Thursday June 29th 2023

Hurrah! A kind of a victory [??? - Ed] this morning in my 8-month battle with our electricity and gas supplier, British Gas: slogan "[We're] looking after your world". 

I decide to send them yet another meter reading this morning, even though it's supposed to be a smart meter so they should in theory know it anyway. And when I upload today's reading to them, for the first time they tell me what for 8 months I've been pleading with them to tell me - the amount I owe them for all the gas supplied to us since we moved into this new-build home in Malvern on October 31st last year. 

What a mad saga it's all been !!!!!

I knew it would be a lot of money, and it is: over £700. And I decide to pay it off right now, here and now. And at least they acknowledge my payment straightaway.

Fortunately I have had the good sense to put a bit of money aside each month, so this isn't such a problem to me as it might have been. 

However, there must be a lot of people who wouldn't have thought to do this, in which case this sort of sudden bill might come as a horrible, even life-threatening, shock. I'm thinking of maybe somebody like great-grandmother Janet Nightingale, or "Ms Nightmare" as British Gas called her in a letter, allegedly by mistake.

Is this how they treat their so-called "priority customers"???? At least 3 times during my long series of anguished calls to the British Gas customer service desk, the helpdesk responders spoke proudly about how they had made me a priority customer because of my age. 

How did I get on their so-called "priority list"? Well, a nice woman in South Africa, where most, if not all of the helpdesk people, seem to be based, said she'd put me on the priority customer list after realizing that I was taking a long time to get downstairs to read the meter and then climb back upstairs again to speak to her on the phone. I had to explain that the meter had unhelpfully been installed outside our front door only about an inch or less above the ground, with a display that you need a powerful electric torch, and either a camera or possibly a magnifying glass, to have any hope of being able to read.

You need at least 3 hands to take the reading, as I discovered: one hand to hold the powerful electric torch, one hand for the magnifying glass or mobile phone, and a third hand to keep the box lid open and to stop it falling on your head. And for the millionth time in my life, I say "What would I do without Lois, applying her "third hand" with such skill?" haha!

Flashback to January and to the very first time I lowered my face down to within an inch of the gravel at ground-level in an effort to read the tiny dark display screen and send the reading in to British Gas.

our British Gas gas meter, only about an inch above the gravel of our front flower bed

- highlighted here with a white circle by my graphics team, i.e. me.

[thinks: does British Gas really expect me to "stoop this low" to give them a reading???]

the British Gas meter "screen", much magnified 

in this picture taken by my phone

In summary, what a madness it's all been !!!!!

Also annoying is the fact that all of my phone conversations with the British Gas so-called "helpdesk" over the last 8 months have ended on a deceptively optimistic note, with the helpdesk guy assuring me that "this problem will be fixed within a few days". Eventually I realised that this was all hogwash - the guy just wanted me to give him a good rating when asked to award him between 1 to 5 stars at the end of the call. Yes, it's been 8 months of total madness !!!!

And yes, £738.60 is a lot of money, but gas and electric costs have been rising for everybody, haven't they.

Who do I feel most sorry for? Well, the UK's reptiles, of course, of which there are 6 species, although the reptile population in terms of individuals has never been calculated with any degree of accuracy, in my humble opinion.

The plight of the UK's reptiles was highlighted recently in a hard-hitting report on the influential American website Onion News: 

the Whitlow family of Elgin, Moray, who struggled to maintain their body temperatures over last winter

EDINBURGH —With government figures indicating double-digit home-heating cost increases in coming months, the UK’s reptilian citizens are warning that, unless swift measures are taken to provide them with adequate warmth, many will face serious metabolic crises this winter.

"Unlike our mammalian citizens, who maintain a consistent body temperature and have the option of throwing on a sweater, reptiles are entirely dependent on external heat sources," local MP Richard Durbin (D-IL) said. "All my constituents are facing rate hikes of 21 percent or more. But some of them, like it or not, may be forced into a quasi-hibernating state if they do not receive emergency fuel-price relief."

