Another quiet day for Lois and me in Malvern, and another whole afternoon spent in bed - my goodness! But we're trying to recover our energy after last weekend hosting our daughter Sarah and the twins, in time for next weekend, when we'll be doing it all over again.
It's nice being in bed here in the afternoon, but there's always a slight niggling anxiety that somebody from Persimmon, the building firm who built our house last year, will be ringing our door-bell to say that they've come to do some painting or repairs or to fix any of the dozens of other defects we've reported.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
our bed - a great place to be in the afternoon except
when people are outside, ringing repeatedly, and with urgency,
on the doorbell, and then it's not so great - my goodness no!
A "trades" person like that came from Persimmon this morning and rang our doorbell - I recognized him as a joiner, because he had a Persimmon "joinery" badge on his lapel, which was helpful. He came to fix the so-called "restrictor" on the top of one of our pair of patio doors, a restrictor that had never been properly attached, but which didn't stop the house being certified by Persimmon as "finished" just before we moved in on October 31st last year. What utter madness !!!
the restrictor on top of one of our patio doors -
left completely unattached and swinging free by the builders,
so the door could easily be pushed back against the brickwork,
which could shatter the glass into tiny fragments - utter madness !!!!!
I'd never heard or seen the word "restrictor" before last month, and when Francis, our son-in-law, spotted the defect a couple of weekends ago, I discovered that even Francis didn't know what this loose bar on the top of the door was called. So I had to do some in-depth research on the web before I could report the defect to Persimmon, and I bet they were impressed!
I've since found out that restrictors are, literally, what holds the Western World together, and they're vital, just as one example, to the NASCAR Stock Car Racing Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina - this story was "broken" recently by the influential American news website, Onion News. NASCAR is the National Association for Stock-Car Auto-Racing.
I ask the Persimmon joiner-guy this morning whether the restrictor on our patio-door could potentially stop this house from breaking loose and travelling downhill towards Britten Drive at 200 mph, but he was very cagey: he wouldn't confirm or deny the suggestion, which is worrying, to put it mildly! It sounded like Persimmon have been doing another big number on their joiners to prevent yet another scandal breaking in the tabloids.
What a crazy word we live in !!!!
[You've done that one once already today! - Ed]
possibly the most likely route that this house would take if it broke loose
and travelled 0.4 miles down the hill at 200 mph towards Britten Drive
16:30 We stagger out of bed and have a cup of tea and another two slices of Lois's "Disney Princess" birthday cake from yesterday. This leaves the last two slices for tomorrow, which is a nice thought!
flashback: Lois prepares to light the candles
on her "Disney Princess" birthday cake
20:30 We wind down on the couch with Saturday's first programme in Professor Alice Roberts' new Channel 4 archaeology series, "Ancient Egypt by Train".
Alice Roberts' programmes are always entertaining because of her knowledge, her empathy, and infectious enthusiasm, and we sense that she's doubly excited in this series, because it's actually the first time she's been in Egypt. We're used to seeing her at archaeological excavations in the British Isles, and also in the Greco-Roman world, giving us the benefit not only of her historical knowledge but also, when it comes to human remains, her anatomical and biological knowledge - she's got Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees: what a woman!
So she's a rookie in the world of Ancient Egypt, which is a plus. However, to me this programme highlights the difficulties of making a TV series about Ancient Egypt. Yes, it's all new to Alice, although other "celebrity traveloguers" and "presenter traveloguers" have done it for us many times before; and yes, she's travelling by train, but I've got news for her - the audience doesn't really care that much what kind of transport you use to get from place to place: it doesn't make an awful lot of difference does it, in the great scheme of things, to put it mildly!
Alice is clearly travelling by train through Egypt
- there's no doubting that, is there haha!
Nevertheless, Alice does a good job of finding out what work archaeologists are still painstakingly doing all over Egypt, and we get a good picture of that. At the same time all these projects tend to be very long-term - some of these archaeologists are dedicating a huge proportion of their working lives to one project or another, and if you drop in on them for a TV programme, you're not likely to see anything necessarily very spectacular: their work is going to go on for decades, let's be realistic!
In tonight's programme Alice travels 30 miles west of Alexandria to a 2000-acre site called Taposiris Magna, where there are the remains of a lighthouse, also an ancient temple of the goddess Isis, functioning until the 5th century AD, a temple that had been completely buried by sand; plus a more recent discovery: a system of tunnels 26 ft (8m) down beneath the surface, first discovered in 2019, tunnels that may extend far out from the land beneath the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
Here, Kathleen Martinez, a former lawyer from the Dominican Republic, has been directing the work at this site for 15 years, because she's convinced that the elusive tomb of Queen Cleopatra is here, and is not in Alexandria itself, as most archaeologists believe.
We know that Cleopatra wanted to hide her burial place from Augustus and the Romans, who didn't really like her because of her liaison with Augustus's mortal enemy Antony, but even so, this site 30 miles to the west of the city is a bit of a long-shot as the Queen's burial site, as Alice herself says.
Oh dear!
Kathleen Martinez, however, believes that it's significant that the temple here is dedicated to the goddess Isis, who was also associated with Cleopatra. And on her mobile phone she shows Alice a photo of the temple's foundation plate, which reads in hieroglyphics and in Greek, "Ptolemy, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and Berenice, made this sanctuary for Isis".
If she does find Cleopatra's tomb, Kathleen will become one of the big names in Egyptology, however, that's for sure! So maybe it's worth the gamble of 20 years work or more, out under the sun in the hot desert. My goodness, I think I'd rather be working in a damp field in Worcestershire, if it were me haha!!!!
[I've got news for you - you won't find the tomb of Cleopatra in Worcestershire! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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