey progresses, however, with stops at several little towns on the journey south, Larkin notices that each station's platform is crowded with excited groups of wedding guests saying goodbye and good luck to a couple who've just got married, couples who are each boarding this London-bound train to start their honeymoon in the capital.

Another nice descriptive poem, where Larkin is vividly sharing his experience of what was for him a unique journey. And that sharing certainly works, thanks to Larkin's incomparable wording and imagery - you feel like you were there on that train, no doubt about that. I particularly identify with "all sense of being in a hurry gone", that feeling when you've rushed on board, found your seat, and stashed your luggage, and you can finally relax, a feeling I remember well from the times I used to travel by train.

Tonight, programme presenter Simon Armitage has invited a couple of poetry pundits onto the show to discuss the poem with him.

The Whitsun weekend was a peak time for getting married in those far-off days, something which it isn't particularly any more. That aside, The pundits talk a lot about the "universality" of the poem, One of the programme's pundits is an Asian, and he sees a lot of things in common with the Indian weddings he's attended, "the mothers loud and fat" etc.

However, Lois and I think that the programme's contributors fail to notice a lot of its un-universality - is that a word? [No! - Ed]

The poem is actually very 1950's, we think. Unlike today, it was a time when entering on a marriage was a true entry to a new phase of life: the couples would be starting to live together for the first time, and having sex for the first time that very night. The wedding guests would be very conscious of the imminence of this momentous event, hence the women "sharing the secret like a happy funeral", and the girls "staring at a religious wounding".

The programme's pundits remark particularly on one odd feature of the poem, the fact that Larkin's focus is all on the bride, and on the bride's family, and less on the groom.

In fact the groom isn't specifically mentioned at all, except as part of a couple. Lois and I wonder if that's perhaps because it's going to be principally the bride whose life is certainly never going to be the same again, but we're not completely sure, so the jury's still out on that one.

And what did Larkin mean by the ending?

The "travelling coincidence" is the fact that, weirdly, these couples, by being on the same train, are in a way sharing this momentous day in their lives with a lot of other couples whom they do not know, and whom they will never know.

But what's all this about "an arrow-shower sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain" ?

Various pundits give different explanations, so we suspect that the final verse is open to interpretation. Our theory is that the arrow-shower is describing these couples all going their separate ways once the train reaches London, all going off to start married life in a dozen different hotels, and then living out the rest of their lives in a dozen different towns, being fruitful and multiplying and all that stuff - call us excessively literal-minded if you like haha!