The day rushes by and soon it'll be dinner-time. It's been a quiet day for Lois and me - it's our last day of it being just us on our own in the house, it's the day before Sarah, Francis and the twins come back here tomorrow to spend the weekend, a delightful experience always, although we end up all being a bit squashed up together in this tiny little house: oh dear!
flashback to May 7th: Sarah, Francis and the twins
relaxing in the pool at the local Malvern Splash Leisure Complex
Yes at the moment our weeks are "weeks of two halves", the quiet half where it's just Lois and me, the bustling half where there's lots of nice company and chat. Both halves are nice in their own way.
And, as I've said many times before, is it not worth all the money in the world to have two young granddaughters happy to fly 9000 miles across the world to live near us, and to have "fun with flags" in our back garden, just any time that there happens to be a Coronation haha!
flashback to Coronation weekend: our twin granddaughters
having "fun with flags" in our back garden: Lois took this
sneak, unposed picture of them through the patio door
over some of the mountains of drying laundry - what madness!!!!
Talking point: was this running about in our back garden even greater "fun with flags" than the now sadly-decommissioned regular "Fun With Flags" video podcast presented by Sheldon Cooper and girlfriend Amy Farrah-Fowler on "The Big Bang Theory" sitcom? If not, I think we should be told, and quickly, before it's too late haha!
Amy dresses up as a kangaroo for boyfriend Sheldon
in a memorable "Fun With Flags" video podcast from "The Big Bang Theory"
11:00 Lois has worked out the meal plan for the weekend, and this morning the local Morrisons supermarket delivers the necessary ingredients for those meals.
The major disappointment is that they haven't got any banoffee tarts left - oh cruel world!
the email that arrives at 8:21 am, bringing us the shock news
that at the local Morrisons supermarket, banoffee tarts are "unavailable": what a madness !!!!
Also, to make things worse, we realize that we ordered the wrong size of fruit tarts and quiches - little ones instead of the big ones: when you order online it's hard to tell how big the tarts are, unless you're familiar with the metric system, which is a drawback for us. We were just "born too early" - what a pity!
But no banoffee tarts - oh dear, and Morrisons weren't prepared to offer a substitute, which I can sort of understand - those tarts are pretty irreplaceable.
some typical banoffee tarts
By coincidence Lois reads in the June issue of "Which?", the consumer magazine, that whereas Morrisons usually, but not always, offer substitutes, which you can of course reject on the doorstop, Sainsbury's allow you to specify that certain items are "not to be substituted for", while Tesco and Waitrose allow you to make comments to their warehouse staff about what kind of substitutes you'd be happy with, giving explanatory notes etc.
We decide to maybe try Tesco's next time. It would be nice to form a real relationship with their warehouse staff, so that they really get to know our wants and needs. Could we invite some of them round to a "open house" session here, perhaps, or even a "sleepover", so that they "clock" some of our breakfast likes and dislikes? I wonder!
a typical Tesco grocery delivery
14:00 You may think that Lois and I have not had much of a day today - but actually we took full advantage from the fact that nothing much was going on to spend the whole afternoon on a longer-than-usual shower followed by a longer-than-usual nap. So it wasn't wasted, to put it mildly! And we feel so much better now - you would not BELIEVE haha!
We eventually emerge into the daylight at about 4:30pm, just in time for our usual Earl Grey tea and jaffa cakes on the patio. Bet you're envious!
Go on! Have one of my jaffa cakes -
you know you want to haha!!!!
20:00 We settle down on the sofa to watch the second half of the film we started watching last night, all about Colette (1873-1954), the famous French novelist.
In the first half, Colette had started writing best-seller novels about a French schoolgirl, based on her own experiences in the French countryside. The snag was that her husband, "Willy", was putting his own name on the by-line, not hers, and so it was Willy who was getting all the kudos from the novels.
Colette, however, was getting some consolation from her passionate affair with married American debutante Mrs Duval - "Georgie". Georgie is from Louisiana, and she at once notices the resemblance of Colette's teeth to those of alligators, which are a familiar sight in her home state. I'm not sure if that's the best form of compliment she could have come up with, but it doesn't seem to put her off when the kissing starts, which was probably for the best!
In this second half of the film, that we watch tonight, the affair between the two women goes quickly sour, however, when Colette finds out that Georgie is also sleeping with Colette's husband "Willy". Colette is particularly angry that both Georgie and Willy kept quiet about their affair, saying she wouldn't necessarily have minded if they'd both been open about it.
Lois and I think that Colette used to visit Georgie at her Paris flat during the day, and that Willy went to see her after work. Lois recalls that this was the traditional time for Frenchmen to have sex with their mistresses or with prostitutes - the so-called "cinq a sept" (5pm to 7pm) sessions.
For a while, Willy got away with his particular infidelity, by telling Colette that he was just "popping out to the bank".
the moment when Colette realizes that her American mistress Georgie is also
sleeping with Colette's husband, "Willy": Colette arrives for her own session with Georgie
only to see Willy up on Georgie's balcony. Oh dear - this won't end well !!
In retrospect it was a pity, from the point of view of marital stability, that Parisian banks had such long opening hours - in the UK banks have always tended to open quite late and close quite early to enable staff to avoid the rush-hour in their commutes, which was fair enough!
It all ends happily, however - Colette takes up with another woman, "Missy", who, daringly for the times, has very short hair and dresses in men's clothes.
Colette (left) starts a new affair with "Missy", a woman who,
daringly for the times, has very short hair and dresses like a man
And also, Willy finally gets exposed as a fraud for living off the reputation of being a great novelist, whereas it was actually his wife Colette who was writing the novels.
What a bastard!
And the film ends at the point when Colette is starting to get the recognition she deserved. And don't you just love those slides they put up at the end of films, telling what happened subsequently and giving pictures of the actual real people. It's so great isn't it!
21:00 We go to bed on the rest of the Victoria Wood retrospective that we started watching last night.
As well as her sketches, we also see some of Victoria's stand-up work tonight, which is nice.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!!
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