10:30 We go out for one of our walks on the common - one of our favourite places at the moment because you can literally see for miles, over to the Malvern hills to the west and across the Vale of Evesham to the east.
We can hear skylarks somewhere, but we can't see them - they must be hovering somewhere high above the clouds, which are quite low. And we think there must be several - maybe it's find-a-mate time, but we're not sure.
Lois spots a local woman (centre right) walking her dogs,
and she asks her about the skylarks round here
The woman tells Lois that skylarks do indeed like this place, and they will indeed build their incredibly vulnerable nests just right there on the grass wherever it's a bit more tufty than average. It's also a favourite eating spot for the local rooks and crows, the woman tells us, if they're looking for tasty skylark eggs. Poor little skylarks !!!!!
We carry on looking and eventually I capture one on camera, but it's a bit tiny in the picture - damn! I don't think I'll bother to send it in to TV's "Springwatch". Damn (again) !!! Then we see one drop like a stone into the grass somewhere, but its camouflage is very effective - we can't see any sign of it now, although that might be our ageing eye-sight, which probably isn't as good as the average crow's, but the jury's still out on that one!
almost deafened by the songs of several skylarks,
we scan the skies above us for any visible signs of these fluttering wonder-birds...
eventually I capture a skylark on camera
but it comes out REALLY SMALL - damn!!!
the skylark "in close-up"
[Don't bother next time, Colin! - Ed]
12:00 Another set of amusing Venn diagrams comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, who monitors these diagrams from the internet on a weekly basis for us.
one of my typical "nasty surprise" selfies
- oh dear!
We've got 2 meaty subjects on the agenda today: (1) Stephen, our just-as-friendly but no-longer-so-local handyman is coming tomorrow, so we want to make sure we've listed all the jobs we'd like him to do, because it may be his last visit; and (2) we discuss what we're going to do with our back garden - we need to buy a lawn-mower and a shed to put it in, before the grass becomes a complete jungle, but what's going to be the overall plan for the garden? That's the question. Where will we put the path, and where do we want our rotary clothes-dryer, all that kind of thing - oh dear, decisions decisions!
flashback to earlier this month: our back garden (centre right) during the great snows:
just grass and nothing else - a bit of a blank canvas at the moment isn't it!
The following kind of design is from the website that our daughter Alison suggested to us, it's a concept which Lois is quite taken with - and it's from a site specialising in small urban garden designs:
Lois's favourite small urban garden design
The garden is officially Lois's domain, so she has the final decision. I want to put the shed on the patio up by the house, but Lois wants it down at the bottom of the garden, so I suspect that it's going to be down at the bottom of the garden, at the end of the day. But fair enough, she's the one with the green fingers!
21:00 We go to bed on Episode 3 of a fascinating documentary series about Bill Cosby, the disgraced comedian.
We've been waiting for this one, because this is where Lois and I come into the story, inasmuch as, during our time in the US as a family of four with 2 young daughters Alison (7) and Sarah (5), we soon adopted the show as one of our staple weekly TV viewing highlights - it was definitely one of the funniest if not THE funniest show on during our 3-year residence over there.
[I don't think that counts as "coming into the story", Colin. Sorry! - Ed]
flashback to1983. This is us, in front of our house
in Columbia Md; with Derek the neighbour kid (left),
and our Ford Something estate car (right)
The programme begins.
This week we hear more stories by actresses and others about sexual molestation and assaults, together with definite evidence that the production crew, and all the behind-the-scenes team, knew very well that things were going on between Cosby and a number of the actresses playing incidental roles.
And the ones that Cosby had his eye on, even if they only had a handful of lines in the show, seem to have been given their own dressing-rooms, whereas bit-part male actors would normally have to dress and undress in what were little more than cupboards.
What stands out, however, is that as yet I don't think we've heard from any of the actors or actresses playing the big roles, i.e. the members of Cosby's screen family. Will they appear in later programmes of the series? Or are they racked by guilt because they knew things but kept quiet about them?
We also hear about the creepy story-lines that Cosby himself may have been the main author of, which were included in the show. There's the fact that his character was a gynaecologist who treated women in his private office in the basement of his house, for a start.
And there's also a creepy story about an aphrodisiac barbecue sauce found to be in use at a family meal, after which Cosby obviously can't wait to get his screen wife Clair (Phylicia Rashad) upstairs. There's a particularly creepy moment when Cosby realises that his son has also had some of the barbecue sauce, and we see him wiping it off the boy's mouth in a bit of a mild panic - ewwwww!!!!!
As he says to Claire on the show, "It's my barbecue sauce. Have you noticed after people have some of my barbecue sauce, after a while, when it kicks in, they get all huggy-buggy?" And he keeps some on his night-table, he confides. Ewwwww (again) !!!!!
Ewwwwww!!!!!
It's clear that black people in America feel particularly let down by the news of Cosby's sexual assaults, because the show was a milestone for their community, showing a wealthy, professional black family in contrast to some of the negative images of black people that were around at the time, and instilling a new sense of pride.
Scenes like this, between young Theo and his dad, must have been thrilling to hear for a lot of families at the time:
Oh dear.
And, and so to sum up, Cosby wasn't just like his role, Dr Huxtable the gynaecologist, to put it mildly. There's a lesson for us there, I think.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment