Friday, 23 December 2022

Thursday December 22nd 2022 1800Z - Friday December 23rd 2022 1759Z

19:00 Our daughter Ali and her husband Ed go off for an evening at a local pub with 4 of their neighbours, leaving Lois and me to entertain / look after our 3 grandchildren Josie (16), Rosalind (14) and Isaac (12). And what better way to spend the evening than on a nice educational game of Trivial Pursuit, which Lois wins.


we play a game of Trivial Pursuit with our three
grandchildren Josie (16), Rosalind (14) and Isaac (12)

20:30 Ali and Ed are not back yet, so we look for something to watch on TV with our three grandchildren, and we light on an old special Christmas edition of Blackadder, called Blackadder's Christmas Carol. 


Lois and I are soon squirming with embarrassment, however, because instead of a gentle "Mr Bean" style comedy, the programme turns out to be much stronger meat than we remembered, with lots of swearing, comic violence and sexual innuendo etc. We decide to play it cool, however, and not switch off, and eventually our three grandchildren get sleepy and go to bed before the programme ends.

What madness on our part! 

We've obviously failed to notice that our grandchildren are growing up all the time - Josie will turn 17 next year, and there should also have been a clue in the scheduling of this programme by the BBC: 6:15pm, well before the so-called 9 o'clock watershed. And I find out the following morning from Ali that all three of our grandchildren "loved Blackadder" which they had never seen before. And on top of that, Ali says she actually recommended to Isaac that he should watch the Blackadder series on World War I, because that's the period Isaac is studying in his history classes.

So that's all right then! But the show's premise is highly a moral one: it subverts Charles Dickens's original concept of the evil Ebenezer Scrooge being shown how to be a good man, by making Ebenezer Scrooge into a bad who is shown by the ghosts how that it's much more advantageous to be evil. Not a life lesson we want our grandchildren to absorb too whole-heartedly, that's for sure!

Still, that's all part of life's rich pageant isn't it haha!

The show has a nice cameo part for our friend Jen's former Oxford High School classmate Miriam Margolyes as Queen Victoria, which is nice.


Miriam Margoyles as Queen Victoria, with
Jim Broadbent as Prince Albert

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!

11:00 For Lois and me this has been the messiest Christmas ever - our lives for the past few months have been dominated by downsizing from a large house to a small house and moving 25 miles from Cheltenham to Malvern, and we've hardly had time to think about Christmas.

I've actually bought a Steeleye Span CD for Lois but I haven't done one of my usual home-made Christmas cards for her, and Lois hasn't done one of her home-made Christmas cards for me, and she hasn't even had time to buy me a present.

We decide to remedy that today in the simplest way possible, by driving the 4 miles to Grayshott and getting each other a present in Lloyds Pharmacy, after-shave and shampoo-body-lotion for me, and perfume for her. See? Simples!!!

I buy some Giorgio Blue perfume for Lois's last-minute Christmas present

The store is selling off its perfumes and other "smellies" because Christmas is just around the corner now, and Lois says it's their last chance to get the stuff off their shelves before they re-stock for the new year.

So we both come out of the store "quids in", which is an extra nice present for both of us haha!

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