According to Department of Energy data, households in Scotland have seen their home-heating bills double or even triple in recent winters. Heating costs in reptilian households have quadrupled the cost of special U.V. light bulbs.

Reaction in the reptile community has been uncharacteristically jittery. "I don't ask for the average human to understand my lifestyle..." said Arthur Masters, 141, a cost-benefit analyst for Prudential Financial in Boston, Lincs. 

"...But there's no changing the fact that I am a giant tortoise. If I cannot maintain my core temperature, I cannot be a productive member of society, nor can I provide for my wife and latest clutch of hatchlings." Masters was not alone in his concern for the well-being of his loved ones. Anxieties are running deep in a community that, while close-knit, cannot huddle together for warmth.

Poor Arthur !!!!! At 141 years of age, Arthur must surely be on his energy-provider's priority list - if not I think we should be told why, and quickly !!!!

And, of course, poor reptiles in general!!!!!

15:00 There's a bit of uncertainty around for Lois and me for the moment - last weekend we visited our daughter Sarah and family, recently returned from 7 years in Australia, initially living a rather cramped existence with us in our smallish new-build home in Malvern. 

They're currently renting a house near Alcester, and last weekend they invited us over there. Will they do the same this weekend? Or will they want to spend some time here with Lois and me, maybe even staying the night? We start making up all the beds again, just in case.

The other uncertainty is about our delayed Golden Wedding - this August we'll have been married for 51 years. Last year, when it was our 50th, we just celebrated it in a twosome, having lunch at Buckland Manor Hotel and then going home to have a bit of a lie-down - well we are pretty old haha!

flashback to August 2022: we celebrate our Golden Wedding with a twosome

at a "secret" location: Buckland Manor Hotel, near Broadway.

[Not much of a "secret" - that's where you always go, isn't it! - Ed]

This year, however, it's a special August, because both our daughters are living in the UK for the first August since 2012, so eleven years ago. And our elder daughter Alison has offered to host a bigger golden-wedding celebration for us than last year's low-key affair, at hers and Ed's crumbling Victorian mansion in Headley, Hampshire. 

Who should we invite? [suggestions welcome as long as they're sensible ones. And no reptiles this year, all right? I know we all feel sorry for them but didn't really work last time we tried it - be honest! They would have eaten most of the food again, which wouldn't be good, to put it mildly!] 

There's some anxiety creeping in for me now, however, as Lois starts to write a few invitations - I expect a lot of the people Lois is thinking of won't be able to come, but even so, there's a certain point where a slowly enlarging guest-list starts to trigger my agoraphobia - yikes!!!!

20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch the latest programme in Michael Portillo's new series of "Great British Railway Journeys", followed by Bridget Christie's new Gloucestershire-based comedy drama, "The Change".

Tonight we see Michael leaving London and travelling through East Anglia, working his way gradually from Felixstowe up to Norwich.

Lois didn't know that the use of postcodes on letters was trialled initially in Norwich in 1959. The concern was to try and introduce more automation into postal deliveries, to cope with the growing volumes of mail. 

It seems strange but not surprising that, at the time, nobody could have predicted the wider role that postcodes play today: in GPS navigation for motorists, for example, or in the calculation of insurance premiums etc, in a world where people are writing far fewer letters because of the growth of the internet, all totally unforeseen in 1959 of course. 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

And yes, machines can make a good-enough job of reading even hand-written postcodes in most cases, a fact which I still find difficult to believe - but it's true.

Of course one of the big tasks in 1959 was to persuade people to go to the trouble of finding out what the correct postcodes were, and remembering to include them in the address on the front of the envelope. And the trial of the system in Norwich showed that people were willing to do this, in the expectation, I guess, that their letters would be less likely to go astray.

In 1974, nevertheless, a big advertising campaign was organised, to persuade the public to use the new system, with the campaign using advertising of all sorts, including leaflets and booklets. And a lot of the campaign was directed at children to make it seem like a "fun thing".

Do YOU remember Poco, the Postcode Elephant? He was so cute, wasn't he - awwwwwww!!!!

