Monday September 12th 2022

16:00 Lois and I sit down on the couch with a cup of tea and a piece of bread and homemade gooseberry jam and look back at the day so far.

The ugly truth is that we don't have much to show for it. We've both become overtired. We're trying to prepare to downsize and move from the house in Cheltenham where we've been living and accumulating stuff for 36 years to a smaller house 25 miles away in Malvern, Worcestershire.

And at the moment we're not sleeping well. Both of us are waking up - at different times of night - and writing imaginary to-do-lists in our heads and then rewriting them in our heads till it's driving us crazy - what madness !!!

 a typical woman in bed, trying to write a simple to-do-list in her head

So both Lois and me are feeling our lack of sleep and we decided, at about 11 am, that it was time to have one of our legendary "morning conferences". 

And we come up with an overall master-plan: (1) to get our hundreds of unwanted books out of the house, when the Oxfam charity man calls tomorrow afternoon, and then (2) invite the British Heart Foundation charity guy to take away all our unwanted furniture and electrical appliances, and then (3) get ready to choose and to welcome a general "clearance guy", who will take away everything else that we don't want any more. 

 part of a typical house that needs the "decluttering" treatment

After that, we should be in the happy state of only having in the house the things we want to take with us to Malvern. See? Simples, isn't it, when you sit down calmly and talk it through!

13:30 There's a desperate need for a post-lunch nap today, and we can't see anything wrong with being in bed and watching on my smartphone the Queen's body being driven through the streets of Edinburgh, followed by her children and their partners. It's no disrespect, ma'am, honest haha!!!!

Charles, Anne and Andrew follow the hearse through the streets of Edinburgh

And by the time the service starts in Edinburgh's St Giles Cathedral, we are both downstairs and on the sofa, so no complaints please!

And I must say that after hearing the "new" National Anthem played and sung numerous times over the last few days, it no longer feels strange, during this afternoon's service in the cathedral,  to hear the words "God Save the King" rather than "God Save the Queen", which is nice. 

That's a result, surely haha!

The words "God Save the King" no longer seem strange now, 

which is nice

Luckily today also there's some light relief when Steve, our American brother-in-law, sends us another of the amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors for us every week on the web.

Lois admits the problem with spinach. She says she tends to use frozen spinach and put a large quantities of it into the microwave, but just for a rather short and perfunctory cook-time. However, that doesn't really work for Boris's achievements, because they aren't really a lot of them in the first place, are there. 

Oh dear, back to the drawing-board haha!!!!

20:00 Another email from Steve contains a picture of a sign erected by the municipal authorities in the Érzsébetváros district of Budapest, where Lois and I stayed on one of our visits to the city, on Dohány Street in the Jewish quarter, just a few yards down from the Synagogue.

And it's immediately clear to Lois and me that if we ever go back to that district of Budapest, now that drinking alcohol, bawling and urinating in public is now banned, it certainly won't be half as much fun as it was when we were last there, in 1998 - damn !!!!

Érzsébetváros in Budapest - "no fun any more" haha!

It was different back in 1998, that's for sure! We stayed in a little bedsit in the district, and this was the view from our window:

And this was the bed we used to come back to at night after a hard day of public drinking, urinating and bawling:

Happy days !!!!!

21:00 We go to bed on the last half of an interesting documentary about James Joyce's classic novel, "Ulysses", which we started watching last night.

Early efforts to publish "Ulysses" in the Anglosphere were doomed to failure - no surprise there. In New York, a lesbian couple Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap tried to serialise it starting in 1918 in their Greenwich Village magazine "The Little Review", which was devoted to avant-garde writing. There was an instalment they published in 1920, in which a woman called Gerty "exposed her undergarments" to the book's hero Leopold Bloom on the beach, Publication of this instalment brought about a police raid on the magazine's offices, following which Anderson and Heap were put on trial for obscenity.

Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap with their Greenwich Village

publication that tried to serialise "Ulysses"

The Gerty episode was written by Joyce in a mock style of women's romantic fiction. "Ulysses" is full of all sorts of events and written in a variety of styles of English, some historical. This was Joyce having fun with language.

"Ulysses" basically had a almost-zero plotline, so Joyce could put anything he liked into the book, with styles as variant as those of Sir Lancelot tales or of geographical textbooks. And it's generally full of sometimes quite mundane details from quite mundane lives - Joyce thought anything, however mundane, could be turned into literature.

Perhaps knowing that will help Lois and me to finish the book if we ever pick it up again!

In his real life, Joyce discovered that living on the Continent with the apparent love-of-his-life Irishwoman Nora Barnacle had its downsides - if the couple had stayed in Britain or Ireland, they would at least have kept relatively clear of the two world wars. In 1915, as British citizens, they had to move from Trieste to Zurich in neutral Switzerland, and in 1940 they had to move away from Paris, again back to the safety of Zurich.

Joyce's relationship with Norah Barnacle and their travels on the Continent seems like a classic fairy-tale love-story, until Lois and I are disappointed to hear that Joyce was a frequent user of local prostitutes, and probably had syphilis.  Oh dear! Still that's the real world, I suppose!

Joyce died in 1941, after surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He was aged only 51. 

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