Wednesday November 30th 2022

I can feel that Lois is getting a bit "stir crazy" - we haven't been out of the house for a few days, what with the bad weather and with our street being blocked by road diggers and builders and all. And although staying in doesn't bother me as much, I know Lois really doesn't like it. 

But where should we go?

As it happens, Virgin Media have reminded me this morning that I'm paying for two of their phones simultaneously at the moment, my new one and my old one - yikes! So Lois and I decide to drive the 3 miles over to Hanley Swan post office to hand the old phone over to Royal Mail. Let's hope it arrives with Virgin tomorrow, and I can cut my phone bill by half, which will be nice!

However, to make our visit to the post office today even more productive, I decide, as soon as I've had my morning porridge, to write all my UK Christmas cards by mid-morning: I've already done my overseas list. Lois and I have a long list of card addressees, and, by tradition, I only do some of them - my relatives or friends - and Lois does the rest. Makes sense to us!

There's a potential problem with Christmas cards this year. A lot of addressees will be surprised to find out that, after 36 years, we decided to move from Cheltenham to Malvern, and they may be expecting a long newsy letter of explanation. I decide to avoid that, however, because we have a hundred people to send to - and it wouldn't be practical. That's what I say, anyhow! Call me a selfish, uncaring swine if you like haha!

Hanley Swan Post Office

This post office, a typical country post office, is a good discovery for us, because it's also the Village Stores, so we pick up some groceries at the same time.

Lois likes nothing better than to browse a food store. Whereas I always go into such places armed with a shopping list and just tick all the items off one by one and don't look at anything else, Lois most of all likes to see everything that the store is selling, whether she needs to buy it or not, and I can see her point of view.

After our visit to the post office, we decide to extend this morning's outing and upgrade it to a "familiarisation tour" of our new surroundings. So we drive another 3 miles and drop in at nearby Clive's Fruit Farm, just outside Upton-upon-Severn: a store which not only stocks loads of fresh produce but also has a proper butcher. You should have seen Lois's face light up - she's clearly in paradise now: and we come away with a bunch of joints of meat, plus Scotch eggs and minted lamb burgers, all from local farms. Yum yum !!!!  What's not to like?

we visit Clive's Fruit Farm, near Upton-upon-Severn

There's even an attractively spacious chicken coop by the car park, where 3 enormous cockerels are lording it over a couple of dozen hens.

we watch the hens and cockerels in Clive's hen coop

the meat counter at Clive's Fruit Farm

So all in all it's been a good  morning for us, because we like to be able to buy fresh local produce and meat from local farmers, and we weren't sure where in Malvern we needed to go to get that kind of stuff. Up till now we've pretty much been eating what we've found in the local supermarkets.

13:00 We drive back to Malvern, only to find that the road we live on is impassable again, with a bunch of mechanical diggers digging holes and laying cables, piping etc. So we're forced to park round the corner and lug the shopping back home over the mud-drenched pavement. What a madness it all is!!!

The builders have promised us that all this road work will be finished by the end of Friday. Let's hope they're not just stringing us along!

Tuesday November 29th 2022

 November 29th - my dear late sister Kathy's birthday. She would have turned 75 today if she had lived.

flashback to 1967: Kathy aged 19

When this photo was taken, Kathy was sitting on the brick wall that surrounded the steps that led down from our back door, in the house in Bristol that our family lived in from 1960 to 1968. It was a favourite place for each of us, whenever we wanted to just sit and watch the world go by.

my other sister Gill, aged 7

me aged 20

Happy days!

08:30 I screw up my courage and take the decision to try and set up my shiny new Samsung mobile phone this morning.

Neither Samsung nor Virgin Media provide anything much in the way of instructions, so I have to research it all on the web as best I can. After a couple of hours I manage to set the new phone up and transfer a lot of stuff - names of contacts and the like - from my old phone. Then I delete all the personal stuff, passwords etc from the old phone. 

The above paragraph sounds as if I knew exactly what I was doing. But you don't know how flabbergasted I am that I finally get all this to work. My flabber has never been so gasted. 

