Danskcolin: Friday May 19th 2023

11:30 If you've had the misfortune to read this blog even remotely-regularly you may have got the impression that Lois and I are pretty efficient. But here's a rare exception which proves the rule. We are currently expecting the arrival this Friday evening of our daughter Sarah, plus husband Francis and their 9-year-old twins, who will be staying with us for the weekend. And we thought that we had catered for everything in our online grocery order and delivery from Morrisons supermarket, but no! - we appear to have overlooked several important items! Who would have thought it, eh?! Surely this cannot be!!!

So at about 11:30 am we drive over to the Warners-Morrisons supermarket in Upton-on-Severn to remedy this embarrassing situation and, more importantly, to do so before anyone notices! Were our faces red as we did so haha!

the Warners-Morrisons supermarket at Upton-on-Severn,

seen here in happier times: when it wasn't too crowded

Usually we try to only shop there early on an early weekday, so that we can avoid having to cope with a lot of old codgers clogging up the aisles looking for older, once-popular products hat have now become unobtainable, like Barry's Tea. Today, however we can't go too early because we've got to wait in for an Argos delivery of a patio table.

Do you see our dilemma? I think you will if you just think about it for a minute or two haha!

Barry's tea: far too many pensioners are still asking

for this long-unobtainable product - it's crazy !!!!

When we arrive we find, as expected, that the aisles are indeed clogged up with pensioners, and also with some middle-aged housewives who didn't get out of bed that early today, for some reason. Damn!

Lois (left) and I arrive late, to find that the local pensioners, together with

dilatory middle-aged housewives, are already

clogging up all the aisles - what a total madness it all is!

13:30 After lunch we "assemble" the patio table delivered this morning by Argos, and we manage to do it without Jim's help, which is quite a triumph to put it mildly! Jim is the guy we habitually call on to assemble Ikea and other complex "flatpack" furniture items.

Assembly of our new patio table, however, turns out to be not too complicated. You just turn the table top upside down and slot the legs into it, taking care not to slot them in the wrong way round, or they'll just fall out again: something of a rookie error, no doubt about that!

our new plastic patio table - and how delightful it looks!

This could be just the experience that Lois and I need in order to develop the confidence to assemble all the IKEA furniture that we get it into our heads to order in future.

Good!!!!

16:00 Lois and I relax on the sofa with a cup of Earl Grey and one of the tray of banana muffins that Lois has been baking this afternoon - yum yum!

Lois reads me some choice items out of her copy of this week's "The Week" magazine, which gives a digest of the week's news from home and abroad. She also tells me about some of the UK's maddest festivals.

What a truly crazy country we live in !!!!!

We're expecting Sarah and family to arrive here about 6pm, after Francis has collected Sarah from work in Evesham. She has, in the past 2 weeks, resumed her job in her old accountancy firm, after a gap of 7 years while the family has been in Australia.

Meanwhile Lois and I take advantage of the quiet to look at the puzzles in the coming week's Radio Times. We get reasonable results on the Popmaster questions (5/10), but we decide to see later if Sarah can answer any of the questions on the more recent decades - spoiler alert: she manages to improve our score by 1, answering question 9 with a song-title that neither Lois or I have ever heard of, but I supposed that's understandable given our great age haha!

We turn to the intellectually more prestigious Egghead questions and score a reasonable 7/10.

Finally we solve the Only Connect, where the categories prove to be (a) books of the Old Testament, (b) boxers, (c) Britain's Got Talent judges, and (d) things you can figuratively "lose".

See? Simples haha!!!!

18:00 Sarah and family arrive, but the atmosphere is a bit subdued, and with good reason. Francis has been suffering from a cold and from sinus infections, and Sarah has had a punishing week back at her old job, where she's been given the account of a particularly difficult new client to manage, before she has really got fully on top of the current software in use by her firm. Oh dear!

Still, it's great to have them back again for the weekend.

21:30 Lois and I, left alone on the sofa while the twins are being put to bed upstairs, decide to watch a bit of telly, another programme from the Victoria Wood fest broadcast on BBC4 on Wednesday night.

We get some fascinating insights here from the late great comedienne, when she was still young - in her 30's maybe? - talking about her struggles with writing her sketches and stand-up routines.

Here she gives us some idea of how she builds up her ideas for sketches.

"Piece of paper, pen, little notebook, with maybe an idea and a half in it. And I just sit here till about 6 o' clock and I try and write about 5 minutes' worth. Some of it will be, I think... oh yes, that'll be a good idea for a sketch, and it'll be a good idea and it'll work... and you'll be able to just sit down and write it, and 3 hours later you've got a good sketch...

"Or you might have half an idea, and you might write it and it's not very good, but you can rewrite it and it gets better. Or you might have no ideas at all, and you might just write anything... and sometimes that works out."

And we see some of her early sketches, like this one featuring her teenage self with her gormless boyfriend Carl, sitting in a bus shelter waiting for the bus home.