Sunday February 12th 2023

Today Lois and I have got to prepare our new "snagging list" of defects with the new-build home that we moved into on October 31st last year - because Graham, the building-site manager, and "Harry" his customer care "gofer", will be coming to check things out. 

This is concentrating our minds and we have already begun to uncover new defects that we hadn't realised about before. For instance the double radiators in the house are all fixed firmly, but the single radiators aren't, so if you lean on them, like we old people tend to do when we're trying to stand up after getting down on the floor, it's possible to knock these radiators off the wall, which isn't good, to put it mildly!

Another defect we discover today is that the plastic keys they gave us to lock and unlock our gas and electric meter boxes don't in fact lock them. Oh dear! How many more defects are we going to discover? Right now, it's beginning to feel like a bottomless pit !!!!!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

flashback to January 19th: I investigate the two meter boxes outside

our front door (grey=electric, brown=gas), but I fail to spot

that the plastic key they gave us fails to lock them - what madness !!!!!

11:15 Lois wants to attend her church's communion service today, so we drive over to the Village Hall just outside Tewkesbury, where the church holds its services.

Just like last Sunday when we arrive, we find that the preliminary service hasn't finished yet. This time we creep into the lobby at the front of the hall to avoid attracting attention or disturbing the concentration of the 30 or so church members in attendance - half of whom are Iranian Christian refugees. Plus there's the usual cohort of dogs - either 4 or 5, I'm not quite sure. They're extraordinarily well-behaved - and the dogs are too haha!

The preliminary service hasn't quite finished but Lois and I decide to enter the main hall anyway and sit right at the back. When the service finishes, we sit and eat our packed lunches along with everybody else, in the 40 minute gap before the communion service begins. We're in luck because the only free chairs are right at the back by one of the radiators, so we're not shivering this week, which is nice!

we get two seats at the back by the radiator, and get out our packed lunches.

Lois crosses the room to get us two teas but she's waylaid by David (see picture, centre), so I have quite a wait for my tea, while they chat. It would be churlish to moan about that, however, because Sunday mornings are Lois's big chance to talk to her fellow-church members, and I always encourage her to take full advantage.

Just like last Sunday, one of the Iranians has a birthday, and somebody has baked him not a birthday cake exactly but a "sculpture" of curranty cup-cakes, I don't know if that's the right expression.

close-up of the above picture:  in order to indicate more clearly the cupcake"sculpture"

an orange arrow has been superimposed by my graphics team (i.e. me)

14:15 We drive home. Lois is trying to do bits of driving now and again to get back her skills - she stopped driving at the start of the pandemic, and neither of us can remember why. I guess we didn't do any driving at all to begin with, and we just used to move the car up and down the driveway to keep the battery "ticking over".

She decides not to drive us home today, however, because there's an annoyingly bright sun low down in the south-western sky. It doesn't bother me because I've got my "strap-on" sun glasses, so I do the driving again on her behalf.

She's trying to brush up her driving skills in case ever I'm not in a fit state to drive, not because of intoxication but in case I don't feel up to it after any of my upcoming dentist appointments.

Yikes !!!!!!

15:00  Luckily we arrive not to late to go upstairs and have a nap, which is nice.

20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch the last programme in Alice Roberts' latest series of "Digging for Britain", which highlights the most significant results of archaeological excavations in the UK from last year. 

Tonight's programme, the final one in the series, focuses on excavations in the north of Britain: Scotland and northern England, in other words.

Imagine a Scottish island in the Hebrides group, one called Islay (pronounced "Ila" for some reason), where people from the Stone Age kept visiting regularly for thousands of years, time and time again, to carve thousands and thousands of little flint tools, which are still there and still very sharp, so take care if you pick one up! 

The first visitors were hunter-gatherers called Ahrensburgians (crazy name, crazy guys!), who arrived as soon as the Ice Age was over. And for the next thousands of years (again), all these people, not just the Ahrensburgians but all the later Stone Age that came after them, worked their flints, and lit fires in the same square fireplace. You can still see the burn marks!!!!

What a madness it all seems now, in retrospect!

And historians found out about it all after some pigs, brought in by the land-owner to "rootle around" and get rid of the bracken, happened to discover the flints on or near the surface: the pigs didn't tell the landowner, but he found out about it anyway, and he called in the experts, which was nice.

Fascinating stuff !!!!

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