Danskcolin: Thursday July 3rd 2023

This morning Lois and I are a couple "on the run" - on the run from our daughter Alison's cleaner, Joanne. We're house-sitting and pet-sitting for Ali and family who are holidaying in Spain and Italy.

Last Thursday Joanne was doing the ground floor of this crumbling Victorian mansion in Headley, Hampshire, where Ali's family live. But this Thursday Joanne is going to be doing the upstairs - yikes!!!

Yikes (again) !!!! So we can't go back to bed about 8 am, which is what we usually do, after we've fed the tropical fish, cats and dog, and let the cats and dogs out into the extensive 6.5 acre grounds - we don't have let the fish out into the garden, luckily - Ali says it wouldn't be good for them, so that's one less job to do, which is nice!

Before Joanne comes we decide to "clean up" in our bedroom and the bathroom, so Joanne doesn't find anything embarrassing or "incriminating" from our stay here, which is just coming into its third week. Yikes (again) !!!!

we do a pre-clean up in our bedroom and the bathroom,

before Joanne, the cleaner, arrives. We want to make sure to remove

anything embarrassing.

The bedroom's easy enough, but there's not much we can do about the mess in the bathroom, where we pulled both shower caddies off the wall, one during each of our the two showers we've had since coming here - we're just going to have to tough that one out, and say, "Oh we didn't notice!".

Never explain, never apologise, that's what politicians say, isn't it!

09:00 Joanne arrives. She's a chatty soul in her 50's perhaps, which is nice. She's obviously a Freddie Mercury fan, because she's talking about the auctioning off of a lot of Freddie's memorabilia, according to this morning's news.

Joanne knows about all the pop stars who used to record round here. Lois and I knew about Fleetwood Mac who used to live up the road in another big mansion, where they also had a recording studio. And we knew that Led Zeppelin used to record at Headley Grange.

However, till Joanne told us, we didn't know about Jimi Hendrix's girlfriend, Kathy Mary Etchingham, who also used to have a place here. She was the "Mary" who inspired Hendrix's song "The Wind Cries Mary" - he wrote the song after the two had had a big fight, apparently.

Kathy Etchingham, seen here with Hendrix

flashback to June 2021: me outside Benifold, Fleetwood Mac's old "pad"

Flashback to the 1970's: Led Zeppelin at Headley Grange,
where they recorded much of their music

Fascinating stuff !!!!

Joanne is not only doing the upstairs today, however, she's also doing the kitchen and the two bathrooms downstairs, so Lois and I decide to get out of her way.

We drive to the nearby town of Grayshott, to get a few groceries from Sainsbury's, and to pick up our son-in-law Ed's 13 shirts - yes thirteen - the ones he sent to be dry-cleaned in Grayshott before the family went off to Spain and Italy.

Ed is a hot-shot legal adviser for one of the UK's big bus and train companies, so he needs to have a clean shirt every day - my goodness, yes! When I was working, I was a civil servant in a government department 100 miles from London, where you rarely met your Whitehall "customers", just communicating with them by phone or email, so people there used to turn up for work wearing the most awful jeans and tee-shirts. My goodness, when I think of it !!!!

some of the buses and trains run by the firm

Ed provides legal advice to

But what a kerfuffle it is for Lois and me today, carrying, not just our groceries, but also 13 shirts, each on its individual hanger, back to our little Honda Jazz and hanging them as best we can on the little plastic "rails" above the back two doors (just the shirts, not the groceries haha!).

I stand and take a picture (see reflection in car window),

as Lois struggles with some of Ed's 13 shirts -

it looks like I'm not helping, but I do my bit as well [not shown]!

we stuff Ed's 13 dry-cleaned shirts onto the plastic "rails"

above the 2 back doors of our tiny Honda Jazz - what madness !!!!

Yes, what madness !!!!

And what to do with all these 13 shirts when we get back to the house? We decide to hang them up in bunches on the wardrobe doors. Other suggestions welcome haha!!!!

we hang Ed's shirts up in "bunches" on the wardrobe doors

Let's hope the shirts don't break the five little plastic wardrobe door-handles, or that'll be 7 things we'll have broken upstairs in this house since arriving here a couple of weeks ago.

What madness !!!!! [That's enough madness for today! - Ed]

11:00 Meanwhile Ali, Ed and family are spending the day looking round Pisa, where Ali was at the local university for a year as part of her 3-year Italian degree course at Cardiff.

(left to right) Ali, Isaac (13), Ed, Josie (16) and Rosalind (15)

Also today, they see the block of flats where Ali and a fellow Brit student stayed during their study year. Lois and I remember the flat well from our visit to Ali there in April 1997. Like most Italian flats, there were no carpets on the concrete floors and just blinds on the windows, so nothing to absorb sound. Hence it was very echo-y, and difficult to understand what people were saying to you.

the doorbells for the individual flats, one of which Ali lived in

with a friend 1997-8: the name-plate still carries the same name,

so the same owners must still be living there, which is kind of amazing.

the back of the apartment block with the balcony

that Ali and Lois stood on 25 years ago

flashback to April 1997: all those years ago, Alison (21) and Lois (50)

on one of those balconies in Pisa belonging to the flat where Ali lived

During our visit in 1997, Lois and I stayed one night at a really cheap budget hotel right under the Leaning Tower, which we thought would be exciting, which it was, although not always in a good way. The decor reminded us of our idea of what a Turkish prison would be like, mosquitoes everywhere etc etc. However it was also was the local police's go-to dumping-place to take drunks to sleep it off overnight, as we discovered lying in bed listening to the big heavy doors below us clanging repeatedly shut in the early hours, followed by the police car speeding away.

Still, we were relatively young then - only about 50 ! And I expect we got back to sleep after the police went away. But what madness !!!!

[Second warning! - Ed]

20:00 We watch a bit of TV. The BBC is saving money at the moment showing us the occasional one-off editions of old sitcoms and comedy sketch shows, programmes which Lois and I are quite happy to see again, because it's nostalgic.

Also, comedies were much funnier in those days, weren't they - let's face it! Go on, admit it, you know it's true!!!!

It's so nice to see a show with a bunch of intelligently written scripts that are really good parodies of some cliché'd style or other and these scripts are all written by Fry and Laurie themselves, which is nice.

Take this sketch, set in the billiard room of some grand old house back in Edwardian times. In the sketch we see young Rufus, on the eve of getting married to his sweetheart Helena, having a heart-to-heart chat with his father, or "Pater" as he charmingly calls him.

Oh dear, Rufus IS a young "clever clogs" isn't he! He thinks he knows all he needs to know about "having babies", seemingly!

Now, of course, I expect you've guessed that Rufus doesn't know about some of the absolutely essential foreplay needed to secure a conception. I'm not going to tell you all the details of this, because I don't want you trying any of this at home, but it starts with - you may know this already - the necessity of having a "Tideymans" [reg. trade mark] carpet, with its soft velvety texture.

"Tideymans" [reg. trade mark] is, of course, the show's sponsor, but I don't think that fact played any part whatever in the decision to include the product in the dialogue for the sketch. The BBC would never have allowed commercial influences of that sort - so let's rule that right out from the start!