Rain!!! Rain at last - there was a bit of drizzle that started at 10 pm last night, and there's more today, and there'll be more tonight.
We're all saved, if that's not too much of an exaggeration haha !!!!!
Rain aside, it's been a bit of a weird day again for Lois and me so far.
We get up early again and at 9 a.m. we drive to Bishops Cleeve, our shopping venue of choice, because we can get to it through the country back roads, without going into Cheltenham. Our first stop is the "extra-fat" post-box outside Bishops Cleeve post office - it has a really helpful "fat" slit so you can stuff sometimes quite "fat" parcels into it, without going into the post office itself and possibly coming out with a virus or two haha!
Not that I like to indulge in "fat-shaming" normally haha!
the "fat" red "pillar box" outside the post office at Bishops Cleeve
with its really fat "slit" [not shown]
our route to virus-free shopping at Bishop Cleeve
- and the "blue route" is a no-brainer by the way:
don't hesitate to take it - there are no downsides, a rare thing nowadays!
This morning we have to post a really fat parcel to Australia. We've bought the postage on line, completed the customs slip on line, printed off the labels, stuck them onto the parcel and Bob's your uncle! That's just the way you do it these days.
We've learnt that the education system in Western Australian state schools is not so great, and that our daughter Sarah in Perth wants us to post a UK National Curriculum maths coaching manual to her - she and Francis are preparing to home-school their 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.
The situation in the twins' school has got so unchallenging, that Mr Black, the girls' primary school teacher, has been setting the twins harder homework than he sets the other children. Sarah says that the other 9-year-olds in the class can only do one multiplication table - the "two times table". What a nonsense it all is!
If the family moves back to the UK in the next few months, Sarah and Francis understandably don't want the twins to find themselves out-of-their-depth when they start at a UK school.
flashback to last Saturday's zoom call: Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia,
showcases the previous book in the series, that the twins have now completed.
Sarah is really pleased that we've managed to get hold of a copy of this book - she's impressed that Amazon UK have delivered it to us within a 2-day time-frame: we ordered it on Friday afternoon and it arrived here on Sunday.
Another thing that Sarah and Francis complain about in Australia, apart from standards in the state schools, is the limited opportunities to shop online, and the slow delivery times, especially for people out on the west coast. Delivery times are always better for Australians on the east coast, she says, i.e. the people "over-east" as Western Australians call them.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
10:00 While in Bishops Cleeve we also stop by the pharmacy, and Lois gets some more witch-hazel for her bites - insects have always loved her, but they almost always ignore me. And from today I'm taking over Lois's greenhouse watering duties - she suspects that it's when she's doing this little job that the little buggers "strike", and she may well be right.
Badham's Pharmacy at Bishops Cleeve, where we buy
some witch-hazel for Lois's insect bites
11:00 My big job for today is more preparation for our planned move to a new house 25 miles away in Malvern, Worcestershire. I have to try and fit our furniture "schematically" into the plans for the house, and today's target is the dining-area. It's not a dining-room, it's a dining-area of the kitchen, which is a nonsense for starters: oh dear!
What makes it worse is that I'm trying to juggle metric and imperial measurements, taking care not to mix them, which is harder than it sounds. The measurements in millimetres are easier to add and subtract with, but at the end of the day, I can't visualise how big they are, so I have to convert to feet and inches to decide whether Lois and I will have room to get out of our chairs, especially after a big meal - what madness !!!!!
After a couple of hours of frenzied maths, I come to the conclusion that our sort of furniture doesn't really want to go into a brand-new house. Well, tough luck, furniture items! We've signed up to a new house and you're just going to have to make the best of it - so don't say I didn't warn you!!!
I realise that if we put our current dining-table fully extended into our new house, Lois and I will have just six inches of space each for ourselves when we're eating - so we'll just have to eat standing up: there'll be no room for chairs!
What madness !!!!! [That's enough madness for one day, mind that you don't get overexcited again. Remember what happened last time! - Ed]
the typical mayhem that results when somebody's
tried to put too large a dining-table into too small a "dining-area",
with the result that diners have to dine standing up - what a madness it all is !!!!