Call me terrible if you like [Well, I do that often enough, as you know! - Ed], but I am burdened with this overpowering interest in local accents and dialects, and I often comment on them when Lois and I are watching TV. I'm sure it must annoy her a lot, but, as with so many things, she lets me "get away with it", luckily haha!

And it's fascinating to me tonight to hear the local East Anglian accent. We see Michael talking to an older worker, Roy Stangroom (crazy name, crazy guy!), a veteran manual letter-sorter in Norwich General Post Office. It's Roy who has to sort the letters that the machines fail on, and he explains to Michael that a "few" postcodes written on letters don't get recognised, and that sometimes other features on the envelope "confuse" the machine.

I notice that, in typical East Anglian fashion, Roy pronounces the word "few" as "foo", as in "Kung Fu", or "Foo Fighters" - the rock band. And he pronounces "confuses" as "confoozes". 

Do you remember when, back in 2014, Lois and I visited the RAF Air Defence Radar Museum at Neatishead, Norfolk, and one of the staff there delighted us by talking in his charming local accent about the part played by radar in tracking Soviet ship and submarine movements during what he called the "Cooban Missile Crisis" of 1962?

stations forming part of the RAF's World War II air defence radar system

flashback to October 2014: Lois and I visit the RAF Air Defence 

Radar Museum at RAF Neatisham

the Neatishead Control Room - this was the first base

that the RAF used radar from during World War II, 

to track German bombers coming over from the Continent.

Incidentally those RAF women in the radar control room in the above picture aren't real. Either that, or they just weren't interested in answering my questions. One of the two - take your pick!

Linguistic footnote: incidentally I always thought that "Foo Fighters" was a reference to Kung Fu, but did you  know that "foo fighter" was a World War II slang term for UFOs or unidentified flying objects? [No I didn't, but I don't wish to know that, so leave that bit out will you?! - Ed]

Further linguistic note about Norwich Post Office's veteran manual letter-sorter Roy Stangroom. Did you know that his name derives from a village in the neighbouring county of Huntingdonshire, one of the old Anglo-Saxon counties "abolished" by Ted Heath in 1974? It's true you know!

21:00 We wind down for bed with an episode of the new Gloucestershire-based comedy-drama "The Change" all about Linda, a woman going through the menopause, or "the change" as it's still often known.

A lot of Brits think that the mainly rural county of Gloucestershire is full of a lot of weird people, but let me tell you, that's nothing to what Gloucestershire people living east of the Severn think of the Forest of Dean people who live west of the river. My goodness, no!!!! 

the "districts" of Gloucestershire

Talk about "weird" !!!! And Lois and I wonder what the "forest folk" think of this new series, which hardly depicts them in a favourable light, to put it mildly, even though it's written by, and is starred in by, one of their own, i.e. Bridget Christie.

In tonight's episode, there's a public meeting to protest against a new road planned to cut right through the middle of the Forest. However, proceedings are temporally halted by a dramatic intervention from a guy standing at the back of the room, and dressed in some sort of weird robe.

Luckily the meeting's chairperson recognises the man, and fortunately he turns out to be not a proper delegate - yes, it's only old Alan, the hall's janitor, luckily!

And talking of accents and dialect, you can tell that a lot of the cast in this series aren't real Gloucestershire people. But haven't got Channel 4 got a dialect coach?

Everybody knows that a real Gloucestershire accent, especially in "The Forest", is heavily "rhotic", i.e. the letter 'r' is pronounced in all positions. But it isn't pronounced in words where it isn't there, of course.

So why does Channel 4 let people address the menopausal heroine, Linda, as "Linderrrrr" !!!!

It's just shabby - that's what I say!

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

Wednesday June 28th 2023

09:00 Lois and I are lying in bed with our cups of tea and Lois's copy of "The Week" magazine, with its digest of the last week's news,  which arrived a few days ago. And the magazine is soon setting Lois and me into a bit of a tizzy trying to decide which our candidates for "Guinness World Records" to send in, before this year's deadline expires.

