Friday September 2nd 2022

What a weird morning for Lois and me - it's almost as if the COVID era has passed. First we drive into town, pay for parking using an app (just like a young person would do haha!)  and then we spend 30 minutes in a solicitor's office with Steven, the law firm's "wills guy". 

Steven, our solicitors' "wills guy"

Steven has rewritten our wills, not off his own bat, I might add - we're not that crazy! [I think you'll have to get some certification before I accept that denial out of hand! - Ed]

Also Steven has created a so-called "trust" for us, and trusts are something Lois and I don't know too much about, to put it mildly. But it'll be necessary if we need to help our daughter Sarah and her family to move back to the UK from Australia next year, and to buy a house in the UK.

flashback to Christmas 2019: Sarah, Francis and the twins

on the shores of the Southern Ocean - next stop Antarctica: yikes !!!!!

What a relief - the appointment with Steven is over after 30 minutes, after we've signed lots of complicated-looking papers. 

We stumble back to the car-park and get our breath back. As usual I've overpaid for the parking - I just wanted to be on the safe side, so I paid for 2 hours. What madness !!!!

feeling tremendously relieved we get our breath back

in the Rodney Road car-park.

Then we do another seemingly crazy thing. On our way home we park the car in the village and step inside the local butcher's shop, Waghornes. We used to go there regularly, but after the pandemic started we've just ordered things from them online, which they delivered. Now the shop has stopped doing deliveries, there's nothing else for it - we either have to venture into the shop or just get all our meat, cheese etc from a supermarket.

We've got guests for dinner on Sunday, another thing we haven't done for 3 years. So we decide to be brave, and venture into the shop.

Waghorne's, the butcher's shop in the village,

seen here in happier times: before the pandemic

I can tell that Lois is really happy, suddenly finding that she can look at things in a shop and make her mind up there and then about what she fancies. For 3 years we've been choosing things off the computer screen, and I can tell that online shopping is not so satisfying for her. With me it's the opposite, but what do I know haha!

suddenly, almost before knowing it, we find we're in the shop again,

and all of Lois's pent-up frustration with online shopping is dispersed

in clouds of joy and gourmet delight - what madness !!!!!

Yes, I look back in my blog and I can see that it was December 2019 when we were last in this shop. It's the woman serving - she doesn't recognise her, even though we were regular customers until the pandemic. That's only to be expected, however.

We get a couple of samosas for lunch, one of our all-time favourite lunch choices, and again it's the first time for 3 years. The shop doesn't do samosas on its online menus, so we've had to do without.

It's no exaggeration to say that now, we're absolutely gagging for it. What a lunch this is going to be haha!

 

three years of forced abstinence ends - hurrah!!!!

16:00 Time for tea and a scone on the couch. It's Friday so we look at the puzzles in next week's Radio Times. Something's happening to us because we get 5.5 out of 10 on the "Popmeister" questions. 

The DJ featured at the top of these questions, Ken Bruce, is now one of the few BBC Radio 2 DJ's that the BBC hasn't fired for being too old, and elsewhere in this edition of Radio Times, people are speculating about Ken's days being numbered.

One of the failings of the BBC is that what they think of as "the potential audience" is more important in their eyes than its actual audience, and they're always thinking about trying to attract a younger audience at the expense of their faithful older listeners.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

We also get a good result on Eggheads today, despite another stupid mistake in the wording of one of the questions, question 4. 

"Who is the only 20th century US president to feature on Mount Rushmore: Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson?"  [Say whaaaaaaaaaat?!!! - Ed]

A puzzling question, so Lois and I plump for Teddy Roosevelt who was President from 1901 to 1909, "as any fule know" (phrase copyright Ronald Searle), because Teddy was the only 20th century president in the choices.

It must have been a mistake in the question - Abraham Lincoln is the correct answer, so presumably the question-setter must have meant "Who is the only 19th century US president to feature on Mount Rushmore?"

It's time the Radio Times opened its wallet and appointed somebody to check the text before it gets published, that's what we say almost every week these days! And we award ourselves one point for our answer, even though it's wrong, which seems fair enough to us - call us unscrupulous cheats if you like haha!

17:00 It looks like tomorrow's "southern cousins get-together" in Oxford, is going to be more sparsely attended than first thought: less than twenty of us perhaps. 

One thing's for sure, there'll never be another gathering like the one in 2007, when most of the dozens of the descendants of my grandparents, Sidney and Gladys, and their partners etc showed up. One of the problems nowaday is that we cousins, the grandchildren of Sidney and Gladys, are ourselves getting so old now - oh dear!!!!

21:00 We go to bed on an old episode of "Third Rock from the Sun", the 1990's sitcom about a group of four aliens from outer space, Dick, Sally, Harry and Tommy who are living together incognito as apparent members of one family, in order to study earthling society.

Dick, the chief of the aliens, is masquerading as a physics professor at the local university, and he's started sleeping with his close colleague Dr Mary Albright. Tonight, however, Mary announces that she's going to be working in Borneo for a year. 

In this scene Nina, Dick and Mary's secretary, breaks the news to Dick that Mary is going away to Borneo, and not just for the weekend.

Tremendous fun !!!!!

Lois and I always enjoy scenes with Nina, Dick's secretary, because she always seems to get the better of Dick. 

Earlier today I was reading a thread on the quora forum website which was asking the question, "which is the most 'racist' sitcom on TV?", not in the sense of containing racial slurs but by appearing to represent a world where virtually everybody is white. 

A common answer that came as a surprise to me was "Frasier", which has rarely featured white characters, as I recall when I think about it. But then it was mainly about members of one family, with the two most prominent characters Frasier and Niles, being pointedly pretentious, so maybe it was fair enough for its time. Somebody in the thread objected that Daphne, Frasier's maid, was an immigrant, however - she was supposed to be from Manchester, England. You can't get more "diverse" than that, can you! So that's all right then haha!

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