A great day, because our 5-month-old dispute with British Gas is resolved at the end of my third chat-session with their South Africa-based helpdesk staff - hurrah!
Lois was rifling through some papers this afternoon, and found the gas meter reading that Persimmon, the builders of our new-build home in Malvern, sent to British Gas on 31 October 2022, the day we moved in. British Gas obviously lost this reading - can you believe it? Anyway it's all sorted out now, I really believe, thanks to the very helpful Rahul (crazy name, crazy guy haha!). Let's hope I hear no more about it.
Now we've just got our water company to battle with - Severn Trent. Damn !!!!!
We reckon the turf covers an area about 27ft long and 18ft wide, so not massive by anybody's standards to put it mildly. Certainly not massive compared to the back garden of our previous house in Cheltenham, the house we vacated at the end of October 2022.
20:00 We settle down on the sofa to watch the fourth and final episode of a fascinating documentary series about disgraced comedian Bill Cosby.
What a really well-made series this has been, fascinating throughout - and particularly fascinating to see Cosby, before the rumours really surfaced too openly about his assaults on women, castigating fellow comedians, including black comedians, for what he called their bad grammar or their "filthy" language., as when stand-up comedian Wanda Sykes tried to interview him at the 2003 Emmy awards.
13:00 Another step forward - Lois has begun the process of finding a gardener/landscaper to sort out our back garden, which is pretty much a blank canvas of quickly-growing turf at the moment. So we'll see!
flashback to December 15th - the building firm Persimmon's landscapers
lay the turf for our back garden 6 weeks after we move in
flashback to last week: Lois does some measuring up
flashback to Spring 2022: Lois hard at work
in our previous 130ft long back garden
- poor Lois !!!!!
Lois and I didn't realise how shattering the Bill Cosby case was to the black community in the US. The first women who came forward with allegations were white women - black women were understandably more reluctant to point the finger at their community's hero. However, this meant that black people in general were continuing to give Cosby the benefit of the doubt, believing that the scandal was being whipped up by the white establishment.
Despite all the stories in the press, it wasn't really until a "black" magazine - Ebony - came out against Cosby that the black community began to sit up and take notice. Even then, people at first refused to believe the allegations.
The clincher came when a black woman, Beverley Johnson, came out with her allegations, so similar to previous claims by over 30 white women, that Cosby had drugged them before raping them as they lay unconscious - in Beverley's case Cosby had used a spiked cappuccino.
And Lois tells me more about the difficulties faced by women, in the UK also, who make accusations of rape - all the questions and insinuations and harassment that they have to face, both from the press and the police beforehand, and then the lawyers when they get inside the courtroom.
For some reason - I don't know why - Lois and I had lost track of this story, and we hadn't been aware, before this documentary series began, that although Cosby was sentenced to up to 10 years in jail, he was eventually freed, after 3 years, because of a legal technicality: the unsealing of, and use in his trial of, a deposition in one of the early civil cases brought against him.
Lois and I have learnt a lot about the US legal system as a by-product of watching the programme. A lot of things are similar or identical to the UK system. We didn't know, however, that some (or maybe all?) US states have various statutes of limitation that bar the bringing of court proceedings against people if too long a time has elapsed since the alleged crime. This is also true in continental Europe, we discover, although in the UK it applies only to misdemeanours, not to felonies, which are the more serious crimes.
Who knew that? [I expect a lot of people did! - Ed]
21:00 The Cosby series is pretty heavy stuff to go to bed on, so we watch a repeat of the final episode of the 1980's sitcom, "The Mistress".
There were 2 seasons of it, each consisting of 6 programmes. Viewers apparently didn't like the first series, because Felicity Kendal usually plays sweet, nice women, and viewers didn't like her playing somebody having an affair with a married man. So in the second series they decided to downplay the sexual side and make it a more generalised sitcom. But that didn't work apparently, and ratings remained down.
married man Luke (Peter McEnery) with his mistress
Maxine (Felicity Kendal)
As a sitcom, it was beautifully acted, but just wasn't very funny, no doubt about that, and Lois and I have found it heavy-going.
We never saw the original airing of the series in the 1980's. We tune in tonight to see if the writer Carla Lane could see that this love triangle wasn't go anywhere, and decided to bring some kind of resolution into the story of the final programme.
Well, she didn't, and she was obviously trying to keep open the possibility of having a third series - to judge from this bombshell cliff-hanger, delivered by "the mistress" - Felicity Kendal - in the closing minutes of the episode.
Poor Carla !!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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