Monday May 1st 2023

12:00 Lois is a bit restless today, I sense, and then I find out that she's been fatally tempted this morning by a leaflet she has got hold of advertising 3 days of "Open Gardens" in the nearby village of Hanley Swan. 

Should we give in to this type of temptation quite so easily? Maybe not, but well, you know Lois - she can never resist the call of a nice flower bed, and the prospect of a cream tea, and she knows very well how to encourage me to say yes: she's had 50 years of practice at that, and it's child's play to her haha!

We drive to Hanley Swan carrying 2 packed lunches left over from yesterday, and we look for the private gardens where the owners have agreed to let the public look round. There's a little bit of confusion because a lot of people have also decorated their gardens in honour of next weekend's Coronation of King Charles, but aren't wanting the public to look round, so we have to avoid stumbling into those ones by mistake. Yikes !!!!

In the end we get hold of a map clearly marking the gardens that are open to the public this long weekend, which is a big help, to put it mildly!

We see quite a lot of these specially opened-up gardens this afternoon, and we see also the inside of the parish church, St Gabriel's, so we do quite well. However, we discover that, as we've realized many times in the past, there's nothing more tiring than shuffling round somewhere, stopping here an stopping there - it's much more tiring than just going for a walk. Oh dear, we're getting old, no doubt about that!

I'll be frank - garden visits are not  really "my bag", and I tend

to take more interest in the tasteless little sculptures 

than I do in the plants and shrubs - oh dear!

Can I put my cards on the table? You see, garden visits are not really "my bag", and I tend to take more interest in the tasteless little sculptures and the other visitors than I do in the plants and shrubs etc. But when, this afternoon, Lois starts on a long, technical and animated conversation about "gardeners' issues" with the garden-owner whose garden we're walking around, I do my best to stand there looking vaguely pleasant, and to sound interested and make the right noises, laugh at the jokes etc. Because marriage is a game of give and take, isn't it, and there are plenty of times that we do things that Lois would much rather we didn't do - oh my goodness, yes, you would not BELIEVE!!!

"Wow!", I cry, "Look at that giant slimy snail...!"

... and some naughty monkeys....

...and a super 8 ft pencil....that's one that visitors to our house

aren't going to steal haha!!!!....

and some lovely tasteless hippos to finish up haha! Sheer genius!!!!

For lunch, we slip into the parish church, take a quick look at some of the patriotic pre-Coronation displays, before eating our packed lunches on a bench in the old churchyard.

Do you remember the old song, Barbara Allen? "They buried Willie in the old churchyard, and Barbara in the new one, From Willie's grave there grew a rose, from Barbara's a green briar". Fabulous stuff!

a lovely lunch in the churchyard , cheese roll and salad - yum yum!

13:30 We leave the churchyard to see a few more gardens and then after that we work our way back to the church to take advantage of their lovely cream teas - scones with cream and butter -  at £5 a head.

15:30 We get back to the car, and I discover that Sarah, our daughter, has been trying to ring me on whatsapp - she's only got an Australia SIM-card at the moment, which is costing them a fortune here. Sarah and husband Francis, together with their 9-year-old twin daughters Lily and Jessica, arrived back at Heathrow Airport on Friday, finally moving back to the UK after 7 years down under. 

Sarah is ringing from Hythe, Kent, where they are staying for a few days with Francis's sister Shirley. Hythe is the quiet seaside resort that my mother told me she used to take me and my little sister Kathy to, on the bus from Dover, for the occasional afternoon outing. 

flashback to 1950: me and my late sister Kathy,

 with our mother outside our house in Dover - how little Kathy and I were!

Hythe is a town which Sarah says today that she'd never heard of before, and which is "on the very edge of England" - yes, it's on the edge all right, Sarah!

It's so nice to speak with Sarah without having to add on 7 hours or 8 hours for the time difference between the UK and Western Australia. How great is that! 