I had lined up all sorts of ideas for if it didn't work, e.g. email our daughter Ali and her husband Ed to ask for help, or ask Matt next door if he can help me, or even (as very much a last resort) phoning Virgin Media's so-called helpdesk. Those guys are all youngsters (compared to Lois and me) so I assume they know - even the Virgin Media guys - what to do by some sort of younger person's instinct, and they can do it all without thinking. That doesn't apply to me, to put it mildly haha!!!

me today, trying desperately to avoid 

phoning Virgin Media's so-called helpdesk

I'm "trading up", so that means I have to return my old phone to Virgin Media in the postage-paid bag that gets delivered to our house today. To post the old phone off, I'll have to take it to a post-office, though. However I can't do that today - we've been "under siege" since 8 am, when one of the builder guys rang our door-bell: we were still in bed, so I had to struggle downstairs in my dressing-gown. 

The guy asked if Lois or I needed to take our car out today. I said no we didn't, and then we watched from the window as our street slowly became totally impassable with mechanical diggers etc either digging holes or filling them in - it's hard to tell which it is, to be honest!

What a crazy street we live on !!!!!

You can probably tell from the photos that it's a very damp and misty day today here - I don't envy those builder guys having to work out there in the cold and in all that mud. 

At least Lois and I can stay here indoors in the warm and have refreshing cups of tea periodically, which is nice!

Monday November 28th 2022

08:00 Lois and I look at our phones as we lie in bed sipping our cups of tea.

Our daughter Alison has been posting a suave photo of herself and husband Ed on social media, after the pair attended a fancy Railway Ball in the middle of London this week - there were about 1500 guests, seated at 150 or so tables, Ali says. And Ed got an invite because he's a lawyer who works for a number of railway companies.

our daughter Alison with her husband Ed at 

a fancy Railway Ball  held in Central London this week,

at the Intercontinental, near the O2 

Ironically the dinner went on so long that Ali and Ed and a lot of other guests - railway executives and managers and the like - missed the last train out of London to the south: which left at 11:30 pm. How "provincial" London is for some things!

Ed rang for an Uber driver to take them home to Headley, Hampshire, but the journey took longer than expected, and they didn't arrive home till after 2 am. It was difficult getting away from the O2 area apparently, because a Rod Stewart concert finished at around the same time. Then, night road closures for road repairs meant that their Uber car had to get off, first, the M25 and then, later, off the A3 - and their amended route took them through Kent, Ali says. What an enormous detour!

And what a crazy country we live in !!!!!

And who would have guessed, when Ali was just starting out in life in the mid 1970's, that our little baby girl would end up going to fancy Railway Balls in the middle of London?

1975 - the first picture

1976 - the heatwave summer, on holiday in Minehead, Somerset

1976 - Ali's first brush with the railways, 

at Blue Anchor Railway Station, Somerset.

11:00 We roll out of bed and eventually we go out for a walk. We manage to post off the first of this year's Christmas cards: all the overseas ones, to Australia, US, Japan, France and Hungary.

we post off our first Christmas cards for 2022: all the overseas ones

Don't ever accuse us of being unable to prioritise haha! After all, it isn't rocket science is it!

12:00 My shiny new smartphone arrives from Virgin. Oh dear - that will mean a lot of work this week to find out how I get the new phone going. I want to keep the same phone number so I suppose I have to take the SIM card out of the old phone and then try and put it in the new. But do I try and copy the old phone's data over first, using SmartShift? Or do I put the SIM card into the new phone and then do the transfer? Beats me!!!!!

I think I'm going to leave all this till tomorrow.

Oh dear. Sometimes I think I can't cope with the modern world And I think my brain is starting to flatline again, which won't help - damn!!!! 

my new phone - but how do I set it up? Beats me !!!!

14:00 Steve, our American brother-in-law sends us another of the amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors for us on the web.

Yes, we think it's crazy that Matt Hancock has been able to dominate this year's "I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here" reality TV show, and avoid being evicted week after week. Lois and I don't watch the show of course, but we feel sorry for the other celebrities who've been upstaged by him - much more worthy souls like Boy George for example.

Poor "Boy" haha !!!!!

Hancock says he's going to give to charity some of the enormous £400k fee he got for appearing on the show. Well, let's hope he makes good on that promise. What madness !!!!!

Sunday November 27th 2022

11:15 After a cheery zoom with our daughter Sarah and our twin granddaughters in Australia, Lois and I head off to Tewkesbury with 2 packed lunches.

this morning's cheery zoom with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia,

and with our 9-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica

"Why are Lois and Colin hitting the road and driving the 17 miles over to Tewkesbury?", I hear you ask.

