Monday December 19th 2022

10:00 We drive from our new-build home in Malvern to Kennington, a village near Oxford, to spend a couple of nights with our old friend Jen and her son Daniel. It's a weird feeling to leave our new home and go through all the going-away-on-holiday routines, making sure the house is secure etc - it's for course the first time we've ever done this, as we only moved in on October 31st.

we drive to Kennington to spend a couple of days with 

our old friend Jen and her son Daniel

The weirdest thing is driving past our old house in Cheltenham, and realising that somebody else, a family of 4, is living there now. As we pass, we see that there's a van parked out front and somebody seems to be moving some kitchen unit or other into the house. So weird!

12:00 We arrive at Jen's and find that her eldest daughter Naomi, a GP, is there, and after lunch Naomi and Jen go off to see a nativity play at one of the area's primary schools where somebody they know has a  daughter performing in the play.  I'm not exactly clear who, but that isn't important right now.

It's a so-called "wiggly" version of the nativity story, which I think means that the participants perform the dialogue while twisting their bodies to and fro, somewhat like Chubby Checker did in 1961 when he surprisingly suggested that we all "twist again like we did last summer", although it's not clear whether the previous summer's twisters had had time to find out what the twist was. However I''m not entirely sure - so the jury's still out on that one, sadly!

While Jen is out, Lois and I settle down to do a difficult crossword from the Times Crossword Book, and Lois intermittently reads a bit of a children's book "Bunkle Pulls It Off". The Bunkle books, written by female author M. Pardoe in the 1940's and 1950's, were all about an adolescent boy nicknamed "Bunkle" because he always talked a load of bunk (ie rubbish, in the slang of the time). Bunkle and his friends specialised in solving mysteries and bringing criminals to justice.

By coincidence both Lois and I, as children, both read and enjoyed all the books in this series. Apparently the popularity of the books declined in the late 1950's, when stories about well-off, upper-middle-class children began to fade in popularity to be replaced by fiction about children of more modest means.

In Jen's absence Lois and I sit in her lounge,

solving difficult cryptic crosswords, and reading

M Pardoe's mystery for children, "Bunkle Pulls It Off"

18:30 Jen's son Daniel comes home from work. He's a librarian at one of the Oxford University Libraries, in a part now housed in the same location as what used to be the old Radcliffe Hospital, where, by coincidence, both Lois and I were born, 3 months apart, in 1946. 

Lois stands in Jen and Daniel's kitchen, discussing

a point of detail in the logistics of the evening meal

We spend the evening mostly chatting about old times with Jen. We have both known Jen an awfully long time. Lois and I, with Jen, were part of a group of 6 young people, also including friends Paul, Steve and Jane, who all spent a week in a cottage on the Isle of Wight in 1969.

flashback to 1969: me in white shirt with Jen, as we wait, with Paul, 

standing next to Jen's white Austin mini-traveller, queuing up for the Isle of Wight ferry 

which would take us and our group of 6 friends, including Lois, back to the mainland

We also talk to Daniel this evening about his job at the University Library. Most of the regular students have gone home now, as term has ended, but there are still a lot of grad students around, who insensitively make work for Daniel, asking for "essential" books and other so-called "source materials" etc, when Daniel would probably much prefer to be reading a newspaper, or making cups of tea or coffee for himself and his colleagues!

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

22:00 We go to bed - Jen has kindly given up her double bed to us. She warns us, however, that her bedside radio will switch on automatically at 5:55 am, and nobody knows how to turn the alarm off, so we will just have to "work around" this - it's a small price to pay for the use of what turns out to be an extremely comfortable bed, which is nice!