Friday March 17th 2023

A funny old day - very quiet, but I do manage to write a summary of the financial and legal status of Sarah, our daughter in Australia, and her family's efforts to move back to the UK after 7 years down under. I send some thoughts to Ed, lawyer-husband of our other daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with their 3 teenage children.

Sarah and Francis are currently in a manic packing mode, having sold their 18ft boat, and trying to get rid of all their furniture, giving it away if necessary, because they're going to start afresh once they're back in the UK - it's simply not worth the cost of shipping all that furniture and paying the insurance apparently.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

flashback to 2022: (left to right) the twins: Jessica, Lily, Sarah and Francis

on the estuary of the Swan River at Perth, sailing the boat they used to have

- sob sob!!!!

It's another drizzly day so we stay indoors and at 4 pm we sit on the sofa with a cup of tea and a bun, and then take a look at the puzzles in next week's Radio Times, our weekly treat.

We score an incredible 8 out of 10 on Popmaster, which makes us look and feel "poptastic" for a change. We've still got it, you see! [Don't kid yourselves, you lost it a long time ago. And Question 10 was eminently guessable! - Ed]

We score a reasonable 6 out of 10 on Eggheads, but compared to our scores over the last few weeks, it's a bit of a downturn. Damn!

We make a bit of a mess of "Only Connect" scribble pad, but we get the 4 categories in the end. 

They turn out to be (1) Famous Martins: Clunes, Scorsese, Freeman and Lewis (2) Spinoff TV series: Beyond Paradise, Angel, Torchwood, Frasier; (3) Roald Dahl characters: Twit, Wonka, Trunchball, Wormwood (4) Lists: Transfer, Shopping, Short, Bucket.

See? Simples, really isn't it haha!

16:30 We pause to reflect on how lucky we are to be sitting in a house in this quiet road in Malvern today, and not to be in the house we lived in for 36 years, up until the end of October 2022. You can bet our old road outside our house will be gridlocked with traffic right now. this being Gold Cup day at the Cheltenham Race Course!

What a madness it all is !!!!!

20:00 We wind down on the sofa with part 2 of an interesting retrospective on the life of TV presenter Paula Yates.

Definitely a weird story, this. Both Paula and her Australian lover, INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence, suffered "untimely deaths" - Hutchence's death in Sydney in 1997 was ruled as being suicide by the coroner, although Paula always maintained it was auto-erotic asphyxiation. 

And was Paula's own death in 2000 in Notting Hill, London, a suicide, or was it the result of an accidental drug overdose on a woman not accustomed to drug use, as her friends claim? The juries are still out on both those, although only in a figurative sense - both received a coroner's inquest of course, I point out, just for the record! In Paula's case, the verdict of the coroner's court was indeed "accidental", the outcome of "foolish and incautious behaviour". 

Lois and I don't read the tabloids nor do we much follow the lives of celebrities in general, and we had quite forgotten that Paula's father had always been assumed to be Jess Yates, the former presenter of "Stars on Sunday", the ITV semi-religious Sunday variety show from the 1970's.

Do you remember "Stars on Sunday"? Of course you do! And presenter Jess Yates, nicknamed "The Bishop" because of his avuncular "holier than thou" style of presentation. The show was a mix of hymns and bible readings, performed by celebrity guests from the world of showbiz. 

Yates introduced the show seated at an electric organ, in front of a stained-glass window, often giving some of his observations on life, including his famous, "We can't see round the bend in the road, but God can".

Jess Yates, presenting ITV's "Stars on Sunday"

And do you remember how the 54-year-old Yates was booted off the show in about 1974, after an affair with 22-year-old showgirl Anita Kay became public knowledge, a real-life "the actress and the bishop" story.

Lois and I had also quite forgotten that Paula, who was born in 1959, was eventually found not to be Jess Yates's daughter after all, when a DNA test revealed her actual biological father to have been former Canadian Air Force pilot Hughie Green. Hughie was the presenter of various radio and TV game-shows such as "Double Your Money" from the late 1940's onwards, and later, presenter of the 1970's top talent show "Opportunity Knocks". 

On Opportunity Knocks, two of his most famous catchphrases were "Friends, we wanna hear them!" and "Wasn't that wonderful, folks?"

Hughie Green (right) and his game-show assistant, presenting some

lucky winner on "Double Your Money" with a nice cheque

They really knew how to do "scandals" back then, my goodness. What's wrong with us today? We don't seem to be able to create this type of scandal any more. 

Come on Britain, wake up haha!!!!

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