Monday July 3rd 2023

08:00 Lois and I wake to a quiet house, which makes a change from the weekend, when we turned out to be unexpectedly hosting our daughter Sarah and her 9-year-old twin daughters for 2 nights. A visit that we really enjoyed as it turned out - I can't emphasize that enough!

flashback to 7 pm on Friday evening: our daughter Sarah

has arrived unexpectedly for the weekend, with her twin daughters

We still feel puzzlingly shattered today, however, and we can hardly wait to get to bed after lunch. And in the course of our afternoon "down time", we manage to fit in a "lessons learned" session. Conclusion: we think the reason we're feeling so shattered today is because Sarah's visit with the twins came as a bit of a minor bombshell at Friday tea-time, to put it mildly. 

We are 77, you know! [Yes, we know all about all that! - Ed]

Foolishly, because we hadn't heard from Sarah, and it was already past 5 pm on Friday, when she leaves work, we had assumed they couldn't possibly be coming - at least not till the following morning at the earliest. That was our mistake. In the event they arrived about 6:30pm on Friday and needed feeding, which was a bit of a "yikes!" moment. When they arrived, Lois had only just that minute finished her online chair-yoga course on zoom, under the tutelage of her great-niece Molly in Leeds.

But they're such lovely company - we were really pleased to see them and to know we would have the benefit of their delightful presence for the following 36 hours or so. However we must get Sarah to give us more warning in future so that we can prepare ourselves better. It's a no-brainer really, isn't it. Let's be honest!

10:00 Anyway it'll be a quieter day overall today. Lois asks me to drive her over to the OneStop convenience store on Poolbrook Road. She wants to make some apricot jam today and we're out of sugar - she needs 4lbs or so, and we're also out of a few other things, to put it mildly.

the OneStop convenience store, about half a mile away from us

Later, however, there's a satisfying aura of apricot jam around, pervading the house, which is nice! Lois finds she has just enough to fill four 1lb-jam jars.

Think of all those apricot jam sandwiches to come, not to mention apricot jam with rice pudding or egg custard etc. Yum yum (in advance) !!!!!

12:00 We get an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law, attaching the latest series of amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors for us each week on the web.

Let me confess something here: I've never ever worn a string bikini or a skirt - call me hopelessly old-fashioned if you like! However Lois confirms to me the friction issue with skirts in hot weather - but she likes her skirts, so she's kind of stuck with that, she says. Poor Lois!

And where next for Harry and Meghan? Lois read in a recent copy of her "The Week" magazine that the Sussexes' popularity has fallen away in the States, and I'm not surprised. They don't buckle down and do anything much in the way of work for the companies they have signed contracts with. And they've got nowhere to go really have they, and nothing particular to offer, now that they've spilled all of Harry's royal "secrets". Oh dear - but they should have seen it coming, surely????

20:00 We wind down with an old programme in the Big Train series from the 1990's - you know, the series that used to expose and highlight previously unknown political scandals and social problems?

Who knew, before this episode of "Big Train", how local radio DJs and presenters got hold of all the puns they used to use when filling in time between records, or when doing their "continuity" links to the next programme etc? 

It all created a bit of a scandal at the time, I seem to remember - way back in the late 1990's. And it all stemmed from that awful day when popular Chesham 101fm dee-jay, Simon Pegg, ran out of puns live on air during his afternoon show? Were you listening at the time? 

I think everybody remembers where they were and what they were doing when that awful impasse took place, don't they. And this archive Radio Chesham security camera footage tells the story as it happened...

this was the fatal moment Simon paused to give that routine station check...

Remember?

...followed by a teaser about Janet McPhail's upcoming Hollywood gossip slot...

...and here Janet makes her usual rude gesture to Simon,

as he continues to pump her for titbits - remember?

So far so good, but what puns can Simon make now while the next record is being got ready? What would YOU have said? Lois and I find our minds have gone blank, but then we're not radio dee-jays, so fair enough!

Pegg was heard rifling through his desk drawers for the list of "batman" puns that were supposed to have been prepared for him, but without finding anything.

And later we witness some harrowing scenes as Pegg, in furious mood, visits his "pun factory" - a dark basement where poor children are working in almost "Dickensian" conditions to produce the thousands of puns Pegg used to use quite routinely in each day's broadcast of his 2-hour afternoon "drive time" show.

What a scandal that was, when it all came out, and I don't think Pegg's reputation ever seriously recovered from that, do you? But it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and the scandal certainly made the reputation of the then little-known maverick legal team at Langley and Allchurch.

Fascinating stuff!

But a useful reminder and a warning for the future - we must never let this whole kind of sorry saga ever happen again in our country, and that's for sure.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

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