Another day in mine and Lois's battle to downsize. I admit to being a bit too gung-ho at times about throwing things out, but luckily Lois always finds them and brings them back in the house, which is fair enough!
Our garage is the key element in our strategy - what goes into the garage should be solely things that we don't want any more. And we're hoping to get the garage ready soon for our neighbour Bob the Builder to inspect it, and to take away anything he or his enormous family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren may be able to use. Today Lois and I tidied up the garage a bit and put all the empty cardboard boxes to one side, so Bob will be able to see what's what when he comes round.
Bob (right) in happier times, seen here with his grandson, home from Afghanistan
Now pay attention - you may have to downsize yourselves one of these days!
Step One is to get all the empty cardboard boxes out of the garage, and to tidy up the "useless rubbish" that remains:
Step Two is to move the empty cardboard boxes back into the garage, so that they don't get rained on, and then, in due course, invite Bob (or whoever) to take away any "useless rubbish" that he takes a fancy to.
See? Simples !!!!!
After today, our next step will be to explore that part of our house that we normally "don't want to go to" - ie. all the stuff that's been stored under our 5 beds for years and years - yikes !!!! But it's got to be done - and there may be even more things lurking there that Bob the Builder will want, which will be nice.
But what a madness it all is !!!!!!
And Lois and I take three more steps forward today - Lois has agreed to part with another 40 to 50 of her books. Also Mark the Gardener who came to do some gardening for us this morning, says he's willing to take several hundred of our books down to the Red Cross bookshop on Bath Road, which will be another weight off our minds.
But poor Mark !!!!!!!!
the Red Cross bookshop on Bath Road
Another step forward is that Lois is half-persuaded we need to get rid of the two fat armchairs of our 3-piece-suite, and use our slimmed-down chairs in conjunction with the sofa in the new house. The chairs don't exactly match the sofa, but it'll give us more room between all the other pieces of furniture, most of which will be wedged tightly up against each other.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
After all, in practice, it's just going to be Lois and me in the new house over the winter, nattering all day to each other, as now - because we won't be able to entertain anybody for months, if not years, that's for sure. We mainly just need a double bed to sleep in at night, and a 2-seater sofa to sit on in the day, one which will enable us to do all our normal "sofa activities".
some of our routine "sofa activities"
e.g. Lois reading bits of "The Week" magazine out to me
It hasn't been a very exciting morning, but we feel we've achieved a lot nonetheless, and so after lunch we start feeling incredibly sleepy again, and decide to spend the afternoon in bed - it's really become a habit now: oh dear!
The worst thing is that, over and above all the downsizing, all our everyday routine activities have to be done as well - such as cooking and washing up, and watering the vegetables and the greenhouse, and harvesting the results. At least Lois finds a really fat cucumber today in the greenhouse, which neither of us had noticed before. Phew what a whopper !!!!
Look what Lois has found today -
phew, what a whopper !!!!
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 listen to a recent edition of BBC Radio 4's language series, "Word of Mouth".
Our language's store of imaginative collective nouns is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, in my humble opinion. As far as I know, no other language has such a store, and it's perhaps evidence of our inherent sense of whimsy.
The BBC's blurb above mentions "a murmuration of starlings", "an army of ants", "a charm of goldfinches", "a dazzle of zebras", "an exultation of larks", and "a murder of crows", but there are many many more.
a typical gathering of crows - a so-called "murder of crows"
It seems hard to believe now, but I can remember that, at the age of 10, I was memorising the more common of these, like "a pride of lions", "a nest of vipers", and "a gaggle of geese", as preparation for the national exam that all British schoolchildren took in those far-off days, the dreaded "Eleven Plus". This exam determined which sort of secondary school you advanced to at the age of 11. If you passed the Eleven Plus, you went to a grammar school and took more academic studies in depth, and if you failed you went to what was called a "secondary modern school", where there was more of an emphasis on studying practical subjects.
