08:00 Lois and I have now been on our own in our little house-for-two for exactly 24 hours. Our visitors, i.e. our daughter Sarah, husband Francis, and the twins, left us yesterday Tuesday as per their usual schedule, as they do whenever the working week begins - Monday having been a Bank Holiday, which made last weekend the third such long 3-day weekend this month. They'll be away for a couple more days, therefore, but they'll be back here again on Friday evening about 6pm, which suddenly doesn't seem so far away - oh dear!
flashback to yesterday: Sarah and Francis leave us
after the long, 3-day weekend, but they'll be back again at 6pm on Friday - yikes!
It's a joy to have them here every weekend, but at the same time it makes this little house far too crowded for anybody's comfort, to put it mildly. Be that as it may, however, inexorably, the whole cycle will begin again on Friday, and so, having had a bit of a restful day yesterday Lois and I have already got to be planning for their return on Friday.
Yikes (again) !!!!!
Firstly we have to put in an online grocery order to the local Malvern Morrisons supermarket, to replenish our much-depleted food stocks. Yikes (again) !!!! [That's enough yikeses! - Ed].
Morrisons will deliver the order on Friday morning between 8:30 am and 9:30 am, which will give Lois and me a chance to pop out to the Warners supermarket at Upton-on-Severn later in the morning, if any of our ordered grocery items prove to be out of stock, especially if "substituted" for with something unpleasant - some flavour that nobody likes, which is a madness!
a typical delivery by Morrisons Supermarkets
13:00 There are also loads of things to be done in the house to get ready for the next "invasion". Even though Sarah and Francis haven't requested it, Lois has decided, out of the goodness of her heart, to take the bottom sheet off their double bed and replace it with a clean one.
She's so kind-hearted. If only I could be more like her haha!!
Unfortunately it's not a straightforward job to replace one sheet with another in this case. Sarah and Francis have piled their bed up with dozens of bags filled with their possessions - they arrived recently from Australia after 7 years down under, but they haven't yet got a house of their own to go to so Lois and I are acting as a temporary storage centre.
So before we can change the sheet, Lois and I first have to move all these dozens of bags off the bed, including Francis's set of golf-clubs, which weighs a ton, and find somewhere to stash them all temporarily.
What a madness it all is !!!!!
changing the bottom sheet on Sarah and Francis's double
bed is more complicated than you could possibly imagine
- what a madness it all is !!!!! Francis's heavy golf-clubs
can be seen on the left, by the way, just under the mirror.
19:00 Able to rest up a little at last, Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch a programme about last winter's strikes, concentrating on those involving an assorted bunch of train-drivers, bus-drivers, and nurses.
Not a very illuminating programme as it turns out, because we just hear one side of these disputes - that of the unions. This type of documentary never gets you very far anyway - what's needed is not people heavily involved in the dispute, because you know that both sides are going to exaggerate, cherry-pick statistics, and twist the truth in whatever way suits them.
Also it would have been nice to see some reactions from, or interviews with, not just the companies but also the victims, i.e. the people who are suffering - the travelling public, and, above all else, the poor hospital patients.
What Lois and I would prefer to see is more of an unbiassed and balanced programme, featuring real experts and independent commentators, giving genuine stats and figures, not the ones that either side has cherry-picked - that's what moves things forward, isn't it.
We wouldn't normally watch this sort of programme at all - all the clips of shouty people get a bit tiresome after a while, to put it mildly. However, this afternoon, when we rang our other daughter Alison in Headley, Hampshire, she told us that her husband Ed, who is paid for giving legal advice to some of the UK's train and bus companies, more or less wrote the caption or slide shown at the very end of the programme on behalf of some of the companies involved, so we've got to watch the programme just for that, if nothing else.
Ed's "statement" at the end of the programme
Admittedly Lois and I don't fully understand what Ed's written here, but we're going to let that one slide, because we're sure Ed must know what he's talking about - he did all that training all those years ago now haha!
