Danskcolin: Monday April 3rd 2023

We'll be going off to visit our elder daughter Alison and her family down in Hampshire in the next few days, so I have to "get down and dirty" anyway, to check the tyre pressures.

Yuck - mucky fingers! And now, now that I've checked the tyre pressures, should I wash my hands, or should I take the opportunity to do another "dirty job" and investigate the chamber for our water meter, which our neighbour Matt has told us has been buried in the pavement outside our house - who would have guessed??!!!!!

What lunatic devised this system for water meters? Matt himself admitted that he had had trouble opening up his meter chamber, because the builders of this half-finished 300-house new-build housing estate, Persimmon Homes, keep tarmacking and re-tarmacking around it, so it tends to become completely tarred-up and a real swine to get the lid off of, if you want to take the water meter reading.

It's a total modern-day madness!!!

I demonstrate some of the tools you'll need to open up

one of these Persimmon Homes water meters:

the one thing missing is a phone to take a picture of the meter display with

we finally get the lid of the meter chamber off,

wipe the meter display to semi-clean with an old washing-up stick

and then take a picture of the display using a smartphone: at a depth of about 12 inches

the figures are far too small for anybody to read with the naked eye

It's utter utter utter meter-madness !!!!

I know it looks from the above pictures that Lois is doing most of the work, but that's not entirely true - it was a team effort, and it's just that she's more photogenic than me, plus it's easier for me to wield the phone/camera while she does the poses.

That's my story anyway, and I'm sticking to it!

our water-meter: could you read the figures haha???!!!!!

later I tell Severn Trent, our water company, that it says 00037.2

- and that's genuinely my best guess !!!!!

If your interpretation is different, please send it - on a postcard pleeeease!!!!

(And don't forget haha!!!!)

I get onto the chatline operated by our water company, Severn-Trent, hoping to persuade them to set up an account for us before we start owing them hundreds of pounds.

Sadly I get the same result as I did last week. Despite the fact that I give them an up-to-date reading, they promise only that they will ask the "concerned team" [sic] [how concerned are they, really, the team-members, in all honesty haha], requesting them to register this new-build property, after which I will have to wait 4-6 weeks to be contacted by Severn Trent with details of my account number and specifics of how much I owe them.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!! [That's enough madness for today! - Ed]

14:00 Relaxing on the couch after lunch we see that our son-in-law Francis has put a charming picture of Sarah and Francis's 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica onto social media.

The family are camping near Perth Airport, in preparation for moving back to the UK later this month, after 7 years down under. They have vacated their house in Perth, and are having a short holiday before their flight. They'll also be spending a few days in Dubai on the way home, which will be nice.

19:00 After dinner we settle down on the couch with an after-dinner drink: Lois with her usual Redbush tea, and me with one of the hot chocolate made from one of the chocolate hearts Lois gave me as an extra Christmas present last weekend. Yum yum!

I enjoy a post-dinner hot chocolate made from one

of Lois's chocolate hearts with marshmallows included - yum yum!

20:00 Having seen, and been disappointed by, the first 2 episodes of the BBC's new jazzed-up version of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations", we decide to watch Armando Iannucci's recent documentary about the writer, as an antidote.

An interesting programme, reminding us about the quality of Dickens' writing and also about the way Dickens can't quite help looking for the comic side of everything, even when telling stories of great tragedies.

We gather some interesting insights on Dickens' mental state also. He was certainly a very driven man, and a look at the original manuscripts of some of his works reflect an almost manic desire for perfection in the words he uses.

a sample of a page of Dickens' manuscripts

with some of his copious hand-written alterations

Was Dickens a bit like his famous character Mr Dick in David Copperfield?

Mr Dick suffers from delusions, but instead of being shut up in an asylum, he's been taken in by David's Aunt Betsy.

For most of his life, Mr Dick has been working on a historical document which he calls "The Memorial", but we never really find out what it's supposed to be about. And every day his work on it is interrupted by thoughts in his head about the execution of Charles I. And the only thing he can do in order to get these thoughts out of his head is to write them down on big pieces of paper, to gather those pieces together and make a giant kite out of them. And then he goes outside and flies the kite.

Now, that really is madness!

Mr Dick flies his kite, from a green slope,

with the young David Copperfield sitting beside him

And Armando reads us a passage out of the novel.

David Copperfield says about him, that "I used to fancy as I sat beside him on a green slope and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it into the skies. As he wound in the string and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light till it fluttered to the ground and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream, and I remembered to have seen him take it up and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart".

It's interesting also that Dickens hated writing the endings of his stories and novels. As Armando points out, David Copperfield ends with a whole host of characters, including Mr Micawber, sailing off to Australia to start a new life. And they succeed - Micawber grows prosperous, while at home David marries again and lives happily ever after. But this ending "doesn't feel so happy when we close the book", says Armando.

For Armando, Dickens' endings are disappointing. Dickens, he feels, hated finishing his novels, and his heart wasn't in it. It's when his characters are restless and struggling and energetic that they're at their most animated, and it's when they become static that something goes out of them.

For Dickens, Armando thinks, a happy ending is dull.

Fascinating stuff!!!!

21:00 We go to bed on yesterday's edition of "Antiques Roadshow", in which members of the public bring along treasures and heirlooms from their attics, garages and storerooms, to have them discussed, and valued, by experts in the field.

At the close of tonight's show, presenter Fiona Bruce showcases an old election poster from the 1860's designed to counter false rumours that had been spread around that one of the area's 2 Conservative MPs was preparing to stand down as a member of Parliament.