Lois and I roll out of bed, thinking "What can we throw away today?", which is a great attitude - throwing stuff away is so great, isn't it!
But you can get a bit too carried away with it, can't you. This morning we drive to Bishops Cleeve and the Daisychain Charity Shop to give away (1) a light grey suit of Lois's that she can't get into any more, (2) two of my jackets that I've never liked, and (3) the white and blue striped shirt that I used to think in the 1990's was the height of looking "business-y" at the office, but which the young Iranian refugees at Lois's church rejected, a few months ago, as being too "fuddy-duddy" and too "yesterday" - what madness!!!
some typical examples of the local Iranian refugees, the kind that don't want any
of my so-called "smart", "business-y" striped shirts from the 1990's - oh dear!
one of my what I call "smart business-y striped shirts"
that the refugees rejected, seen here in happier times, in the 1990's,
washed and ready for me to wear to the office the following morning
Poor shirt !!!!!!
Our mission to the Daisychain Charity Shop this morning proves to be an organisational disaster, in any case. As it turns out, we forget to hand over some of the pile of clothes we took with us, and so have to make a repeat trip - e.g. Lois gives the shop the jacket of her suit but forgets to hand over the skirt, and we don't discover this until we get home, necessitating an immediate second trip.
What madness !!!!
Is all this decluttering messing with our minds?
14:00 In the afternoon, I start shredding some more business documents, bank statements etc. Oh joy!!!
I make a start on shredding tons of documents
Do you remember Katy, of "What Katy Did" fame, and her world-record best-ever diary entry, "Forget what did"?
For me, today, my blog entry should be "Shredded What Did", which would be more accurate. And I also have to shred the financial documents that our daughter Sarah and her husband Francis left with us when they moved to Australia a few years back. Yikes!!!!
Meanwhile Lois goes upstairs to declutter part of her wardrobe, and she discovers a box, which, she says, "has the whole of my life in it". I'm not surprised - it's so heavy that I can only nudge it out of wardrobe and ease it onto the bedroom floor with an almighty thump. I'm not strong enough to put it onto the bed - yikes (again) !!!!
Lois starts looking through "the box that contains
all my life", as she puts it - yikes [That's enough yikeses! - Ed]
I wouldn't mind, but we've got to sleep in this bed tonight!!!
But there are numerous plus points to the discovery of this "whole life" box - most of all, Lois's hand-written travel diary of the first time we went away together on holiday, to Norway in September 1970. The first time either of us had flown in an aeroplane, for starters, and numerous other experiences, e.g. flying in a 6-seater sea-plane over the Folgefonn Glacier.
Happy times !!!!! And we can re-live them now, as Lois reads me some extracts while we have our tea and jam, which is nice.
Lois reads her diary entries from the first time
we went away together on holiday - to Norway in 1970
20:00 We relax with the second return of a TV quiz this week, "University Challenge", the student quiz, which is celebrating the 60th anniversary of its debut this week - it's the UK's longest-running TV quiz by miles, no doubt about that. And Jeremy "Paxo" Paxman has already announced that it's going to be his last season as presenter, so this will be the end of an era, that's for sure.
Tonight Bristol University are battling it out with Durham University, two very good teams, and it's a really close run thing at the end.
Lois and I traditionally try to get answers correct that the 8 young students fail to get or get wrong, but as the programme starts, we're definitely feeling we're not in peak condition, to put it mildly.
Presenter Jeremy Paxman is also showing his age, we think, and his speech is not as clear as it used to be, which is a pity, because all the questions are read out by him. While he's reading one of the questions tonight, Lois and I both think he's saying the word "death", and the students do too - we can tell by their reaction. This gives the students a bum steer, because it becomes obvious when the answer is given, that he was saying the word "deaf". Oh dear, Paxo!
It was a question on algebra.
1. The 9th century mathematician Al-Khwarizmi called irrational numbers 'inaudible'. This has led to what term for a quantity that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers? The name comes from the Latin for 'deaf' [misheard by us, the students and the subtitle-writer as "death"].
The correct answer turns out to be "surd" - the Latin word for "deaf" is "surdus", or "sourd" in French.
Oh dear, Paxo, is it time to hand in your question-master's badge perhaps?
Anyway, be that as it may, despite numerous questions tonight about popular culture, recent films and their theme music, computer games, chemistry, microbiology and physics, Lois and I still manage to get 3 questions right that the students strike out on.
Three is our minimum - if we fail to get at least three we officially have to hang our heads in shame for a week. This may seem harsh but them's the rules, you see!
These are our petty triumphs:
1. Who wrote "Clisson and Eugenie", a tragic love-story that went unpublished in the lifetime of its author, who became First Consul of France at the age of 30?
Students: Mitterand [Say whaaaaaaaaat ? - Ed]
Colin and Lois: Napoleon Buonaparte
See? Even our esteemed Editor, for all his faults, knows that Mitterand doesn't sound quite right for 'First Consul'.
What a crazy world we live in!!!!
2. Ten-year-old Miles and his sister Flora are characters in which opera by Benjamin Britten, adapted from a novella by Henry James?
Students: Peter Grimes
Colin and Lois: The Turn of the Screw
3. From the French word for "cradle", what do we call a soothing musical composition usually in 6/8 time? An example is Chopin's Opus 57 in D Flat Major.
Students: "pereuse"
Colin and Lois: "berceuse"
22:00 Honour is (just about) satisfied. But we're hanging on by a thread here, that much is clear!
We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
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