Am I "losing it" - the plot, I mean?
I persuade Lois that we must get out of bed super-early this morning, after a cup of tea at a ridiculous 6:30 am, because various painters and repair guys could be ringing our doorbell at any time from 8 am onwards, every one of them anxious to fix all the defects we've reported in the new-build home we moved into 2 months ago.
Well, nobody came, and by 3 pm I realise that I've got the date wrong again - it's not today, it's a week today, on January 10th, that all these guys are coming. Damn!!!!
Luckily, as agreed on Friday, a quite separate guy comes to fix the washing-machine, a guy called Ollie, who's got no volume-control on his voice - he shouts as if he's addressing a public meeting, even if he's only a couple of feet away from you. But we don't mind that, because he's a genuine guy and a really good washing-machine repair man, and he really knows what he's doing, unlike the building site so-called "plumbers" who made a hash of installing our washing machine when we moved in here 2 months ago.
The parked van out front that says, "Washing-machine-repair-guy is in residence!"
Have I really lost the plot? No, I don't think so. The problem is that we're still so short of storage here that we don't have sensible places to put things where we can find them again, and one of the results of this is that we've often got no logical place to record things like appointments. So you see, it's not really my fault.
Hopefully our handyman friend from Cheltenham, Stephen, will soon be over his bout of COVID and he'll zip here in next to no time, to fix us up with all the storage we need.
We've known Stephen for well over 40 years - in 1979 both Lois and I, and our two little daughters Alison (4) and Sarah (2), and also Stephen himself were all in the crowd to celebrate Stephen's aunt's wedding in Cheltenham.
flashback to 1979: wedding-guest Stephen on the edge of the wedding crowd
...and in another part of the crowd, wedding guests Lois with little Sarah (2),
and me with little Alison (4)
Happy days !!!!!
19:30 Full of cold Lois and I collapse miserably on the sofa and watch a bit of telly. First this one all about pictures of the earth taken from satellites.
The programme treats us to quite a spectacular set of images, including one of Krakatoa, years after its massive eruption, still showing the effects.
To me it's particularly interesting that there are now a few thousand satellites orbiting the earth every 90 minutes, taking detailed pictures accessible to all sorts of non-government agencies, and university researchers.
The result is that we see one American researcher recounting how, early in 2022, he "warned the US military" about the build-up of Russian forces on its borders with Ukraine. Of course the US military knew about this perfectly well, as they had their own satellites taking photos. But what a difference from 20 or 30 years ago, when it would have been only Western governments that would have had access to these pictures, and they would have been classified at least Top Secret if not higher. Now all this kind of news is in the public domain.
A lot of the researchers comment on how these satellite pictures reinforce the idea that all the human race has to share this little planet, a concept which makes it particularly galling that a medieval, soulless character like Vladimir Putin can waste so many valuable resources on trying to destroy his neighbours in the Ukraine.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
21:00 We watch part 2 of a 3-part series on the long-forgotten 1970's scandal of John Stonehouse, Harold Wilson's Postmaster-General, who tried to fake his own death by drowning, after being blackmailed by the Czechs and then pursued by the UK authorities for financial irregularities.
Lois and I realise again tonight how little we actually remember about this scandal. Well, it was 50 years ago, after all!
It's quite a comedy, seeing how calm and relaxed Stonehouse was after he arrived in Melbourne, Australia, hoping to start a new life there with his young mistress, his former ministerial secretary, Sheila Buckley.
And Stonehouse remained calm and maintained his stiff upper lip, even when two Melbourne detectives knocked on his door and asked him to take his trousers down.
The surprise is that the detectives concerned had no idea that the man they were dealing with was John Stonehouse. They thought, mistakenly, that he was another of those British fugitives from justice who seemed to have been wandering the planet in the first half of those crazy 1970's: I'm talking about Lord Lucan, wanted for the murder of his children's nanny. And the reason why these Melbourne detectives wanted Stonehouse to drop his trousers was because Lucan had a tattoo on his thigh, and they believed that if they got a photo of the tattoo, this would be cast-iron proof that they had found their man.
What madness!!!
But it would be interesting to see, in due course, the Danish subtitles for this series, and to check whether they make use of the distinctively Danish word "lårhøjde" (thigh-level) for Lord Lucan's distinctive "thigh-level" scar.
I'll just note here also, that there would certainly be a number of uses for this wonderful Danish word in English, if we cared to borrow it, and to use it, for example, in phrases like "thigh-level grill" or "thigh-level negotiations", "thigh-level meetings" etc. All that kind of thing!
The strangest thing about the Lucan angle, however, was that if Melbourne police hadn't believed they'd found Lord Lucan, Stonehouse could have escaped detection altogether, and maybe got away with his crazy schemes.
But we're not 100% sure - so the jury's still out on that one!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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