Friday August 4th 2023

Lois's tummy seems to be settling down today after 2 days of not being quite right, so we make this morning our big push to try and have a lunch out at Applegarth's Farm Shop. Our daughter Alison and her family will be coming back from Spain/Italy/Switzerland on Sunday, and our stint as house-sitters and pet-sitters will be over. 

So we decide "to push the boat out" with lunch today, because we know we can sleep it off in bed this afternoon, after we get back to the house, so that's all right!

Applegarth's Farm Shop and restaurant, near Grayshott

just to be sure about our order, we check the flimsy paper menus

that one of Applegarth's incredibly young-looking waitresses brings us

We've booked a table for two online, and looked at the menus online, but we look again at the flimsy paper versions that one of Applegarths' incredibly young-looking waitresses gives us as well, just to check!

[You're not going to tell us what you ordered again, are you?!!! - Ed]

Well, seeing as you're obviously interested, I'll let you know! Lois orders the pan-fried monkfish wrapped in Parma ham, and I get the Applegarth Burger with smoked cheese, AppleMac sauce, skin-on chips, dill pickle, you know the kind of thing! 

To drink, Lois has an elderflower cordial and I have a local Haslemere Gin and Tonic.

What would you have chosen? Go on, be daring! Especially if you can go to bed afterwards and sleep it off haha! 

[Well, you haven't given us a menu have you, so how would I know what I would have chosen?! - Ed]

And seeing as it's lunchtime and we haven't got anything much to do this afternoon we decide to get a dessert, a brownie with salted caramel ice-cream. Yum yum!!!  

The restaurant have made a wise choice, it seems to us, commercially, to offer both small and large versions of their desserts. As a lot of their customers are middle-aged or elderly, this is obviously going to be a money-spinner, and, like all the other old codgers, we of course order the small version, just to be on the safe side!

we order the small version of the "brownie plus

salted-caramel ice-cream" dessert

16:00 Meanwhile our daughter Alison, plus husband Ed and their 3 teenage children - Josie (16), Rosalind (15) and Isaac (13) have had a long day's travelling by train from Florence to Geneva.

Ali sends me a text and a picture from the train window, as they at last start getting near to Geneva after the long day's travelling.  

Ali sends me this picture taken from their compartment,

as the train passes along the shores of Lake Geneva

The journey apparently included a mad dash across Milan to get their onward connection. What madness !!!!

At least temperatures should be cooler for them all now, and less crowded with other tourists too, hopefully.

16:30 We struggle out of bed, go downstairs, and start doing the puzzles in the coming week's Radio Times. 

We do quite well at Popmaster, till the questions come to halfway through the 1990's, which figures, and at the end we come away with the usual 7/10. 

Oh dear! It was the mid-90's when our two daughters had both gone off to university, and that's what happens usually to parents, isn't it. They turn into old "fuddy-duddies" overnight. Oh dear - but it's true, isn't it! We know it, you know it too haha!!!

We also get 7/10 this week on the intellectually more prestigious "Egghead" questions.

It's been a bit of a lazy day, but the family are coming back home late on Sunday. Yikes!!!!

So tomorrow Lois and I will have to start thinking about putting this house back to rights again, and hiding anything embarrassing away in our suitcases, plus fixing all the things we've broken or moving back things we've moved to the wrong place, like borrowing the pritt-stick from Ed's office, that kind of thing - don't tell him about that, by the way, will you, that's strictly between us, okay haha!!

20:00 We watch the first part of a 4-part documentary taking a new look at the life and career of film-star Marilyn Monroe, "Reframed: Marilyn Monroe".

An interesting programme, and it's clear that the common perception of Marilyn as a victim, exploited mercilessly by the film industry, isn't anywhere near the mark. Marilyn knew what she wanted to achieve in her film career, and she wasn't going to be any man's plaything on the road to the top. 

Do you remember Elton John's famous song "Candle in the Wind"?

...They set you on a treadmill
And they made you change your name....

...Hollywood created a superstar
And pain was the price that you paid...

That was all piffle, Elton !!!!!

Women stars were normally considered as there for the taking by studio bosses, but when Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, and one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, invited her, at contract renewal time, to spend a few days on his yacht, she decided to leave Columbia there and then.

And later Marilyn daringly revealed the truth about Cohn and other like-minded men in the industry, in an article in the New York Daily News, "Wolves I Have Known" (1952).

But this was the 1950's of course, when the term "sexual harassment" hadn't even been coined, so Marilyn really was really brave to put her name to the article, and also way ahead of her time. As the programme makes clear, Marilyn really could have faced a serious backlash because the powerful men didn't want to be called "wolves", and they didn't want their behaviour to get called out.

Marilyn's 1952 co-written article in The Daily News

Lois and I are now very much looking forward to watching Part 2.

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

21:00 We wind down for bed by seeing  the last programme in the current series of the very long-running sitcom "Not Going Out", co-written by, and starring, stand-up comedian Lee Mack.

Lee's son Benji plays for the junior soccer team, coached by Lee's friend Toby, and it's the team that consistently comes bottom of the table every season. Nevertheless Lee is lobbying furiously to get Benji named the "player of the year award" by the coach.

Poor Benji !!!!!!

This has been a really great season overall for "Not Going Out", but this final episode is a bit of a let-down for me. I thought they would end up with a real humdinger, but to me, this is the weakest programme of the lot in Series 13. 

What we see is the "trope" of the ultra-competitive dad, who cheers on his son's performance in the local junior soccer team, getting into arguments with the other dads, shouting at the referee and coach etc, all people who, for some reason, don't seem to share the dad's opinion of how great his son is.

Isn't that a bit of a sitcom cliché? I'm waiting for the sitcom where the son only plays soccer because the school makes him do it but he doesn't really care about it, and neither does the dad - wouldn't that be funnier? [Only to you, I suspect! - Ed]

Tremendous fun anyway!!!!

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