Tuesday December 13th 1800 - Wednesday December 14th 1759

21:00 Lois and I go to bed on an old episode of "Ladies of Letters" - the series about 2 middle-aged women, Vera and Irene, played by Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman respectively, who rarely meet but who diligently write letters to each other: ostensibly friendly letters, but actually letters in which they are constantly trying to get one up on each other. 

In the TV version, as always, we see the two ladies composing the texts of their next letter in their heads while going about their daily tasks.

This is the episode where the two ladies fall out, after a disastrous holiday with Bill, Irene's admirer Bill tries clumsily to initiate a threesome involving both women, by booking the honeymoon suite for all 3 of them, instead of booking 3 single rooms. 

You must remember this one! And then, after this embarrassing holiday, the ladies don't speak, or write, to each other for 2 years, so it was quite a major rift, no doubt about that!

Yes Russian vines - remember them? A.k.a the so-called "mile-a-minute vines", similar to Japanese knotweed, that a couple of years ago was regarded as the main threat to civilisation. You don't hear about it so much nowadays, do you. I suppose it was overshadowed by the pandemic, like many other things, and maybe Covid killed it off. Or did it? Perhaps we should be told!

I check with Lois and she says people are still having to be careful about Japanese knotweed - so there you have it.

There's nothing like giving a phenomenon a foreign nationality if you want to demonise it, is there? Spanish flu etc etc, enough said haha!

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

08:00 We roll out of bed, but there's a slight air of unease today. 

We moved from Cheltenham to Malvern on October 31st and have had to sign up with a local NHS doctor's surgery. Our new doctor has asked us to go in there early tomorrow morning for fasting blood tests and blood pressure tests, so we feel there's bound to some bombshell finding about to hit us, one that's going to mean something unpleasant in one way or another. Damn!

We haven't seen a doctor in person since the pandemic started, so it'll all be a bit nerve-wracking.

our new doctor's surgery

We try and relieve the tension today by taking our own blood pressure in the calm of our own dear kitchen-dining-area, but the preliminary results  hardly make us feel any more confident about our prospects. Oh dear! 

Lois tries to escape the gloom by wrapping up some presents for some of her young relatives in Oxford. We're hoping to spend a couple of days there in Oxford before going on to our daughter Alison's house in Hampshire.

13:00 Neil, building firm Persimmon's local customer care manager, calls round and apologises for not coming to us yesterday as he had promised. We give him our list of 25 faults that we've discovered with our new-build home, but I think Lois and I are both aware that not much is going to be put right quickly, given the proximity to Christmas. 

However Neil is upbeat, as usual, and says that the turfing of our back garden, for example, will be done either on Thursday or Friday this week, unless the professional advice is that the ground is too frozen hard to make it practicable, which would be fair enough.

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

It's an amusing idea to rearrange your flatmate's food to hide the fact that you've been eating it. Could this strategy be extended to cover other felonies and misdemeanours perhaps? At the very least a burglar could tidy up your things before leaving and maybe store them more logically, so that you don't find out you've had anything stolen for several weeks, if at all. Perhaps a better strategy than making the house look like a bomb has hit it, which is what most burglars in cartoons seem to do. One to ponder perhaps!

Yes, maybe the time has come for burglars to "think outside the box" a bit more than perhaps they have in the past. Comments from my felonious readers welcomed - but only on a postcard please!