Lois's copy of "The Week", with its digest 

of the week's news from home and abroad

Have you got any potential world records that you've achieved in the last 12 months? If so, you'd better get your application in fast, that's all I can tell you!

"The Week" magazine this week is highlighting this crazy guy who appears at the top centre of the magazine's current front cover - Eltibar Elchiyev (crazy name, crazy guy!) [You've already established that he's crazy! -Ed], the man who at some stage broke the "coveted" world record for the most spoons stuck on a body.

Eltibar Elchiyev, current holder of the world record

for "most spoons stuck on a body"

It may help you with your application if I give you a few hints perhaps. Well, for starters there are four main types of records that get accepted for the book:

1. Records broken not because anybody tried specifically to break them in a staged "event": e.g. most words in a hit single ["Rap God" by Eminem, which contains 1,560 words].

2. Sporting achievements, e.g. the longest ever tennis match [11 hours 5 minutes]

3. Records that seem to exist purely in order to be records: e.g. fastest time to roll an orange one mile with your nose (22 mins 41 secs), or longest fingernails (42ft 10.4in)

4. Marketing stunts: e.g. in 2020 Bush's Beans set the record for largest layered dip (493kg and 70 layers), designed as a celebration of the Super Bowl.

Has that given you any ideas? And by the way, don't even think about sending in your "sex records" - I know a lot of you probably have some, but don't bother: they won't be accepted, the article says!

And Lois and I are left wondering, how can you possibly live a normal life if your fingernails are nearly 43 feet long? Surely that means there must be am awful lot of everyday tasks that you wouldn't be able to complete in anything resembling comfort! Am I right? Or am I right? [Answers on a postcard please!]

Diana Armstrong from Minnesota USA, showcasing

her world-record-breaking fingernails

We hope Diana isn't looking for a man - if so, she's going the wrong way about it, that's what we think. 

For that matter, let's hope that Eltibar Elchiyev isn't looking for a woman. Lois thinks that spoons stuck on a man would be a turn-off for many women nowadays - and that, I guess, is the modern world for you: oh dear!

Poor Eltibar !!!!!

10:30 We drive the 7 miles over to the Warners-Morrisons supermarket at Upton-on-Severn. We need to stock up on a bunch of groceries, and also Lois want to make some of the raspberry slices she saw on the "Food and Drink" page of this week's "The Week" - yum yum in advance!

Mostly I just stand there with the shopping trolley, trying not to be an obstacle, while Lois browses the shelves and picks out the things she wants. Sometimes she tells me to go to a different aisle in search of some simple item I can't possibly make a mistake with - like a box of "Barry's Tea" or "Bush's Beans". But mostly I'm just standing there somewhere behind her with the trolley.

This gives me time to browse the other customers, who are mostly old codgers at this time of the morning, with the occasional influx of sixth-form students from the local high school looking for fattening snacks and cans of Coca-Cola etc, things that their mothers must unaccountably have forgotten to pack for them in their lunch-boxes.

a teacher and a sixth-former showcase 

the local high school, on its "Open Day"

I myself prefer to do grocery shopping online, because it's less work for me carrying the stuff out to the car and into the house when we get home etc. Lois, however, prefers to see what's available generally and not just what's on her list. And she gets frustrated when online shopping goes wrong - when they tell us at the last minute that they're out of something vital, or when they've substituted it with something unsuitable, or when we get the sizing wrong: we're still both much more comfortable with the old "imperial" weights than with metric - it's what you grow up with that stays with you for life, isn't it.

This was the recipe that Lois spotted in "The Week": 

Later in the day, as if by magic, a tray appears in the kitchen, all ready to be cut up into yummy raspberry slices.

You're probably wondering why I don't do any baking myself, and why I rely on Lois to do it all. Well, one of my plans when I retired 17 years ago, was in fact to develop my cooking skills beyond the few standard meals I used to do when our daughters were still living with us, for those occasions when Lois was otherwise engaged or tired or not well: my signature dish was "Poached Egg Surprise" - a poached egg on a plate with boiled potatoes and baked beans, and the rest of my repertoire often reached similar standards, even if I say so myself. 

