Danskcolin: Tuesday July 18th 2023

"Barbie" is all the rage at the moment, isn't it, what with the film coming out and all!

And good timing - Lois and I have got the cutest twin granddaughters, Lily and Jessica - you would not BELIEVE! And they'll be turning 10 in a week or so's time - awwwww!!!! Sarah and husband Francis and the twins just recently moved back from Australia after 7 years down under. So this will be their first birthday in the UK since their 2nd birthday, in 2015, and we want to buy them an utterly utterly nice birthday present.

flashback to Saturday: (left to right) our daughter Sarah,

our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica, and Lois

To get them their present, Lois and I will this morning be driving the 25 miles over to the little village of Alderton to pick up a good-condition second-hand or "pre-loved" Barbie House that somebody there in the village wants to pass on to a new owner. Perfect timing or what!

After we arrive, however, we can't get near the seller's house because the seller is obviously having a lot of work done on it. It's surrounded with builders' vans and trucks - just our luck! And then we get some of the trucks to let us into the driveway, we find we can't fit the Barbie House into the back of our little car,

Annoyingly, the current owners must have installed quite a few "adds-on" to the basic "classic" Barbie House, which is already quite large: about 43 inches by 41, as I discovered on the web. Why can't people leave their Barbie houses alone? They've always got to "improve them" haven't they, just so they're better than the neighbours' versions, which is so petty and small-minded, isn't it!

And I get a sudden feeling that this could turn into potentially one of the "worst days of my life" - a frequent premonition of mine, and sooner or later it's going to happen, no question. We've only got a small car - a 2012 Honda Jazz with very low mileage if you're interested haha - and the Barbie House just won't go into it, whichever way we turn it.

But we're in luck, however. We speak to a couple of the builders working on the seller's house, one of whom turns out to have an NHBC qualification and a Swiss Army knife, and after about 10 minutes he manages to pull off, prise off, or lever off, most of the "add-ons", which is a relief.

how many builders does it take to get a Barbie House

into the back of a Honda Jazz? Well, two as it turns out!

After some successful dismantling, the triumphant builder doesn't want to take too much credit, however, and he makes a confession - "Me and Barbie go back a long way", he admits, so I ask him if he's in the film. He says "yes", and claims that he's playing Ken #3 or some-such nonsense, but is he just joking? He doesn't look like any of the Kens I've seen. So it's hard to be sure.

But humour tends to be a bit on the dry side in Alderton - what a crazy village it is !!!!

Later I check on google to see what Ken#3 looks like. I have to say I don't believe the builder's story about being in the new film for one moment, but at the same time there IS a bit of a resemblance, no doubt about that.

See what you think. I wonder if there's any chance the two men might be related?

the builder...

.. and Ken #3

11:30 We come home and stash the Barbie House into our living-room behind the sofa, and have lunch. We'll play with it later - tomorrow perhaps haha!!!

15:00 We come downstairs after nap time, and Lois makes a strawberry crumble with the strawberries that she, Sarah and the twins picked on Saturday.

I inspect the strawberry crumble that Lois has made

from the strawberries she, Sarah and the twins picked on Saturday

Yum yum !

Meanwhile I browse the area news. That annoying local loud-mouth has been laying down the law again in Victoria Park on correct techniques for throwing frisbees, according to Onion News. Why can't the police do something about him? What do we pay our council tax for haha!!!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

And you know that guy with the big head, who lives around here? He's not even smart apparently. What a madness it all is !!!!

Pointing out the shocking contradiction they had been presented with, sources reported Tuesday that the guy over there with the really huge head wasn’t even smart.

“You’d think a dome that big would be filled with a ton of brains, but nope,” 34-year-old resident Caleb Palmer told reporters, explaining that while one might assume a person with such a large head would be “some kind of poindexter” with an IQ of 250, the individual in question was, instead, “a complete f****** moron.”

“It don’t make any sense. What’s taking up all that space in there? Skull like a beach ball, but he ain’t on his way to a Mensa meeting, if you know what I mean.”

At press time, sources reported they were relieved to have encountered a guy with a tiny noggin who was every bit as dumb as the size of his head suggested.

So, "just" a "noggin" then! Well, at least we know now, which is something of a relief. I know a lot of people round here were starting to get worried, us included - my goodness, yes!

19:30 We settle down on the couch after dinner and watch the latest episode in Michael Portillo's latest adventure in his "Great British Railway Journeys" series on BBC2.