Well, there's a bit of a post-pandemic breakthrough today - Lois decides that at last she feels ready to meet with her fellow church-members and take part in person at one of the church's two Sunday meetings, for the first time since the pandemic started in Spring 2020 - how's that for a bold new step!!!!

There are at least 2 fellow church members who'd be happy to pick Lois up and take her to the church on Sundays, but as today is her first time, and she doesn't want to go to both meetings on her first time, she asks me to take her there - it's about 17 miles. And although I'm not a church member myself, I'm happy to sit at the back with her and bring her home again afterwards. The only danger is that lunchtime and post-lunchtime is generally my "sleepy time", so I'm going to have to strain really hard to stay awake - oh dear!

flashback to August 2021: as the pandemic still rages, Lois and I 

visit the village hall where her church holds its services

For both of us it's a big shock to suddenly find ourselves in a crowd of people - they all want to talk to Lois of course, after her 2.5 years' physical absence from services - she's only taken part on zoom since the pandemic began: so the moment we enter the Village Hall where the services are held, we're immediately surrounded by excited groups wanting to shake our hands and ask us how our recent move to Malvern from Cheltenham went.

Yikes! It's scary because we're both used to talking only to each other 95% of the time - mealtimes, in-between times, bedtimes, watching TV times - it's mostly just Lois and me 24/7. So it's a tremendous shock today to be surrounded by a bit of a hubbub! [I think we've got the picture on that one now! - Ed]

The hubbub would have been even more overwhelming on any other Sunday in the month, because we would also have had to cope with the church's 15 or so Iranian Christian refugee members. On the last Sunday of each month, however,  the Iranians hold their own Farsi-language-only service in Gloucester. So today it's much quieter than usual in the village hall.

Today's exhortation is all about the epistle to Titus, one of the Bible's shortest books, although perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the preacher's detailed exposition of the book and its language is one of the longest talks Lois has ever experienced at the church. I guess the shortness of the book doesn't mean that there isn't much to say about it, however, so fair enough!

Saint Titus

During the chatting at the end of the service, one of the church members, David, offers to put up some shelves for us, which is nice. Ideally we would like shelves all over the house. Our larder and airing cupboard are in a particularly chaotic state at the moment, but we'd also like shelves in the living-room and in the kitchen, maybe even the bedrooms (????).

You can never have too many shelves, can you haha! Our old house was full of them.

the almost-total chaos of our shelf-less larder

the almost total chaos of our one-shelf airing cupboard

But wouldn't it be nice to have shelves in the kitchen-diner!

the chaos of our shelfless kitchen-diner

Or shelves in the living-room?

the chaos of our shelfless living-room

Or shelves in our bedroom?

the chaos of our shelfless bedroom - note, in the window, the stylish

flatpack packaging that shields us from public view, in the absence of blinds

Or Bedroom 2?

Bedroom 2 with its stylish "book mountain"

Or even Bedroom 3?

bedroom 3 with its "trinket mountain" and

its bed-top graveyard for discarded packaging

What a crazy house we live in !!!!!

16:00 We get home and I find an email from Virgin phones. For some unaccountable reason I went slightly mad a couple of days ago and took the step of ordering a replacement mobile phone, after being stupidly attracted by a so-called "Black Friday" upgrade deal. 

How crazy! What a fool I've been!!!!  As if Lois and I didn't have enough to cope with at the moment without me trying to trade in my old phone, master a new phone, and somehow stay "on grid". I bet I make the most almighty mess of the whole process !!!!

What a madness it all is !!!! 

18:30 Our first roast dinner in the new house: roast pork, crackling, roast potatoes,  parsnips, sprouts and apple sauce with gravy, followed by our own grown baked apple from our old house with ice cream- yum yum 😋

Saturday November 26th 2022

Lois and I are currently living in a new-build home on a half-finished street in the middle of a large new housing estate - when it's all finished there'll be 300 houses here. This situation has a lot of drawbacks, to put it mildly. One is that some days it's really difficult to drive anywhere because of holes in the roads where underground piping etc is being installed. 

