Danskcolin: Thursday July 20th 2023

It's back on the road again today for Lois and me, driving the 120 miles from Malvern to Headley, Hampshire, to house-sit and pet-sit for our daughter Alison and son-in-law Ed, and their 3 teenage children, who will be going off for a Portillo-style railway-based holiday in Europe, taking in Spain ("scorchio!"), and Italy ("scorchio" again).

Rather them than us, Lois and I say. We prefer "freezio" in Blighty to that, to be perfectly frank!

09:15 We drive off, we two old codgers - I'm getting used to these longer drives again after the long years of lockdown etc, but it's still mentally exhausting for me, to be concentrating on the traffic for two and a half hours. Lois helps by pointing out e.g. lorries moving out of the slow lane with little notice - two old heads are better than one, that's for sure!

11:30 We arrive and our granddaughter Rosalind (15) offers to take our bags up the staircases to our room, which is nice. Alison and Ed are at work, and Isaac is at school, so it's just Rosalind and Josie (16) to join us for lunch,

14:00 Alison returns home during lunch - she works part-time as a classroom assistant at a local primary school.

After lunch I go up to our room for a nap. Lois joins me but only after she helps Ali do some "badger prevention" work in their extensive 6.5 acre grounds, as I watch from the bedroom window. Some baby badgers had been trying to get into the sides of the massive raised lawn, so she wants to block off the holes they are trying to make to burrow underneath, using bits of logs etc. Once those baby badgers get inside, you never get them out, Ali says.

What a madness it is - the world of baby badgers!!!

I look out from our bedroom window to see (left to right) Rosalind,

Alison and Lois blocking up some baby badgers holes with bits of logs

18:30 We have dinner with Josie and Rosalind. We set a place for Ed, our son-in-law, but he's still busy with calls in his "office" at the end of the hall. His job is to give legal advice to one of the UK's railway companies, and the big issue at the moment is the railway companies' efforts to close uneconomic ticket-offices at many of the UK's smaller stations, ticket-offices that in many cases may only sell one or two tickets a day, which is economic madness, Ed says.

Lois says how she thinks all railway stations ought to be manned, for safety reasons - it would be unnerving, she says, particularly for female passengers, to have to wait on platforms at stations which are completely unmanned. Ed says that nobody is suggesting that, but we can't help feeling that will be the next stage.

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

(left to right) Josie, Rosalind and Lois

20:30 We wind down for bed by watching today's episode in Michael Portillo's latest series on "Great British Railway Journeys". Ali joins us and does some work on her phone - they really are a busy family. My goodness!!!

Who knew that the great hobby for working-class men in the UK in the immediate post-war period was pigeon-racing? Certainly not Lois and me. Michael talks to Amanda, a primary school headteacher at a school near Worcester, who is still a pigeon-racing enthusiast herself - a passion that she acquired from her father.

Amanda says it was a popular hobby for working-class men after World War II because it wasn't expensive. Each man would keep his pigeons in his back garden, and on race day they would take them in their baskets to a train station where they would be loaded onto a train. The train would be taken to the race-point, and then released. The winning pigeon would be the one that reached home first.

See? Simples! And did you notice how the men each gave their beloved pigeons something to drink in their baskets by poking the spout of a watering-can through the holes? Awwwwwwww!!!!

And now Amanda makes use of her hobby by introducing her school's pupils to the care of pigeons, in a specially constructed school pigeon-loft in the school grounds.

Tonight we see Michael meeting some of the school's most committed young pigeon-fanciers.