In any case, I just don't think our wooden table and our wooden sideboard will look right in a brand-new house, where we get vinyl floor-coverings in the so-called "dining-area" instead of a decent carpet. Will we have to replace these with plastic-style alternatives, perhaps? I think we should be told!
It's all a great pity, because in the wider world, wood is in great demand at the moment. Steve, our American brother-in-law emails us to say that google searches for "firewood" have soared in Germany, which doesn't sound too good with winter coming up.
And in Hungary, Tünde, my Hungarian pen-pal, tells me that the Government has removed restrictions on tree-felling, even in the country's protected forests, according to a story on the influential Hungarian news website telex.hu . The move, by Hungary's crazy Fidesz government, has now drawn the wrath of British primatologist Jane Goodall, who fears for the effects on climate change, as well as for the future of our close relatives, the chimpanzees.
It's well-known that forests are important in slowing down climate change by extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in their trunks and in the forest soil. But they're also important because they're biologically diverse places, and if the forests go, then a lot of species fall into danger, including our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, the species that Jane has spent a lifetime studying.
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her church's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the couch and watch an episode of the Glaswegian suburban sitcom "Two Doors Down". Lois doesn't like this series, so it's a good opportunity for me to see an episode - I like to pick up on the Glasgow dialect.
(left to right) Cathy and Christine (the rude ones), and Michelle and Beth (the nice ones)
A lot of the comedy in this programme is based on these female neighbours complaining about how useless, dull and unimaginative their menfolk are.
The women are all getting together at Michelle's house for a "girls' night", so Michelle is packing her partner Alan off to see his old pal Davey McKay, so he'll be out of the way. Alan can't see why the women need a girls' night to catch up on each other's news, because they're neighbours and they see each other all the time anyway.
Alan sees his pal Davey a lot of the time too, but it turns out that Michelle knows more about what's going on in Davey's life than Alan does - that Davey's split up with his girl-friend Linda, and that he's thinking of moving to Dubai. All this Alan seems to be unaware of - I don't think the men spend much time catching up with each other's news, that's for sure!!!
Michelle starts imagining that Alan and Davey are going to be having a really enthralling evening tonight catching up on all these exciting developments, but I'm not so sure that they will.
Oh dear, what a crazy world they live in, in those Glasgow suburbs - my god!
21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session, and we decide to go to bed on today's Philip Larkin poem, as featured earlier in poet laureate Simon Armitage's radio series, "Larkin Revisited".
the poet laureate, Simon Armitage
This episode is all about the poem "Going Going", written in 1972 - and unusually for a Larkin poem, this one was commissioned, and the sponsors were the UK Department of the Environment. They wanted Larkin to write a poem that they could include in their discussion report, "How Do You Want To Live?", setting out various environmental issues for the public to have a think about.
I'm not sure how pleased the Department of the Environment would have been with this poem, however, considering that it's a typically "Eeyore-ish" and pessimistic Larkin lament for how his imagined England of peaceful meadows and centuries-old churches was disappearing in favour of a concrete jungle of high-rise flats and network upon network of motorways.
So did the Department of the Environment like the poem? Not a lot, perhaps. And iIn fact I think the Department censored parts of the poem before it appeared in their report, but Larkin got his revenge later by publishing it himself in its original form. He didn't much like the poem himself, however, describing it later as "thin, ranting gruel".
In the programme tonight, the poem nevertheless gets a lot of praise for being an incredibly early expression of environmental concerns - considering that it was written way back in 1972 - concerns that mostly didn't get picked up on till much later.
In the first part of the poem, Larkin is saying that he used to think that whatever we do to the Earth, the Earth can probably take it - e.g. in verse 3, where he says he once believed we could throw as much filth as we want into the sea, because the sea is so vast.
the poet Philip Larkin looking out to sea
By the time he comes to write this poem, however, Larkin says he's no longer so sure that the Earth and the Seas can take it, just like that. "What do I feel now?", he asks himself.
Lois and I know how we feel - we're ready for bed. It's been another long day. Not that we're getting old or anything haha!
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