Saturday July 1st 2023

08:00 Lois and I wake to find ourselves in bed - no surprise really! However, it does give me a quiet moment - our 46-year-old daughter Sarah and her 9-year-old twins are still asleep in their rooms, so I get the time to browse the quora forum website and tell a sleepy Lois about an interesting couple of questions that people have been asking the quora pundits about. 

And I've got no doubt that Lois appreciates that - even at this time of day. Oh yes!

the always intellectually challenging "Quora" forum website

This morning I'm glad to see that one of our favourite pundits on the website, the clever but crazy Swede Mats Andersson, has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "Why didn't Europeans sail westward across the Atlantic before Columbus supposedly [sic] did in 1492? Were ships not capable before then? Why?"

We like Mats because he deals with complete idiots in such a nice way - good old Mats! And he points out, helpfully, that people didn't expect America to be there, and they knew China was an awfully long way away: they could measure the distance reasonably accurately even then: and the ships of the day could never have made it to China going west.  

a 1491 map of the world

Also by 1492 navigation had become much easier - the compass had reached Europe by 1300 or so, and by the time of Columbus, sailors had perfected the art of sailing away and finding their way back to their home port. 

Mats adds that, of course, it was easier for the Vikings - they had already discovered America, but had sort of kept quiet about it. They could cross the Atlantic in stages, and the distance was shorter anyway, up north.

See? Suddenly it all starts to make a crazy kind of sense doesn't it!!!!!

09:30 And suddenly also, everybody's up and about, and downstairs, having breakfast: Lois and me, plus Sarah and the twins, who are staying with us for the weekend. The plan for this morning is to visit the alpaca farm at nearby Alpaca Meadows, but first Sarah has to do some unpaid weekend overtime on her PC on our dining-table in the kitchen. 

It's computer work for the accountancy firm where she's been working for a few weeks, since she and Francis and the twins moved back from Australia in May, after their 7 year residence down under. It's the firm she was working for before the move to Australia, but everything's changed, Sarah says. New software, new clients, and less face-to-face work with clients since COVID. Poor Sarah!

flashback to May 4th, the day Sarah and family arrived in the area 

after their 7 years down under: photographed here behind the premises 

of the accountancy firm where Sarah had got her old job back

And at the moment Sarah can't do her overtime in the rental home that the family moved into in Alcester, because, unaccountably, she's having to wait a few weeks for the Sky broadband to be set up. Poor Sarah (again) !!!! Wake your ideas up, Sky, drag yourself "kicking and screaming" into the 20th century [sic] - that's what we say haha!

flashback to June 24th: the family settling into their broadband-less rental home

in Alcester: (left to right) Francis, Lily, Sarah, Jessica, and Lois

10:30 Sarah takes a pause from her weekend unpaid overtime accountancy work, and I drive us all off to the alpaca farm, 4 miles away, at Alpaca Meadows. 

Lois and I plan to treat Sarah and the twins to a lunch there at the farm's café - this will save Lois from cooking a meal for us all tonight: we can just have something cold - cheese sandwiches or quiche, with salad. It's quite a big thing suddenly for Lois to be often suddenly catering for 6 or 7 people here, instead of just herself and me.

After all, we are both 77, you know [Stop reminding us! - Ed]

We arrive at the farm, and it turns out that the twins love feeding the cute alpacas with the 50p food bags provided by the café - to be frank, I don't think that issue was ever in any serious doubt!

Awwwwwww!!!!!!

