08:00 The internet is still off when we get up this morning, but it comes on again after about a 20 hours gap, about 10am, although not before we have to do what the old Denholm Industries' "IT Department" always used to ask users to do: to try turning it off and turning it on again.
Or, as a variation....
What a madness it all is !!!!!
After the internet comes back, we have a lot of catch-up work to do online, before doing some more preparations for going away in a few days' time. Oh dear! You wouldn't think we'd been retired for 17 years, would you. Work never really stops, does it haha!!!
One thing we really must do today is to get another 8 weeks-worth of Lois's NHS repeat prescription of statins, so before we get into bed after lunch we decide to get that job out of the way, at a time when all Malvern's other old codgers will presumably be taking naps, hopefully leaving the pharmacy prescription counter and the pharmacy car-park relatively quiet and unused.
the pharmacy car-park, seen here in happier times,
when the pharmacy's shut and there are plenty of spaces haha!
We're wrong, as it turns out - there's only one spot in the car-park, and there's a queue at the pharmacy prescription counter as usual, probably made worse by staff obviously having been given a directive to persuade patients to take a blood pressure test while they're there. Do staff get commission for every 'yes' they get, we wonder? What madness !!!!
Lois manages to choke them off on this one - she recently submitted to our doctor a week's worth of readings from our own blood pressure monitor, which were judged to be fine, so fair enough, we think!
staff chatting at the pharmacy counter
The postman brings a nice card for Lois from her old work-buddy Sheila, whom she hasn't seen for several years now. Sheila had a birthday a few days ago, and she was glad to see a card from Lois, because, as she said, Lois is her only link now with their old working days together at the Cheltenham retirement home for Church of England vicars.
the retirement home in Cheltenham for Church of England vicars,
the home where both Sheila and Lois used to work
We hear the latest about Sheila's husband
Chris. Whereas Sheila, who's in her 80's, is as sharp mentally as she ever was,
the same thing can't be said about Chris, who, according to Sheila, sometimes
carries a massive woollen "security blanket" around with him. Oh dear
- poor Chris. But I sympathise haha!
Is retirement
harder on men than it is on women? Do women carry on regardless, with many of
their old "duties" in the home remaining, while men fail to adjust to
a life without the disciplines of their old job? Perhaps we should be
told? [No, you'll just have to find out for yourself! - Ed].
Chris was a
lecturer at a local college before he retired. Sheila was a nurse / carer at
that care home for vicars where Lois also worked, so both Sheila and Chris had
professional careers. But Sheila has coped with retirement, while Chris hasn't,
which is interesting.
Chris has got very bad now, though, having lots of mobility problems and falls, and not even really able to speak any more. Sheila is needing more and more help from her sons and daughter in her efforts to keep Chris going. She has her own problems too now. Her macular degeneration has got worse, and she only drives locally now - yikes!
flashback to circa 1995: the local retirement home for vicars,
Female staff have dressed up as schoolgirls with red noses
for the charity "Red Nose Day": Lois is on the far right,
wearing one of my old school ties
Yes, do you remember that particular Red Nose Day?
It was rumoured at the time that the Gloucestershire County Air Ambulance was put on standby,
in case any medical emergencies occurred among the home's ageing vicars, while the
staff of "schoolgirls" were servicing their rooms.
the Gloucestershire County Air Ambulance responding to an emergency
During her time working at the home, Lois had to fend off the occasional "advances" of the retired vicars while she was servicing their rooms - she once got pinned up against a bedroom wall by one of them, I remember. But she confirmed that she was never in any real danger - you could knock most of them down with a feather, she always used to say.
It was those days way before the #metoo movement, and awful though it sounds, women used to half-expect these incidents, although Lois always reported them to management, as I remember. Like a lot of women maybe, she had developed "strategies" for minimising the possibility of "incidents", starting in her teenage years with one of her early holiday jobs in a local grocery store. From time to time she used to have to retrieve products from high shelves standing on a step-ladder, and the manager felt that, as her boss, he was entitled to to take the opportunity to run a hand up her thigh - though he never took it further, as she used to joke.
It's no joke, though is it. In so many jobs, the work itself is enough of a pain without also having to fend off stupid men - men who may have been suffering from some sort of delusion, because you were being kind or friendly, that you were for some extraordinary reason somehow "attracted" to them. And I don't suppose the #metoo movement has put an end to it yet either.
That really is madness, isn't it!
20:00 We get ready for bed by watching the final two episodes of "The Change", a series set locally here in Gloucestershire, about a woman going through the menopause who tries to find herself by spending some time back in her childhood home-town deep in the woods, in the Forest of Dean.
Most people in the UK tend to think that people living in the mainly rural county of Gloucestershire are pretty weird, but that's nothing to what the people in the eastern part of the county think of the people living in the western part, i.e. in the Forest of Dean. Oh dear, no! Talk about weirdness! And this series certainly confirms those stories of the weird "forest folk", no doubt about that!
the districts of Gloucestershire
Eels are a big deal in the forest, as you probably know - the eels that the forest folk catch in the mighty River Severn that divides them from the "slightly more sophisticated" people who live in the rest of the county.
And there's a weird annual Eel Festival, as we see tonight, which traditionally has focussed on the year's elected "Eel King", and has been all about phallic symbols. This year, with Linda elected as the forest's first ever "Eel Queen", things are set to change - but what a madness the whole thing is !!!!
Oh dear there's always some man in the crowd who thinks he knows best, isn't there haha! But what a crazy life the forest folk lead in their curiously charmless former coal-mining-towns, so different from the picturesque Cotswold villages in the rest of the county.
Lois has really enjoyed this series. I have too, but I have to say I've also been slightly distracted by spotting mistakes in the dialects and accents. A lot of the cast plainly aren't real Gloucestershire people, and say their lines in cod-country-accents, probably picked up from listening to a couple of episodes of "The Archers" on their car radios. And Channel 4 doesn't seem to have a dialect coach, which is a pity. Still, that's just a minor criticism, and says more about me than it does about the show, I have to confess !!!
22;00 We go to bed - zzzzz !!!!
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