Most of the collective nouns in English refer to the animal kingdom: animals, birds and fishes. Before hearing this radio programme tonight, however, I didn't know that the idea all stemmed from a 15th century book, "The Book of St. Albans" (1486), written for gentlemen of the time by a woman called Juliana Berners, and containing essays on gentlemen's main preoccupations of the period, i.e. hawking, hunting and heraldry. "Hawking" is just the practice of using hawks to do your hunting with.
What more could a gentleman want for his Christmas present, say? - It's a no-brainer, isn't it!
This is a typical page from "The Book of St. Albans", although apologies for the saucy drawing, fortunately small, that one of the book's 16th century owners seems to have pencilled in at the bottom - possible representing another "gentleman's interest", one that Juliana Berners forgot to cover, or didn't get around to. But I'm not completely sure, so the jury's still out on that one.
Among the other imaginative collective nouns we hear about in the programme tonight are: "a mob of emus", "a sleuth of bears", "a skulk of foxes" (a particular favourite of mine), "a caravan of camels", "a busy-ness of ferrets", "a convocation of eagles", "a kettle of hawks" (that's a weird one, isn't it), "a shiver of sharks", "a bask of crocodiles", and "a fever of stingrays".
In some cases the collective noun to use depends on what the creatures are doing. I didn't know that "a gaggle of geese" can only strictly be used if the geese are pottering around on the ground. If they're up in the air, they are more correctly described as "a skein of geese".
If a group of seals are all female, they're "a harem of seals", but a mixed-sex group can more correctly be described as "a pod of seals".
What a madness it all is !!!!
a typical harem of seals
I particularly like the use of the word "parliament" as a collective noun. It's the correct term for a group of owls, but this was originally a more modern coinage, by the writer CS Lewis. And Lewis probably intended it as a pun on the title of another medieval work, a poem entitled "The Parliament of Fowls", which describes various birds debating something noisily and not terribly illuminatingly - a bit like the Prime Minister's Question Time in the House of Commons, dare I say.
One of my friends from long ago, Paul, had a horror of spiders, and when staying with Lois and me in Cheltenham on a visit, he told us he had found a spider in the bath that morning.
a typical "spider in the bath", a bugbear for many
And when I revealed to Paul that most bath-tubs in those far-off days had dozens of spiders living in the bath's panelling, he coined the phrase "a parliament of spiders", which I've always remembered. The correct term, however, is "a cluster of spiders", which would be even more unnerving for an arachnophobe, I would have thought.
Luckily, neither I nor Paul knew this phrase at the time, which was fortunate, that's for sure!
flashback to 1982: my late friend Paul in happier times, with our daughter Sarah (5)
at the "tot lot" (children's playground) near our home in Columbia, Maryland,
where Lois and I and our young daughters were living for 3 years (1982-85).
Happy days !!!!
20:45 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch an episode of the old 1980's sitcom "Sorry!", all about the life of librarian Timothy Lumsden, played by comedian Ronnie Corbett.
In this episode, Timothy has taken a selection of library books into the local hospital for patients to borrow any that take their fancy. One patient asks Timothy to read a bit out of a book for him, so he can decide whether to borrow it or not - the book is called "The Storm of Youth".
The passage Timothy lights upon reads,
"Caleb made for the hayloft.... in the hot darkness, he made out the form of a woman. The strong young body of Frenzy McBride thrust itself fiercely against the flimsy potato-sacks she was wearing. Her long, silky thighs were covered in a fine dust of pollen. With one splendid animal gesture Frenzy shook the thin sacks from her body..."
At this point, Timothy glances round briefly, and he sees that all the other male patients in the ward are listening as well. Oh dear!!!
oh dear - all the patients in this male ward are listening to the story too!
Timothy continues, "
His pulses racing, Caleb placed his trembling hands on....". Timothy turns the page...
At this point, however, that classic sitcom device comes into play - the next page turns out to be missing, torn out, so we'll never know exactly what Caleb put his hands on.
Tremendous fun, though, isn't it !!!!! [If you say so! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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