Hail to thee, Ed! You kept us out of war haha!!!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch the final of this year's University Challenge, the student quiz, between Durham University and Bristol University. Almost more important than it being this year's final, it's also presenter Jeremy Paxman's last appearance after 29 years of grumpily presenting the programme - happy retirement "Paxo" haha!!!
Exhausted though we usually are by this time in the evening, Lois and I always try to steal a march on the students by finding a couple or so answers that they don't know, or get wrong. Although in our late 70's, we're charmingly irrepressible, whilst, refreshingly, not being in the slightest bit arrogant, self-satisfied or supercilious - humility is the best approach to take, we always say haha!
See if you know the answer to any of these 3 "doozies" - bet you don't!
1. In 2021 the Turner Prize shortlist included the "Gentle/Radical Collective" in which city? The jury admired their commitment to the community of Riverside, in which they're based - the river in this case being the Taff.
Students: [pass]
Colin and Lois: Cardiff
2. A question about the HSP ("heat-shock") family of proteins, which comprises proteins that are expressed in response to environmental stress. What 5-letter name is given to a plant retrotransposon that has co-opted the HSP expression pathway in order to multiply under heat-shock conditions? In Japanese the name means "hot spring".
Students: jacuzzi [Say whaaaaat?????!!! - Ed]
Colin and Lois: onsen
3. A question about rocket science: which US scientist added drag and gravity terms to the equation linking the change of velocity achievable for a rocket to its mass and speed of its exhaust gases? In 1926 he built and launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket, and Maryland Space Centre bears his name.
Students: [pass]
Colin and Lois: Goddard
So there we are - it isn't much for Lois and me to get smug about, is it, but then again, these are the top two teams left in the 2022-2023 series, for which originally 123 institutions from across the UK applied to take part in, so we've been up against some stiff competition tonight obviously.
At the end, Durham beat Bristol 155 to 120, so a close contest. And it's nice to see Chinese writer Jung Chang, author of "Wild Swans", tagged as the world's most-read book about China, arrive to present the trophy to the winning Durham team.
Born in Sichuan, Jung Chang worked as a barefoot doctor, a steelworker and an electrician during the Cultural Revolution, before moving to the UK to study, where she became the first person from the PRC to receive a PhD from a UK university.
at the end of the programme, the moment that the Durham team is declared winner
and Bristol congratulates the victorious Durham team
Chinese writer Jung Chang arrives to present the winning team with the trophy
21:30 We go to bed on the final episode of the first-ever series of the new Australian sitcom "Colin From Accounts", about a couple, Gordon and Ashley, thrown together by having to look after a stray dog injured in a car accident that they were both involved in. And they name the dog "Colin From Accounts" to make him sound like just another work colleague, which is a nice touch.
Awwwww!!!!!
Towards the end of the episode, Ashley hears Gordon sobbing uncontrollably in his car, which is parked outside her house, so she slips into the front passenger-seat and asks him why. Gordon says it's about a lot of things, which is a bit vague.
What a brilliant idea to request a pie-chart at this point! Whether Gordon goes so far as to produce one formally, on a piece of paper, isn't clear, but wouldn't that be great to request a pie-chart any time somebody says something vague, like "it's about everything" ?
And wouldn't couple-relationships in particular become much easier to "navigate", perhaps ?
I wonder !!!!!
22:00 As we go to bed, Sarah sends this photo of her husband Francis standing by the family's tent in a field somewhere near Evesham. She says it's freezing, and we can imagine - Australia, the family's home from 2015 to a month ago - Australia it's not, by any stretch of the imagination - oh dear!
Brrrr!!! - Sarah and Francis say it's freezing there
in that field, and we can believe it!
Camping isn't always the adventure it seems to be, is it. Still, it's what they wanted, and they're still young, aren't they, or young-ish at any rate, well, younger than us anyway, so let's hope they manage okay tonight. I think the outlook for the weather "going forward" (nobody's favourite modern phrase) looks more promising, so fingers crossed.
Zzzzzzzz!!!!
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