This series began with Michael in Derby. And tonight we see him visiting Coventry and the ruins of the famous old cathedral bombed by the Nazis in November 1940.

Tonight Michael visits the ruins of the medieval Coventry Cathedral

and also sees the new cathedral (left) built on an adjoining plot

It's heart-warming, however, to hear that on the very next day after the bombing, the provost, Richard Howard, came to the cathedral while it was still smouldering, saying that the people of Coventry shouldn't have rage in their hearts, and he wanted that message of reconciliation to go out.

Provost Richard Howard came to the cathedral the very next day after the bombing

with a message of peace and reconciliation

Michael reminds us tonight also, that this kind of warfare is still raging in Ukraine, and he offers the Ukrainian people the history of Coventry as an example that "the phoenix can always rise from the ashes".

In my own mind, the bombing of Coventry is, by complete chance, always linked with a different act of mindless destruction, because I first visited the ruins of the cathedral on another fateful day - September 11th 2001 - in the company of my dear late mother, together with my dear late sister Kathy and her husband Steve.

While we were visiting the ruins, however, we didn't yet know that, at that very moment, thousands of miles away, Islamic terrorists were preparing to visit destruction on thousands more innocent people.

Steve had parked his rental car somewhere near Coventry city centre, and we first stopped in at a café for a hot drink before visiting the shell of the old cathedral. I know I've told you all this before, but Michael's programme tonight certainly brought back all the memories.

my dear late mother and my dear late sister Kathy

Then we explored the old cathedral, destroyed by the Luftwaffe on November 14th 1940, night of the single most concentrated attack on a British city during the whole of WW2.

we look round the shell of the old bombed-out cathedral

After that, we lunched at the Earl of Mercia JD Wetherspoon's, before driving home to Cheltenham, and I guess the 9/11 attacks must have been going on during our lunch and our journey home. However we didn't know anything about them till we got home and Lois told us the news. What a day that was.

20:30 We watch an interesting documentary about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster on Channel Four. Not ideal pre-bedtime viewing, but fascinating stuff none the less.

Lois and I had forgotten most of the details of the disaster, and new information has surfaced recently of what the Russians had already known, for a decade or more, about the weaknesses in the design and safety features of their nuclear plants.

It's interesting to hear how the clean-up operation bankrupted the Soviet Union. And more importantly perhaps it was the Ukrainians' anger about the Russia's disastrous management of their nuclear plants which led eventually to Ukraine's national vote, in December 1991, to leave the USSR.

And this was really the act which spelt the end of the USSR as a political entity.

Things don't change in Russia, do they. And true to form, the Russian authorities kept quiet about what had happened at Chernobyl for as long as they possibly could - till information started appearing in the west. The news first emerged in Sweden where the cloud of radiation was first detected, by equipment the Swedes had installed to detect any radiation leaks at any of their own nuclear power stations. And the news was then spread to Ukrainians via the Voice of America and BBC news broadcasts.

Two days after the blasts, chemist Cliff Robinson - from his name it's sounds like he's English, but he's actually a Swede - arrived early for work at a Swedish nuclear power station - he had a habit of eating his breakfast there.

After eating his breakfast Cliff popped into the washroom to brush his teeth, and to get out of the washroom you had to pass through some routine radiation monitoring. However, when he tried to leave the washroom the alarms suddenly started ringing, which was a total shock to him.

And it was news presenter Julia Somerville who broke the news to viewers in the UK on the BBC's Nine o' Clock News, on the evening of April 28th 1986.

And the cloud of radiation that had enveloped Sweden eventually arrived in the UK.

This is all fascinating stuff for Lois and me, because we realise we had forgotten so many of the details. I guess we had "other fish to fry" at the time. We'd just come back from 3 years in the US, and had just moved to a bigger house etc etc. We were still settling our daughters back in the schools they had left in 1982 when we moved to the States. You know how it is. Life happens - oh dear!

21:30 Yes, oh dear, lots of heavy viewing this evening. So we prepare for bed with something lighter, an old episode of the sitcom "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads" from about 1970 or thereabouts.

Bob's getting married in the morning, so he turns down the offer of a drunken stag night with his old pal Terry and friends, because he doesn't want to end up spending the night in a police cell.

But tragically he and Terry end up in jail anyway because they get drunk instead in Bob's flat, and Bob spills wine on his wedding suit, leading to a crazed trip out into the town to find a 24-hour laundrette.

On the morning of his wedding, Bob wakes up in the police cell, not knowing how he and Terry got there.