11:00 Lois and I venture out for a walk round the half-built estate where we moved to on October 31st - the first time we've put our shoes on and gone outside since last Thursday, due to our both having bad colds.
To us it's a really odd looking estate. There is basically a mix of 4 different types of houses:
(1) Houses built, sold and occupied.
(2) Houses built and sold, but where the owners haven't moved in yet.
(2) Houses built, but still for sale.
(3) Houses still being built (the majority).
there are still scores of half-built houses on this estate
- what madness !!!!!
It's a weird place to live - Lois and I have never experienced anything like it in our long lives. As we pass one of the occupied houses a couple emerge, maybe in their 60's, and they introduce themselves as Jane and David. They say there are a lot of people here our age (and their age) and they point out a nearby house where the couple are planning to start a book group, which is a typical thing that we old people go for - sad isn't it haha!
And Jane and David are so friendly, like everybody else we've met here.
Yes, it's one of the pluses of being here that everybody seems so friendly, and for the first time it dawns on me why this is so. Pretty much everybody who moves to this estate has no friends here, so they're anxious to make some, which is nice, and also so un-British, let's face it!
12:00 We come back and warm up with a hot soup and a cheese sandwich for lunch.
13:00 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent me another of the amusing weekly Venn diagrams that he monitors for us on the internet.
Yes, January bills could be a bit of a nightmare for Lois and me too. We're still waiting for our first gas-and-electric bill from British Gas - yikes!!!!
I think on balance I think I'd rather be attacked by seagulls, even though that is also an awful memory of some of the holidays we've spent at St Ives in Cornwall.
flashback to 2014: our last holiday in St Ives, where
residents and tourists outside fast-food outlets are regularly terrorised
by seagulls on the look-out for a cheap meal: what madness !!!!
14:00 I'm a member of Lynda's U3A Middle English group so I take a quick look at the poem that the group will be looking at on Friday, when the group's first monthly meeting of 2023 takes place.
The poem is called "The Dietary" and is a 15th century work by John Lydgate - it was all about how to live a healthy life and it was a best seller in its time, being published in 3 rival versions by 3 of the major printers of the era.
John Lydgate (c.1370 to c.1471)
I decide to take a quick look at the first verse of the poem. I know from previous reading that the poem was very much an early self-help manual, designed to appeal to people who didn't want to pay money to expensive doctors ("leeches" as they were called in those far-off days). Then, as now, most people were hoping to be able to achieve good health the cheap way - just by living a healthy life, which makes sense to me!
Already you can see that the key to good health, according to Lydgate, is to practise moderation in all things, and be sensible.
Here are some of Lydgate's pieces of advice: wear a hat so your head doesn't get cold, don't eat raw meat, drink wholesome drinks, and eat light bread. Also to leave the table while you still have an appetite for more, and never to have supper too late at night. It seems a bit unnecessary, however, to also advise against having carnal relations with "aged women", but Lydgate knew best, no doubt: perhaps he had tried it and he felt a bit "crook" afterwards, for some reason, perhaps coincidence. But I don't suppose the "aged women" were necessarily all that happy about it either - pity none of them said anything, perhaps in the comments section, if they indeed had that facility in the 15th century!
What a crazy world they lived in in those far-off times !!!!!
21:00 We have a relaxing evening in front of the telly watching the first episode in a new series about a long-forgotten scandal from the 1970's: John Stonehouse, Harold Wilson's aviation minister and later Postmaster-General, who on an official visit to Czechoslovakia, stupidly slept with his Czech Government-supplied interpreter . He was, of course, immediately blackmailed into supplying the Czechs with UK "state secrets" in return for regular suitcases full of money.
the Czech Government interpreter, seen here dining with Stonehouse
at a restaurant in Prague
the Czechs show Stonehouse a film of him in bed with his interpreter
and immediately start blackmailing him
Luckily for the UK, Stonehouse turned out not to know any really important "state secrets" that the Czechs didn't know already. The Czechs soon realised this and stopped paying him.
the Czechs soon realised that Stonehouse "knew nothing"
and so they stopped paying him - poor Stonehouse haha!!!
Stonehouse's stupidity didn't stop there, however. He started sleeping with his secretary in London, and he used the Czech money to finance various disastrous business ventures. Eventually, faced with financial ruin, and with renewed threats to expose his sexual adventures in Prague, Stonehouse decided to fake his own death by flying to Miami and then walking into the sea, leaving his clothes and belongings on the beach.
What an idiot! And Lois and I wondered if the Stonehouse character in this entertaining drama might have been played convincingly by Mr Bean, to whom he bears a superficial resemblance. But we're not completely sure - perhaps we should be told haha!
John Stonehouse, Harold Wilson's Postmaster-General
TV's "Mr Bean" (Rowan Atkinson)
What Lois and I come away with, however, is how much simpler the times were in those days. There was much more naivety around, more of a tendency to trust people's word, and to believe their pathetic "explanations" if there was the slightest whiff of scandal.
Happy days - gone for ever now, though !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
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