Sunday January 8th 2023

A few achievements to report today, despite my continuing non-COVID cold and Lois's non-COVID cold. 

Lois manages to take part in her church's two Sunday morning meetings on zoom - it's not a usual Sunday because a few of the church's Iranian Christian refugees have agreed to brave the cold weather and get baptised in church elder Andy's back garden hot tub.

Yes cold weather for it today, but there have been baptisms in warmer weather throughout the last couple of years - compare this one (see picture below) that took place in October 2021: on that occasion it was an Englishwoman that was getting baptised in Andy's back garden hot tub.

flashback to October 2021: a baptism in warmer weather

As for my own "achievements", I manage to vacuum the whole house, which, as I always say, is a challenging workout in itself. 

I also book our hotels for a trip across the country later in the month. My sister Gill in Cambridge sadly lost her husband Peter before Christmas, and the funeral is to be held in a couple of weeks' time. We're not used to driving long distances these days so we'll stay somewhere en route to break the journey, near Harrington, in the place where we stayed in the summer on our way to Gill's daughter Maria's wedding to Tom.

flashback to August 4th - we stay in Harrington

under happier circumstances: en route to my niece Maria's wedding to Tom

I also order two bathroom cabinets and some rows of coat-hooks from Ebay. It's not easy moving into a new-build home you know. They leave everything like that to the resident, which I suppose is best, to be honest.

Also today we have an early morning whatsapp video call with our daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia, with husband Francis and their 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.

We don't do a zoom today because they're travelling around - we actually catch up with them at a playground in Darlington - the Australian one, not the one in County Durham, England, naturally enough - that would be too far to go for a children's playground, in my judgment [You don't say! - Ed].

Darlington WA is 16 miles inland from Perth, just off the Great Eastern Highway, and it's the site of a winery, like many country areas in Australia, as Lois and I found out when we visited the country, in 2016 and 2018.

Darlington WA, 16 miles east of Perth, and site of a winery and popular wedding venue

flashback to 2016: we visit the winery at Mclaren Vale, SA,

with Lois's cousin Stephen and wife Diane, who live in Adelaide.

Happy days !!!!!!!

We talk for a little while this morning to Sarah and Francis, and a little bit to our granddaughters, but Lily and Jessie are feeling a bit tired and hot, so we don't prolong the call too much. The Perth area has been experiencing temperatures of around 104F (40C) in recent days.

What a crazy planet we live on !!!!

16:00 Excitement has been mounting here over the last few days because of the impending and much-awaited first doorstep milk delivery that we're expecting tomorrow morning. Let's hope nothing goes wrong with that!

We find the old empty 6-pint bottle crate that we used to put out in front of the door of our old house in Cheltenham, and we start thinking about putting it outside here tonight in front of the front door. And it's at that point that it suddenly dawns on us how exposed to wind our front door is here. In Cheltenham we had a front garden surrounded by gates, walls and fences, not to mention a 12 ft garden path. 

Here, on our street in Malvern, there are no front gardens in front of the houses, just parking spots, and the wind really gusts down the street sometimes. Will the crate blow away in the night?

What trivialities we worry about, don't we! Still, that's just us haha!

a typical street scene in windy weather - this example

was photographed in the Netherlands

In the end we jam the crate next to the wall of the house in the side passage, and we'll hope for the best. It may still blow away in the night, and there's also a risk that the milkman won't see it there. But it's the best we can do, we believe, in all honesty! [Thanks for being so open about it! - Ed]

we lodge the crate just round the corner in the side passage

- as highlighted by my graphics team (i.e. me)

17:00 I scan the Hungarian media, as you do (insighthungary@444.hu), and see another instance of Putin's pettiness. Apparently only 3 European politicians got Christmas and New Year cards from Putin this year - the lucky (?) recipients were former leaders Schröder and Berlusconi, and current Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán.

How small-minded can you get! I take it that not to receive a card from Putin has become sort of a "badge of honour" these days. I know Lois and I didn't get one, which at least makes us firmly two of the "good guys", something of a relief haha.

So Putin thinks we're in a "difficult" international situation at the moment, does he? By the way, don't you just hate the current use of the word "difficult" to mask the fact that the person talking is actually the incompetent and/or evil-minded person who is the one causing the "difficult" situation?

20:00 We go to bed on the second programme in Prof. Alice Roberts' new series "Digging for Britain, which surveys last year's progress at the most interesting archaeological sites in the UK. Last week's programme was all about sites in Southern England, and tonight's is all about sites in the west of the UK.

There are a lot of fascinating excavations covered tonight but my favourite is the two rectangular Stone Age houses being unearthed in Northern Ireland, and dating to the period 3800 - 3500 BC.

It's weird that when farming came to the British Isles 6000 years ago, houses in present day Scotland and Ireland all seemed to change from the traditional small round houses to much more spacious rectangular houses.

This fashion only lasted about 100 years, however, before people went back to round houses. I wonder why? What was going on here? 

What a great site! And well over five thousand years old!

Researchers believe that the larger dwelling (foreground) housed 20-25 people in all, probably an extended family, and that it was inhabited for several decades. And I expect some of their old-fashioned "compact" round-house neighbours were secretly quite jealous of these trendy newcomers in their massive, new-fangled rectangular ones!

This larger house was about 1100 sq ft (or 100 sq.m) in area, and would have dwarfed the average-size homes we live in today. And there are lots of finds of domestic artefacts, including pottery, quern-stones etc, identifying where in the house food was prepared, and where it was cooked and eaten.

And here, and elsewhere in Ireland, tools were being made and used that were way in advance of the rest of the British Isles, like this plano-convex knife - flat on one side and convex on the other - of a type not seen elsewhere in these islands till the Bronze Age, i.e over a thousand years later.

Fascinating stuff !!!

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