Wednesday August 10th 2022

08:00 Lois and I roll out of bed and look at the weather forecast for today and the coming week. "Yikes!" is our immediate reaction. So, no return of coolness till Monday and Tuesday next week, which is a pity.

09:30 We've got a couple of birthday cards to post, so we decide to pop out and drop them in the post-box before it gets too hot for a couple of old-timers like us.

Lois braves the searing heat to pop the 2 birthday cards 

into the post-box on the other side of the main road

the local football field where we take our walks is looking

dry and parched today, just like us - which is spooky: oh dear!

We're hoping we're not too late posting the two cards - what we don't want is to find we're so late that we have to text or phone - that's for sure. It can be dangerous to do that haha!

a recent headline from the local page of the influential 

American news website, Onion News

10:30 We come home and have a cool drink. We don't really feel like doing anything at all today, but we're hoping to move to a smaller house within the next couple of months, so we've got no choice but to resume work on our downsizing.

We decide to start work on our massive collection of books, DVDs and CDs. 

The British Heart Foundation will collect the DVDs and CDs. And as for the books, we've got 3 categories in mind: (1) books that are too boring or too ragged or tatty, and so of no use and of no interest to man nor beast. (2) books that the British Heart Foundation will come and collect - i.e. travel books, novels and children's books; and (3) books that the Red Cross will accept if we take them along to the local Red Cross shop - i.e. intellectual books and other non-fiction that is of general interest; and (4) - whoops, I almost forgot this category - books we'll want to take with us.

In my case, under category (4), I'm hoping to take a maximum of 10 books with me,  which is a gigantic cut-down on my previous tally of about 500 books that I counted on my shelves 2 years ago. But how many books do you actually need in the internet age? 

What a madness it all is!!!

12:00 When we stop for lunch, we think, "Well, we haven't done much, but at least we've made a start."

we start to make inroads on our massive collections of books,

and try to clear or part-clear a couple of shelves, as a start

The downside is that for the moment we can't use our sofa - what madness !!!!!

And it's important not to make too much of a mess of our living-room and dining-room. For starters we've got our elder daughter Alison with her 3 children coming to us next Wednesday from her home in Headley, Hampshire, to stay with us for a couple of months. And we're hoping that she'll decide to take some of these unwanted books away with her when she leaves for home on Friday.

14:00 It's 2 pm and we go back to bed for a couple of hours, getting up eventually feeling in a post-nap haze and also oddly tranquil, as we sip our Earl Grey and demolish a scone that's buttered and spread with home-made jam.

we feel oddly tranquil as we sip our Earl Grey tea 

and munch on a scone with home-made jam

What a weird day, but then nobody told us there'd be days like these. We're 76 you know! [Yes, yes, you've told us that hundreds of times! -  Ed]

More horrors await us. Soon we'll be cutting up scaled bits of paper to represent our pieces of furniture so that we can see which items won't fit into a scale diagram of the new house.  

Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, says she did this before she moved into her current flat, and the removal men were very pleased, because they could move everything quickly and easily into the right position knowing that they would fit. 

She warns, however, against positioning furniture so that doors or cupboards won't open, and we can see the sense in that - nobody wants to get trapped in their armchair on their first day in a new home. It could easily put a damper on the celebration, that's for sure! 

typical case of badly planned living-room - armchairs

are blocking the door from opening, a pretty basic "rookie error" - oh dear!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, the first programme in this week's series about the librarian-poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985), marking the centenary of his birth.

This first programme is all about one of Larkin's really early poems, "Born Yesterday", written before he was famous, a poem to celebrate the birth of a daughter, Sally, to Larkin's friend, the novelist Kingsley Amis, and his then-wife, Hilary Bardwell, in 1954.

Given Larkin's current "unwoke" reputation as a racist, misogynist, snob etc, it's refreshing that we hear a lot of sensibly clear-headed reactions by young people and students in this programme. The programme's presenter, poet laureate Simon Armitage, finds out that most of the people he interviews are willing to concentrate on Larkin's poetry; and their message is - if you want to criticise Larkin's views or criticise what he said, or wrote, to his friends, then go ahead, but that's another issue, which is surely the "grown-up" way to look at any historical figure. 

Makes sense to me, anyway!!!

This is what Larkin wrote, way back in 1954, after the birth of Sally Amis.

I think this is a really sweet poem written for his friends' little new-born baby, saying essentially that happiness in being oneself is what the little girl should be aiming for, and if she gets that, who cares if people say she's beautiful or "interesting" - why not be dull and "average", as long as you get that gift of a happy life?

After all, everybody's life, however ordinary it may be, has got things worth writing about, so why ruin your life trying to live up to impossible standards?

There's some discussion in the programme about whether Larkin would have written this poem about a baby boy. Is it okay for a girl to be dull and ordinary and "average", but not for a boy maybe? And would Larkin have brought up the question of whether the boy would turn out to be "handsome"?

Well, big deal haha! The basic theme of the poem applies just as much to a baby boy as to a baby girl. And I think it's perfectly okay for writers to be creatures of their times - it would be weird if they weren't, plus it gives commentators and critics something to comment on in their fat volumes of criticism, doesn't it, as well as being interesting in its own right, from a historical viewpoint. 

We live in an imperfect world, after all, and we're all only human - call me a crusty old cynic if you like haha!

21:15 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch an old episode of the sitcom Miranda. As an experiment, while listening to the Larkin programme, I've been setting up what we call our "old laptop", in front of the sofa, so we can see what it's like watching things from the internet instead of watching the TV. 

Our old laptop is ancient, but it has the virtue of a fairly large 17 inch screen, which is nice. And we can put it about 2 feet away from our knees, and, more importantly, only about 3 feet away from our eyes and ears, which is useful when you're getting on in years, and your vision/hearing isn't what it was haha!

We watch that funny episode - you know the one - the one where Miranda and her mother were accidentally suspected of trying to kidnap a class of schoolchildren. They were released from custody on the promise that they would seek therapy and/or psychiatric help - you must remember it! And the therapist doesn't say anything, leading Miranda and her mother to witter on in their embarrassment, revealing all the oddities they would, with retrospect, rather not have revealed.

Such fun!!!!!

But can we take so much fun so near to our sofa? The numbers, at least, are clear - the TV is 6 feet away from our knees, while the laptop is only 3. 

(diagram illustrating the distance differential 

between (a) our knees and (b) the laptop and the TV)

You do the maths! 

[I'm sorry, I'm not going to! I think you've laboured this rather small point a bit overmuch already! - Ed]

The distance A to B is halved, although on the other hand the TV screen is 30 inches, compared to the 17 inches of the laptop.

Would you like me to draw some triangles for you?

[Oh, just go to bed! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!