Luckily the whole site goes pretty quiet on Saturday and Sunday, which is nice. And this morning we leave the house for the first time in about 3 or 4 days. We drive the 7 miles over to Upton-on-Severn to do some food shopping in the Warner mini-supermarket.

we drive the 7 miles over to Upton to shop at the local 

Warner's mini-supermarket

Warners mini-supermarket at Upton-on-Severn

Who lives on a new-build estate? Well, our limited knowledge so far suggests that many of the residents are young professionals. Households with children seem thin on the ground at the moment.

In the house to the west side of us live a  young couple in their 30's probably, Matt and Timera, of which the guy, Matt, has his own company and he works from home most of the time. On the east side is a single guy called Laurence, who we suspect works at the nearby top-secret defence and security contractor Qinetiq. 

We've met only one other resident here in the 3 weeks we've been around. That's Jonathan, an American guy, also with his own company, who mostly works from home. He lives round the corner, and we wouldn't normally have met him but for the fact that our Radio Times magazine, which lists TV and radio programmes, a magazine for which we pay a not-very-cheap subscription, has 3 times been delivered to his house in error, and he's been kind enough to bring it round to us, which is nice.

the current issue of Radio Times

11:00 When Lois and I get back from shopping in Upton, Jonathan drops by to hand over our Radio Times for next week, which was delivered to him in error again. We reassure him that we've notified the Radio Times office about the faulty addressing of our magazine, and that it won't happen again. But it's nice to have got to know him - he's split up with his partner and lives on his own, although he sees his 2 daughters, 11 and 12 years old, every day, he says, because they go to school nearby.

14:00 At last the time of the week we look forward to arrives: Saturday afternoon, when, if we get the chance, we take a leisurely shower followed by a leisurely nap in bed. This somehow seems to set the world to rights. 

One of the snags of moving into a new-build home is that there's always a to-do list as long as your arm, even if it's no more than to "write another to-do-list", but as soon as Saturday lunchtime arrives, all the to-do-lists goes out of the window, which is nice!

But having said that, we've got some wonderful "achievements" to be happy about. Doesn't our new IKEA "Billy" Bookcase look nice, for instance?

our shiny new IKEA "Billy" bookcase with

its dazzlingly tasteful "trinket shelves" !

We liked it so much we bought the company! We liked it so much that we're thinking of ordering another one for our bedroom - how's that for a vote of confidence haha!

Friday November 25th 2022

How small-minded Lois and I have become since we moved into our new-build home in Malvern 3 and a half weeks ago! It took us by surprise that we have to set so many basic things up ourselves - we thought that Persimmon, the builders, would do a lot of this work for us. They don't, of course - why would they? It was sheer madness on our part to think otherwise!

In fact life in November has seemed like nothing more than a huge battle between us and the world: in particular between us and the builders, and between us and everybody who promises to do things but doesn't - that kind of thing.

Eventually - maybe after Christmas? - we can get back to our normal lives, but we're not there yet: my goodness me we're not!!!!!

Having said that, today has really been a red-letter day.

1. Our new Panasonic twin-phones from Amazon have been delivered by Royal Mail: and I only ordered them yesterday afternoon. It's a miracle! You know, they're the "old people's phones" I've been talking about, with the extra loud volume and the easy-to-read numbers on the keypad haha!

our shiny new Panasonic twin phones for the elderly arrive from Amazon - hurrah!

2. At 8 am, I decide to try and find somebody to assemble our IKEA Billy bookcase for us, now that TaskRabbit have failed to deliver. I discover Jim from WeFlatPacks in Worcester and hey presto he's here by 11:30 am and does the whole thing in just over half an hour. Hurrah: at last we can start tidying up some of our so-called "book mountains"!

flashback to a few days ago: I highlight the

growing problem of "book mountains" in this house

and deliver a timely warning: "These must go!"

And go those "book-mountains" do - or at least we make a start on them this afternoon, after Jim puts the bookcase together for us. 

we make a start on clearing some of our "book mountains"

3. Neil, the building-site's customer care manager - known as "the human face of Persimmon" comes by and stops our washing-machine connecting hose from leaking. So we can put all the cleaning bottles and stuff back in the cupboard under the sink.

4. Neil says he's agreed with the site's turfing contractor for him to do our back garden next Friday. And after that we won't have to look at a sea of sticky mud every time we look out of the back windows of the house. 

Won't that be nice!