Danskcolin: Thursday September 15th

Well, Lois and I have got rid of about 500 books this week - what's next? What's that you say? Donate ourselves to a charity shop? No, it's too early for that haha! We're still quite "game" and we get excited quite easily, even though we are 76, that's true enough.

we're both 76 but we still become excited incredibly easily,

especially when we're "off the leash" and "out on the razzle" at some pub

But we will still need to fit into a smaller house when we move to Malvern in the next couple of months. So now that 500 books have gone, why not get rid of some furniture? Wouldn't be great to have some of our rooms looking slightly empty? I think it would give us a real buzz, don't you? [I don't really know! - Ed]

how a typical bedroom looks when it hasn't got any furniture in it

The Furniture Project charity won't take things from upper floors but British Heart Foundation will, so we ask the BHF to take away 2 single beds and a dressing table. Yes, we're starting to feel a bit devil-may-care now - I knew it would start as soon as the books went.

Yes! Let's do it!

We decide we're going to let the Furniture Project have our smaller fridge, our dining table, our hexagonal table, and our chest of drawers in the hall, plus the two armchairs, as long as they're satisfied by the armchairs' fireproof labels, so fingers crossed. These are all on the ground floor here, so there should be no problem.

our smaller fridge

There's nothing wrong with our smaller fridge - it's just that we won't have room for it in our new kitchen. But we'll try and take the fridge magnets with us. One of my sweetest memories of being a grandparent is from the days when our 5 grandchildren were small enough to think it was a fun activity to move the magnets about, or to hand one of them to me, thinking I'd probably been looking for it.

Happy days!

Flashback to 2015: when our then 18 month old twin granddaughters

Lily and Jessica, now 9 years old and living in Australia, thought it was a fun thing to

move our fridge magnets about or to find a home for them in a different room -

how cute they were !!!!!!

And this is the "fireproof" label on our armchairs. Oh dear - I'm sure that's not the label you see nowadays. But we'll see - fingers crossed, maybe the Furniture Project will take the armchairs anyway.

the fireproof labels on our armchair - are they up to date

or are they the so-called "1660's" version, used only until the Great Fire of London?

I think we should be told, and quickly!

15:00 I get an email from the Consumer Association magazine "Which?". By coincidence they are warning me about a scam text that's going about, and it so happens that I got one of these scam texts yesterday on my smartphone.

This is almost word-for-word the text we got yesterday afternoon. Luckily we contacted our daughter Alison, who confirmed it wasn't from her. If you reply to it, apparently, you get a text back asking to send emergency funds, supposedly to your daughter or other family member, who's in trouble.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

21:00 We wind down with one of our favourite TV quizzes, "University Challenge", the student quiz, this week between LSE (London School of Economics) and University College, Oxford.

Lois and I always try to find answers that the students can't get, and three is our minimum score for us on which to go to bed feeling full of energy and pleased with ourselves, and we just about manage it tonight, which is nice!

1. In 1638 thousands of Scots signed what document seeking to resist Charles I's imposition of English liturgical practices?

Students: [pass]

Colin and Lois: the National Covenant

2. In what novel of 1959 by Keith Waterhouse does the young Yorkshire-born protagonist invent other lives for himself, including one as the head of state of [the fictional country of]Ambrosia?

Students: [pass]

Colin and Lois: Billy Liar

3. Along with Jeannie Lawson, who founded the Inn of the Sixth Happiness in Yangcheng during missionary work in China in the 1930's? She was played by Ingrid Bergman in a film of 1958.

Students: [pass]

Colin and Lois: Gladys Aylward

Admittedly Lois and I were helped in our answers by having been children in the 1950's, although we weren't around in the 1630's for the Scottish National Covenant. I expect we probably look like we were, but happily no haha!

Do you remember those days when you used to get your weekly "Eagle" "comic", and your sister used to get the companion comic "Girl" every week? And do you remember swapping them over after finishing them, not to try to be "gender-neutral" or anything like that, but just to give yourselves something else to read at the weekend?

You probably remember that "Girl" once ran a serial charting the life of the missionary Gladys Aylward in comic-strip form, just like "Eagle" did with the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, and with other equally uplifting, but sometimes more squash-buckling, real life or fictional stories?