And we also get to speak to the twins today for the first time since they arrived back in the country, which is so delightful. 

flashback to July in Perth, Australia - 

Sarah with the twins on their 9th birthday

Lois and I think that the girls' Australian accents are beginning to disappear already, which I guess isn't surprising - Francis has been home-schooling them for a few months now, plus in the last couple of days they'll  have been talking a lot to the younger members of their Aunt Shirley's family. 

Kids pick up and drop accents incredibly quickly - as Lois and I discovered back in 1985 when we brought our daughters Alison (10) and Sarah (8) back to the UK after 3 years in the US. 

It's amazing to watch, I tell you!

Sarah gives Lois and me a fright as well - she reveals that she's definitely coming to stay with us on Friday in preparation for starting her new accountancy job the following week at her old firm in Evesham. If it's only Sarah coming, it's no problem, but if all 4 of them want to come, we'll have to do a lot of preparation, that's for sure: this is a tiny house compared to our old one in Cheltenham, no doubt about that. 

Yikes!!!

Later, I order an air-bed from Argos, which will come in useful at some point, even if we don't need it this weekend. It will come tomorrow morning, which is good. The downside is that it could arrive as early as 7 am.

What a crazy world we live in!!!!!

the airbed that I order this evening from Argos

- yikes, though, it could arrive as early as 7 am tomorrow !!!!!

16:00 I look at my smartphone. Steve, our American brother-in-law, has emailed us with more of the amusing Venn diagram that he monitors for us on a weekly basis.

Yikes (again) !!!  Is the global banking system really as precarious as an under boob bikini? I check with Lois and she says the problem with under boob bikinis and bras most comes into focus if you try to stretch your arms up too high. 

So, thinking on my feet here, a provisional thought, just trying to "brainstorm" really, shoot me down in flames if you like - but would it maybe help the global banking system to stay in place if we all try to keep our arms down? It's worth a try, surely haha!!!!

Is this the posture to avoid from now on, for all our sakes, 

for our children, for our grandchildren? I think we should be told, no doubt about that!

21:00 We go to bed on another "Ripping Yarn" - you know, the one set in 1913 and focusing on Whinfrey, a British agent, and his efforts to foil that notorious German plot to start World War One a year early: "Whinfrey's Last Case".

It's a real "doozy"!

A fascinating episode, the story being a real "period piece" from 1913, very much of its time. It shows the shocking unpreparedness of the British Army, and its senior staff's obsession with their low stocks of "materiel", which was all very well, but highlighting at the same time their often crass concentration on shortages of all the wrong things. 

How on earth did we end up on the winning side in 1918? - it seems incredible today, doesn't it!

It seems total madness now, doesn't it, but of course we today have the full benefit of hindsight, which is always famously "twenty twenty". Even so, it was still all rather crass, wasn't it!

There are also instances in this episode that reveal the shocking naivety of British Intelligence at the time. We see agent Whinfrey "taking time off from saving the nation", as he puts it, by having a brief getaway holiday in a self-catering cottage on the cliffs, down in Cornwall.

1913: Whinfrey climbing the Cornish cliffs up to his tiny self-catering

accommodation, "Smuggler's Cottage"

Astonishingly Whinfrey appears not to notice that there might be something suspicious about the incredible overmanning of servants in his small holiday cottage. Later of course all these dozens of servants were revealed as being German spies - an explanation that Lois and I "tumbled to" almost immediately, can I say with due modesty!

Amongst others, there's the housekeeper, Mrs Ottway, and her assistant Mrs Partington, Mr Carne (head steward), McKendrick (the butler), Mr Rothman and Mr Vickers (assistant butlers), McKerris (the boot boy), Mr Ferris (cottage osteopath and/or ostler), Mr Campbell and Mr Rowley (bed-makers), Monsieur Bientot (the cook) and Mr Rolf and Mr Tipking (the kitchen boys), and dozens more. 

Can I just say - I don't want to brag, but... - Lois and I "smelt a rat" almost immediately, especially when the man who introduced himself as the so-called "cottage osteopath" hurriedly changed his job-title to "cottage ostler". 

Suspicious or what haha !!!!

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