21:00 Jen, Lois and I settle down on the sofa to watch TV: actress Miriam Margoyles's new documentary programme all about the Dickensian Christmas.
Miriam plays Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, and as a result her face is known even to Aborigine children in the deepest backwoods of Australia, as a recent documentary series has shown.
Miriam Margoyles as Professor Sprout
in the Harry Potter films
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
"Christmas is coming
The goose is getting fat,
Please put a penny
in the old man's hat"....
and all that.
The programme is particularly interesting for Jen, because she was in the same class at school as Miriam. She says that Miriam was by far the naughtiest girl in the class, but that she did make all the other girls laugh, which was something by way of compensation.
Miriam's old school photo from Oxford High School -
my graphics team (i.e. me) has put a green circle round the face of
Lois's old friend Jen, who's sitting in the row behind Miriam
10:00 We say farewell to Jen, and I drive the 70 or so miles to Headley, Hampshire, where our daughter Alison lives with her family: husband Ed, and children Josie (16), Rosalind (14) and Isaac (12).
I drive the 70 or so miles from Kennington, Oxfordshire
to Headley Hampshire where our daughter Alison lives with her family
I get a text from Sarah, our other daughter, who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica. Sarah says that she and Francis have put in an offer on a house in Malvern, near to the new-build house that Lois and I moved to on October 31st.
Gosh, it's all happening isn't it! Sarah wants Lois and me to visit the house when we get back home to Malvern next week. We've got to be back there by the Wednesday in any case, because Lois had an appointment with the doctor.
Lois has been asked by her doctor to take blood pressure readings twice daily for several days before the appointment. No cause for alarm, it's just a routine preparation for her annual review, but we discover that we don't have the monitor with us, as we had planned to. My bad - I was supposed to pack it, and I thought that I had, but I must have forgotten.
I'm getting old - no doubt about that!
So now Lois and I have to drive 4 miles to nearby Grayshott to buy another monitor, even though we've got two of the machines at home in Malvern already.
What madness !!!!!
the Lloyds Pharmacy in Grayshott, where we buy
yet another blood pressure monitor - what madness !!!!!
Apparently there was a Canadian tank regiment stationed there in the village during World War II, and the Canadian officers belonging to the regiment were billeted in Ali's house.
Ali's house was built in the late 19th century by one of Queen Victoria's vice-admirals, a man called Parrish, and the road that the house is on was originally called "Parrish Bottom Road". When some new residents moved into the area, however, they apparently objected to the fact that the road's name included the word "bottom", which of course is just an old word for a valley or a piece of low-lying land. As a result of their pressure, however, the name "Parrish Bottom Road" was changed to its current name.
What total madness!!! [That's enough madness! - Ed]
Lois and I are well aware that there are hundreds of "bottoms" like this in place-names all over the country, including Six Mile Bottom, which is near where my sister Gill lives in Cambridge. There are even bottoms like this in the US, as Lois and I discovered during our residence there 1982-1985, e.g. Foggy Bottom in Washington DC.
16:00 After a very enjoyable but at times busy couple of days, busy in the sense of more driving than I've been accustomed to recently, at last I get the chance for a nap, so I sneak upstairs to try out the bed that Lois and I sleep in whenever we're here.
I settle down on the bed for a nap. Behind me you can see
a small portion of the house's 7.5 acre grounds,
where Canadian tank regiment officers once relaxed 80 years or so ago
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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