Danskcolin: Monday July 31st 2023

Another day pretty much washed out by rain - for Lois and me our 9th full day of house-sitting in Headley, Hampshire for our daughter Alison and family, who are touring southern Europe - Spain and Italy - in near-"scorchio" temperatures. Milan today, and Florence tomorrow.

Before the rain starts here this morning in Hampshire, Lois and I somehow manage to sneak out to Sainsbury's in Grayshott to get some more food and drink to keep us going, including some "his and hers" Earl Grey Tea, a staple for our 4 pm sessions "à deux" on the couch, a flavour of tea which we've been missing like crazy since we arrived here. I have the caffeinated sort, and Lois has the decaf - hence the "his and hers". Simple, really, isn't it! [Yes, very simple, just like you two old pair of noodles! - Ed]

a typical Earl Grey tea-drinker

Apart from feeding the tropical fish, the 2 cats and the dog, we also have to venture into this crumbling Victorian mansion's so-called "boiler room" every so often and "vacuum" the grate of the central heating boiler, which runs on pellets.

Don't ask me why - we don't understand it either! And a lot of the boiler's surfaces are red-hot, so I have to wear a stylish pair of thick black gloves so that I don't burn my skin. My instructions were to "stick the end of the hoover tube in, and just move it about".

It seems crazy. However we don't want anything to go seriously wrong "on our watch", that's for sure!

I hoover the grate in the family's pellet-driven central heating boiler

You put the hoover in, you take the hoover out, you do the hokey-cokey and you shake it all about, you do the hokey-cokey and you turn around, and that's what it's all about - oi !!!!

Another job is to monitor the part of the boiler where the pellets are stacked, to make sure that no gigantic "hole" appears in the middle of the pellets, like the hole in the sea that is said to precede tsunamis. If there is a hole, I have to smooth the pellets over, wearing my black gloves again, to make sure there's an even surface, with no "holes". What we don't want is for a whirlwind of pellets to suddenly explode all over the boiler room and adjoining kitchen.

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

flashback to July 27th: the sea of pellets in the boiler -

you can't really tell from this photo, but a definite

hole was developing, presaging the risk of a tsunami of pellets

exploding all over the boiler-room. Oh dear!!!

It's true, though, that when you're house-sitting and pet-sitting your worst nightmare is if a disaster happens "on your watch". Lois and I spent a tense night in bed a couple of nights ago, because neither of Alison's two cats had come inside the house during the evening - we have instructions to lock the cat-flap as soon as they are both safely indoors.

As it is, we just have to switch the cat-flap to "in only", and go up to bed keeping our fingers and everything else crossed. "Will we wake to find one of them, or both of them, mauled by a fox on the back lawn?" is the worry. Oh dear! Luckily when we went downstairs in the morning they were both there and "clamouring" (silently) for their breakfast, which was a relief.

14:00 An email comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, attaching another of the series of amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors for us each week on the web.

Yes, "budget supermarket versions of branded products", which people are going for more and more what with the current cost of living crisis.

And in the evening we watch a Channel 4 programme on the subject, fronted by Denise Van Outen, which tells us that the non-branded products now for the first time account for over 50% of purchases, which is a surprise to us, but maybe it shouldn't have been.

I like presenter Denise Van Outen, she's always bright and breezy, but my question to her is - was it worth devoting an hour's programming to tell us, mainly, that supermarket-own-brands are often made by the same people who make the branded stuff, sometimes degrading the recipes slightly, in order to preserve a certain "cachet" to the real stuff? We knew all this already anyway, doesn't everybody?

But as Channel 4 knows well, you can always string this sort of programme out a bit and add a bit of "human interest", if you find a typical family and have fun testing them, to see if they can tell the branded from the non-branded, like a lot of them boast that they can, "no question".

Lois and I can't help noticing, however, that these families tend to identify the first sample they taste as the "branded", and the second as the "non-branded", a phenomenon which we attribute to the second sample not being such a pleasant surprise when you've already had the first sample - a slight touch of "déja vu" or is it "déja mangé" probably sets in. And that probably both samples actually taste as similar as makes no difference.

That's what we hypothesise anyway - call us old cynics if you like haha!

What we didn't know is that there are also firms that specialise in providing a range of non-branded products for supermarkets in certain restricted fields, products packaged to look, often, very similar to their branded equivalents. They're only identifiable as coming from the same factory by a low-profile letter-and-figure combination on the packets. And because these firms produce such big quantities in a restricted range of products, they can become highly automated, and can easily undercut the prices of the brands that they're copying.

And who knew that toilet rolls are made from gigantic rolls like this one, which get all chopped up in the factory into the normal size that we all use in our homes?

To give an idea of the size of these rolls, we hear that one of these giant rolls could provide enough to meet the needs of a family of four for their entire lifetime - that's a lot of rolls, no doubt about that!

What a crazy world we live in !!! [You've done that one once already today! - Ed]

21:00 We go to bed on tonight's edition of "Only Connect", the quiz that tests lateral thinking. At the moment we're not watching our other favourite TV quiz, "University Challenge", the student quiz, because the new presenter, Rajan, speaks too quickly and mumbles, and we can't get subtitles on the TV here, because it's an Apple TV.

It's not that we're getting old or anything haha!

Can YOU tell the link between these four pictures?

Well, if you can't see the link, here's the answer:

Yes, can-can, lamb's, little gem and iceberg - all types of lettuces.

Nobody on the teams tonight, nor the presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell, however, has ever heard of a "can-can lettuce". Luckily, the show's question-setter has provided Victoria with a set of helpful background notes. A "can-can lettuce" is defined in these notes as a "green lettuce", which doesn't get us very far, does it!