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