09:00 We hear from "Jim", a landscape gardener, who Lois contacted yesterday about getting our tiny back garden into shape. At least he got back to us, and he's promised to visit us today at about 5:30pm, "because he's got to go to a meeting in Malvern at 6:30pm", even though he's "very busy".
Oh dear - I don't like the sound of that! We don't really want to wait weeks for him to do anything, that's for sure. But we'll see!
flashback to December: turf being laid down in our back garden
- and that's still all that's there - just turf: what madness !!!!
10:00 Following my success this week in getting British Gas to include our gas usage as well as our electricity usage in my online account details, I decide to do battle with our water company, Severn Trent, who still haven't set up our account even though we've now been living in this new-build house for nearly 5 months. How crazy is that?!!!!
Severn Trent Water: "Safe in our hands" is what they say.
I for one don't buy that slogan for one minute !!!!
I have an online texting "chat" conversation with a woman called Wahida, who promises to set up an account for us, but she doesn't succeed, it seems. At the end of the session she says I've got to wait at least 4 to 6 weeks for the property to be "registered" and then THEY will get in touch with ME.
What kind of crazy world are we living in???!!!!!
Is that a win for me? I don't think so! It's a win for uncomprehending bureaucracy if you ask me! And is Wahida talking about "a concerned team", or is it "the team concerned"? Let's hope they answer to both descriptions haha!
12:30 It's a dull, damp day today in Malvern, so Lois suggests we have lunch at the local Poolbrook Kitchen and Coffee Shop to brighten the day up a bit.
the Poolbrook café, seen here in happier times
Alison, the owner, is on the left, seen here with her waitress
There have been rumours locally that the café is failing, and that the owner, Alison, is trying to sell the business. This has created a wave of sympathy and bit of extra custom for her in the neighbourhood, as people "do what they can" to help her get back into profit - what a madness!!! But Lois and I are not immune from this kind of frenzy either, so today we decide to help her out a bit by buying lunch there. And she does do delicious food, no doubt about that, so it's a win-win - that's how we look at it anyway!
soup and toastie for Lois...
...and a baked potato with cheese and baked beans for me
- yum yum!
and americanos for two of course
13:00 We have lunch and then afterwards there's time for a nap upstairs, which is nice. Later we look at our smartphones.
I check the quora forum website, and I'm pleased to see that Steven Haddock (crazy name, crazy guy!), one of our favorite pundits on the forum, has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "Why was Australia inhabited so early?"
Yes, it's a real puzzle this one, and no mistake! The weird thing is that Australian aboriginals show more genetic variation than any other group of humans on the planet, which means, Steve explains, that they've been living down there in Australia undisturbed by outsiders for a
really long period of time.
an early photograph of a group of Australian aboriginals
Obviously the Aborigines must have come via Asia to get to Australia, and yet, if scientists look at Asia and try to find groups closely related to the Australian aboriginals, they pretty much strike out - there's very little evidence of connections. The group that's the closest to the Aborigines is the Papuans from New Guinea: however, there are still massive differences between the Papuans and the Aborigines, and not only that, the weird thing is that human habitation of Papua started much much later than Aborigine presence in Australia. So how do we explain that?
It's total madness !!!!!
probable human migration routes from Asia to Australia
The best guess is that the Aborigines are all descended from a really small group of people, maybe only a few dozen, that arrived in Australia from Asia 50,000 years ago. And that is around 10,000 years earlier than when humans turned up in Europe or the Americas.
And it could be that the Aborigines' original relatives in Asia, the ones that stayed behind in Asia and didn't join in the emigration to Australia, were killed or wiped out for some reason or another.
It's a bit telling maybe that the Aboriginal population was probably only about 300,000 when the British first arrived there in the late 18th century. This compares with estimates of a population of tens of millions of native Americans in the New World when the Europeans started arriving 500 or so years ago.
If nothing else, this speaks not just of the possibly sparse numbers in the original immigration, but also of the harshness of life in the Australian environment - particularly the frequent shortages of water, given the continent's climate.
native aborigines react with astonishment as Captain James Cook
makes his first landing in Australia (1770)
Fascinating stuff, though, isn't it !!!!!! [If you say so! - Ed]
17:30 Jim the gardener arrives, on time, and has a look at what space we've got in our back garden. Lois floats some of her ideas to him, but decides in the end to put it all together in an email, which she'll send him hopefully tomorrow.
19:00 We watch this week's edition of one of my favourite TV quizzes, University Challenge, the student quiz.
Well, it's one of my favourite quizzes, although Lois doesn't like it so much now, now that we're in the quarter-finals and we tend to see the same teams over and over again as they battle for the right to proceed to the semi-finals. Nevertheless, it's a tribute to her spirit of compromise that she agrees to watch it with me tonight, which is nice!.
Tonight we get 4 answers correct that the students don't know, or get wrong, which is well up to our usual average.
See how many of these "doozies" that you know haha!!!! Bet you can't answer these haha!!!!
1. In 1450, who led a major popular revolt in south-east England? He appears as a character in Shakespeare's King Henry VI Part 2.
Students: Simpson [Were they thinking of Lambert Simnel perhaps? - Colin]
Colin and Lois: Jack Cade
2. Abomey is in which country? Unesco states that its royal palaces are the major material testimony to the Kingdom of Dahomey, which developed from the mid-17th century.
Students: Nigeria
Colin and Lois: Benin
3. A question on plastids, found in leaves and stems: what name from the Greek for 'white' is given to plastids that have no visible pigment? They are primarily used for storage in tissues such as roots and bulbs.
Students: albaplasts
Colin and Lois: leucoplasts.
4. What specific term indicates a syllable, sound or word without lexical meaning, for example "tra-la-la" in the lyrics of a song?
Students: vocalisation
Colin and Lois: vocable
Not much to boast about, is it, although that doesn't seem to stop us haha!
20:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle back down on the couch and watch some of last week's Gogglebox, in which various families of "Goggleboxers" are filmed watching, and commenting on, the week's programmes, as they are broadcast.
This week the Goggleboxers are excited by the return of the 1990's show "Challenge Anneka", featuring the now ageing former blonde bombshell Anneka Rice.
As always, Anneka has some mad challenge that she's trying to meet against some crazy time limit, but as the Goggleboxers point out, it's not Anneka who's being challenged as much as the poor victims that she bullies into helping her.
In this sequence we see the manic Anneka (or "Mannika") as I call her, bullying (or "shunting" as she calls it), a poor mild-mannered carpenter, Tim, into finishing making some dog kennels against some crazy deadline.
Oh dear! Poor Tim !!!!!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we settle down to watch this week's programme in Ben Fogle's Channel 5 series, "New Lives in the Wild".
Sounds fascinating doesn't it! But unfortunately we quickly fall asleep on the sofa, so I'll have to tell you all about it some other time.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
22:00 We stumble up to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