You may scoff, but my "cuisine" was once pronounced "good enough in an emergency" by Lois, so it must have "hit the spot" all round, I like to think!

Lois, besides, has never been that keen for me to take on too big a role in the kitchen, and her reaction was "ambivalent", to put it mildly, when immediately after retirement in 2006, I talked of maybe expanding my culinary skills. To her, although it's often a huge burden just having to plan the meals every day of her life, and I can see that, on the other hand coming up with her own variations and making things herself are also two of her big pleasures. And I always try to help out in a small way by setting the table, stirring the soup on top of the stove, and the like, and doing the washing up afterwards. [I don't think that's good enough, is it, Colin, and you know it. You utter utter bastard! - Ed]

20:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I've set up all the equipment for her - including the speakers, so that she can cope with the often variable sound quality of these sessions.

I settle down on the couch and watch the second half of Elton John's "set" at the Worthy's Farm site in Somerset, at the end of this year's Glastonbury Music Festival - the stuff he played last Sunday night after 10 pm, the sort of time when Lois and I prefer to be tucked up in bed, thank you very much!

Elton has promised to introduce some "special guests", which sounds exciting, but a little bit to my disappointment his guests all turn out to be people I've never heard of, which is a pity. Oh dear - but that's the penalty you always pay for tending to live in the past, I've found.

As always, it's the audience who are the stars of the show for me, anyway. They're so unbelievably joyful, having the time of their lives, crowded together in their thousands in the dark in this big field, singing their hearts out to these old songs, for which even the youngsters know all the words. 

I keep my eyes on the audience as Elton sings an old favourite, "Your Song".

Your song: "You can tell everybody / This is your song /

It may be quite simple / But now that it's done...."

"... I hope you don't mind / That I put down in words /

How wonderful life is when you're in the world"

Awwww!!!!! Bless their little cotton socks!!!!

And they really are old songs now, aren't they. Elton sings "Your Song", which I remember I first saw and heard in my little room in Japan during my student year, on the little Japanese telly that I bought there for £32 equivalent. That price in those days seemed to me so cheap, like all their electrical goods, compared to what the stuff would have cost in the UK.

flashback to 1971: my little room in Japan - with a Japanese student friend

doing his Elvis impersonation, and my little TV (bottom right),

the one I first saw Elton John on, playing "Your Song"

Elton continues with his old tear-jerker "Candle in the Wind", selecting the original Marilyn Monroe-themed lyrics, not the souped-up Princess Di ones, which is probably just as well. And the crowd just love it, the highs and the lows of it - oh yes, oh my goodness, yes!

"It seems to me / You lived your life /

Like a candle in the wind / Never knowing /

Who to cling to / When the rain set in..."

"I would have liked to have known you /

But I was just a kid..."

Oh dear - there's a clear casualty here as the emotions

prove too much for this guy in the funny hat. 

Poor guy !!!!!

And Elton finishes his set on his song "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", a duet with one of his special guests, Rina Sawayama (crazy name, crazy gal!). And the crowd go wild.

Elton finishes with "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", duetting

with Rina Sawayama: "Don't Go Breaking My Heart /

I couldn't if I tried / Honey if I get restless / Baby, you're not that kind..."

Yes, Rina Sawayama. Who she? Well, I google her, and I find out she is indeed Japanese, as the name suggests. She moved to London with her parents in 1995, when she was 5 years old. They intended to stay here for 5 years and then go back to Japan, but they changed their minds and stayed in the UK. And Rina has a degree from Cambridge in political science. 

My goodness! Still I expect you know all that already, don't you - go on, admit it!

"Oh you put the spark to the flame /

I've got your heart in my sights..."

Fabulous stuff!  

flashback to 1976: Elton John singing "Don't Go Breaking My Heart"

with his original duet-partner, "blue-eyed soul singer" Kiki Dee (now 76)

21:15 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we choose the "early night" option, something we always reserve the right to, when we feel like it. Well, we've earned it! [I don't think you've shown that, beyond reasonable doubt anyway! - Ed]

Zzzzzzz!!!!