And we keep bumping into the same nice young couple - you know the strange way you do on tours of these kinds of places? The young man and woman don't seem to be short of money. They had paid the extra £30 - which we thought was too expensive: call us old skinflints if you like haha! - yes, they had paid the extra £30 to actually lead an alpaca round the farm, in the company of one of the farm's young guides.

an alpaca stops and poses for me: behind it you can see

the nice young couple we keep bumping into. They had had the generosity

to pay the farm £30 to walk this alpaca round the designated route

But by the time Lois and I, plus Sarah and the twins, had settled ourselves down in the café to have our lunch, we saw the couple leading their alpaca through the car-park and back to its field, their little alpaca-walk suddenly coming to an end. Awwwwww!!!!

we see the young couple leading their alpaca back to its field,

as we sit in the café waiting for our lunch

And can you guess? Yes, when the couple came into the café themselves, they sat down at the table next to us, which was nice!

in the background, you can see the nice young couple ordering drinks 

from one of the young waitresses after their alpaca experience had come to an end

13:00 I drive us all home and Lois and I go upstairs for our nap. Well, we are 77, you know! [This is your final warning! - Ed]

16:00 We struggle out of bed and try our hand at the quizzes in this week's Radio Times. Well, you've got to do a bit of brain work every day, at our age especially [Don't you dare say it! - Ed].

Yet again we find that we get a better score on the trashy "Popmaster" questions than on the intellectually more prestigious "Eggheads" section. Lois says it's because we ourselves, and our life-style, are becoming trashier in themselves, and increasingly "dumbed down".

I disagree - I just think the Eggheads questions are becoming more obscure by the week, with the individual "Egghead" brainboxes - Kevin, Olav and the gang - just trying to impress each other with their knowledge. But let me know what you think, will you? Doctoral theses on the point welcome haha! But let me have the paper peer-review-checked and typed by Monday at the latest okay haha!!!

We get a bit of help on the Popmaster questions from Sarah, who's not a "boomer" as you can probably work out: she's a "Generation X", but when it comes to finding the answers on the more recent pop music, she does as much head-scratching as us, which is kind of reassuring in a strange way.

In the "Only Connect" puzzle, which tests lateral thinking, we work out the 4 categories: (1) geese, (2) places in New York State, (3) characters in Jane Austen's "Jane Eyre", and (4) famous "Bills" - "Buffalo Bill" etc. See?

18:00 The sun is shining, and Sarah's overtime accountancy work is all over the dining-table in the kitchen anyway, so we have our "high tea" outside on the patio, which is nice!

19:00 Sarah clears away her overtime work and PC, and we settle down to a challenging game of Cluedo on the table in the kitchen.

This is the old Cluedo set that Lois and I bought after we and our 2 daughters, Alison and Sarah, moved back from the US in 1985. During our 3 years in Columbia, Maryland we had played the US version "Clue" to destruction, and the set was looking a bit battered, "murdered" you might say, even, on our return. So we decided we needed a new one after we settled back in the UK. 

This "new" one is now looking decidedly battered now, too. The "Mrs Peacock" was lost long ago and has been replaced by a blue Lego brick. The "dagger" has been replaced by a small safety-pin, and the "rope" by a bit of old string. Oh dear! 

And guess what - tonight Jessie's sharp young eyes spot that our daughter Alison, when she was about 11 or 12 maybe, 35 years or so ago, had, for some unknown reason, scratched (not written) her name and our then phone number "572009" on to some of the squares on the board. And it's just about visible if you get it in the right light.

Jessica discovers that our daughter Alison, now 47, had 35 years ago or so,

scratched her name and the house telephone number on the Cluedo board

You may be able at least to make out the big "A" of "Alison" outside one of the entrances to the Cluedo ballroom.

I text Alison with the picture, and she's suitably amused by it - after all she'll turn 48 this year, and she's got 3 teenage children. 

But how time flies!

20:30 The twins go off to bed, and Lois - bless her heart - finds the energy yet again to read another chapter of their latest "Jennings" schooldays book to them, doing all the funny voices etc. What a woman!

Then Sarah goes back to her overtime work, while Lois and I watch some dumbed-down YouTube videos on our TV. We're too tired to do anything else - well, you know why haha! [Thanks for your reticence! - Ed]

more unpaid overtime for Sarah in the kitchen - poor Sarah!!!!

22:00 We go upstairs - even Sarah stops work now. But it's been a nice day, though, hasn't it. Lois and I feel really lucky some days, and so we should. Because you never know when your luck's going to be running out, do you, especially at our age.... [Oh, just go to bed! - Ed]

We go to bed. Zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!