11:30 The pandemic must be over - we get our first visit from Jehovah's Witnesses since the pandemic closed all that stuff down in spring 2020. My goodness! Luckily Lois answers the door - it's the one called Christine, who Lois gets on with and who she can swap views with. Lois' church and the Jehovah's Witnesses differ on many points of doctrine, but both have had the benefit of recent influxes of Iranian Christian refugees, because Iranian Christians are always looking to join denominations that reject the standard mainstream Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
a typical Jehovah Witnesses doorstep visit
While Lois and Christine are discussing some point on the doorstep I check my smartphone and log onto the Quora forum website. And I'm delighted to see that Rui Azevedo (crazy name, crazy guy!) one of our favourite pundits, has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "How big is Russia's GDP?"
But I'm grateful to Rui today, because I've often heard it said that Russia's GDP is smaller than Spain's, which seems unlikely, but after I check the diagram, I can see it's correct.
Rui challenges his readers to find Russia in the diagram and it's certainly not that easy, especially if you're short-sighted like me.
Russia's an absolutely huge country, but it's GDP is indeed - well - smaller than Spain's. What's gone wrong? I think we should be told!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
12:00 Lois and I have been spending the morning picking apples off our trees and moving unwanted belongings about. Mostly out of our shed and into our garage.
And at last things appear to be moving forward, as regards our efforts to downsize and move from Cheltenham to a smaller house 25 miles away in Malvern, Worcestershire.
Possible events are now at last jostling to get entered into our calendar, which is nice:
Tuesday: a British Heart Foundation van will collect two single beds, the mattresses and a dressing-table. And Mark the Gardener will clear out what unwanted belongings remain in our attic.
Wednesday/Thursday: we'll be able to drive over and see our new home, and check it for so-called "mistakes". I don't think I have a chance in hell of spotting any - you know me, Mr Impractical haha! But we'll have to go through the motions, that's for sure. And Lois has got a great eye for detail, so I think we'll be all right, thanks to her.
Sunday; our neighbour Bob's son-in-law has agreed to take away most of the junk in our garage.
I've also made a request to another charity, the Gloucester Furniture Project, to see if they'll take away a couple of armchairs, two tables and a chest of drawers, although they haven't replied yet.
16:00 We relax on the sofa with a scone and an ice coffee, and with next week's iconic edition of the Radio Times magazine with a hastily organised picture of Queen Elizabeth on the front cover.
We have a luck at the puzzles in the back of the magazine, but once again our efforts are lacklustre, particularly on the Popmeister, where we score 2.25 out of ten - the time is coming when we're going to have to give up on this quiz: our long-term memories just aren't goo enough. But we think they're deliberately making the questions more and more obscure. What do you think? Answers on a postcard please: closing date tomorrow haha!
On the Egghead quiz, we get our most usual score: 7 out of 10, but we're disappointed to get the question about the New Zealand flag wrong. What were we thinking of?
But what a madness it all is !!!!!
21:00 We wind down with an interesting programme put together by "Game of Thrones" actor Kit Harington, a programme about all his 4 grandparents' lives and experiences in World War II.
Kit Harington as Jon Snow in "Game of Thrones"
The programme proves to be a really engaging conversation with Kit Harington, who proves to be a quiet, modest, sensitive and intelligent man with a wry sense of humour. And it seems that his 4 grandparents, for all their amazing exploits in the war, were like him in that way too.
Kit says, "I'm proud of all four of my grandparents - they put their lives on the line during World War II. There was a huge war effort on their part - what they risked, and they did it for a greater good, for their country and for a cause.... There's this idea of being humble, of being quiet about things, not showing off. It's something I really hold dear."
Kit continues, "I've gone and found a life partner who holds those things very strongly as well, so my son will doubtless have that, and will be brought up feeling that way. I really treasure the values I've inherited from my grandparents. What's been fascinating is seeing glimpses of me in them. I think we're all a big melting pot of our four grandparents."
Kit just wishes he could have inherited something else from his grandparents, however, something he didn't get - "tall genes". With that, he says, he could have been up for being the next James Bond.
Not being in the running to play James Bond is not Kit's only regret, however. He also wishes he could have been a spy himself, rather than an actor, but he doubts whether he would have had the intelligence for it.
The programme's intelligence expert suggests, however, that maybe the qualities required for acting and the qualities required for spying are not so different after all. Kit's doubtful about this, though.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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