A quiet day for Lois and me - just a bit of routine shopping this morning to keep our food stocks up. A trip to Warner's Supermarket in Upton-on-Severn is planned and executed, to the letter.
Call us rash, but we don't mess about - oh no, haha!
the crucial aisle no.1 as it looked this morning
- only Lois and one other old codger, with her "minder": so it looks like
we'll be able to zip through the store in no time with our little list, which is nice!
14:00 I go up to bed for a nap, but Lois says she feels she needs an invigorating walk round the estate first, and she will join me later. What a woman!
When she comes back, she tells me how the builders of this new estate, Persimmon, are getting on with construction off the children's play area. It's a bit slow and we think they only do work on it when the house-building is being stymied, perhaps from delays in building materials, but we're not 100% sure. The playground is a low priority for Persimmon - it's all "quids out", whereas completing more of the houses on this 300-home plot is all "quids in", so for the builders it's a no-brainer.
flashback to a few minutes ago: Lois, still on her walk, tries to "get her
photographer's eye in", with this slightly awkward exploratory selfie
the current state of the planned, so-called "children's play area" - the child-friendly
"bouncy" tarmac has now been laid down under all the play equipment
But what a crazy world you live in, when you buy a house on a new-build estate !!!!
14:30 Now our nap can really begin! And by coincidence, I happened to have read an article only today on my phone with the latest results from "napologists" in London and Uruguay. Yes "the old gang" have teamed up again - at last! - and have proved, finally and for all time, that regular naps help old codgers like us to keep our brain capacities working at maximum strength as we stagger through late old age, which is a welcome message for us, to put it mildly!
If you're interested, the article can be found on the influential UK news website, Upday, and the reporter is the site's acclaimed science reporter, Gareema Bangad (crazy name, crazy gal!).
journalist and all-round "science guy", Gareema Bangad
It just shows that former American President Ronald Reagan was doing both himself, and all of us, a favour, all those years ago, when he announced, in late 1987, according to the still old-school, influential pre-internet-age American print-style newspaper, The Onion, that, despite the lateness of the hour, he was going to use his executive powers to proclaim it was "late afternoon".
He then took a late afternoon nap, which in those days, was unheard of - and he was roundly criticized for the move, or non-move, at the time. Do you remember?
19:00 After our sausages have "gone down", we watch tonight's programme in Michael Portillo's new series of "Great British Railway Journeys".
Tonight Michael visits the set of the long-running British TV soap opera "Coronation Street", where he meets William Roche, who, incredibly, has played the part of schoolteacher Ken Barlow (now retired schoolteacher Ken Barlow haha!) since the very first episode was broadcast by Granada TV in December 1960.
And Roche is in the Guinness Book of Records as the "the world's longest serving actor in an ongoing drama". I'm not surprised, frankly!
flashback to the early 1960's: William Roche (centre) as Ken Barlow,
just graduated from university, eating dinner with his working-class parents,
who imagine that their son is now looking down on them - what madness!!!
Roche has just celebrated his 90th birthday, but he's got a special way of dealing with old age, as he tells Michael.
Also tonight, Michael visits Manchester University's Science and Industry Museum to find out about the world's first ever computer that could run a stored program, a computer that was nicknamed "The Baby" (1948). At the museum, Michael is greeted by Prof. Steve Furber.
Michael is greeted at the museum by Prof. Steve Furber,
who demonstrates for him a replica of "The Baby", the world's first computer
ever to run a stored program.
Prof. Furber tells Michael that "The Baby" was built by two engineers, Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, who had worked on radar during World War II, work which, by the end of the war, had ended up at Malvern, on the patch of ground where Lois and I now live, which is a funny feeling for us.
Malvern was thought, by that stage of the war, to be "too far to the west for the Germans to even think about bombing it", which was certainly a "plus", to put it mildly !
Go on, admit it!
"The Baby" was the first machine to implement the big 1930's idea of Alan Turing, of Bletchley Park wartime code-breaking fame: the idea of a universal computing machine.
It was "universal" in the sense that the program is stored in the computer's own electronic memory, so it can be changed very quickly. You don't have to do a lot of manual rewiring. And the program can change itself while it's running. Today, of course, all computers are built on this principle.
And we learn tonight that Alan Turing himself, who after the war began working at the National Physical Laboratory, was developing a machine similar to "The Baby", but Freddie and Tom got their machine going first - so fair enough! Kudos Freddie and Tom haha!!!
By way of contrast, Prof. Furber then takes Michael to the University's Department of Computer Science to see the latest supercomputer to be built on campus, the SpiNNaker machine, which is, ironically, the same size as "The Baby" was. However, whereas "The Baby" was a single computer, the SpiNNaker contains around one million computers, each one of which is approaching one million times more powerful than "The Baby"
And SpiNNaker is being used to run real-time models of brain functions, Prof. Furber tells us. The human brain comprises 100 billion neurons, the basic brain cells, and on the SpiNNaker they can model, not a full human brain, but possibly just about the equivalent of a mouse brain, which is a thousand times less complex than a human brain.
The primary objective for the SpiNNaker computer is to add to, and to accelerate, our efforts to understand the brain. Our current comparative lack of understanding is inhibiting our ability to develop drugs to treat diseases of the brain, like Alzheimer's and dementia etc.
Fascinating stuff !!!!
Meanwhile I settle down on the couch with the chance to watch last week's opening programme in the new Celebrity Gogglebox series, a series which Lois doesn't like.
A USP (unique selling point) of Celebrity Gogglebox is that we see supposedly "beloved" celebrities in their own homes, both watching, and also commenting on, a selection of the week's TV programmes. However, this USP is somewhat obviated for me, because I have no idea who most of these celebrities are. I do recognize a few of them, but the others, I just have to google, which is annoying!
19:45 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom.
Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's
weekly Bible Seminar on zoom.
What a madness it all is !!!!!
It's a pity, however, that Lois isn't here to see this edition of the programme, because it uncovers a new and sinister form of sexism, hiding under the guise of a big-money quiz. Whatever next, I hear you cry!
The Goggleboxers are watching, and commenting on, last week's edition of ITV's "The 100% Club", a game show in which 100 studio audience members are invited to answer a series of logic questions, questions which start out simple and progress to becoming more difficult, with everybody who fails to answer correctly getting eliminated along the way.
This is the question that our Celebrity Goggleboxers have a go at:
This is one of the easier questions, and the Goggleboxers are quick to spot the answer. And they work out that James is only grumpy on a Monday, whereas his wife Fiona is grumpy on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
"Fiona's grumpy, like, all the time", comments Munroe Bergdorf
(transgender model and activist - thanks, Google!)
"Fiona's a bitch!", comments Canadian comedienne Katherine Ryan
"There's quite a lot of sexism in this question.... "
comments BBC sports presenter Clare Balding
"... because there are a lot of days when Fiona is grumpy..."
....and James, magically, is only grumpy on a Monday!"
"Fiona's grumpy because she's living with James!",
says Clare's wife, Alice Arnold
Thanks for that insight, Alice!
21:15 Lois emerges from her zoom session, which "has overrun, as usual", Lois comments! Oh dear!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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