Wednesday August 23rd 2023

Today is not such a nice day as yesterday was, to put it mildly. 

Yesterday Lois and I were taken out and bought lunch in a nearby gastropub by my "new" cousin David and his wife Zanne - the "cousin connection" having been discovered by a DNA test on a family history website a couple of years back. The event disproved the famous saying "There's no such thing as a free lunch" - well, come on, I beg to differ here haha!

Flashback to yesterday, and yes - we prove it! There IS such a thing as a free lunch!

But today - not so good, that's for sure. Lois has to go to our dentist to have a molar taken out, and her appointment is for 10:50 am. You can't get much more of a contrast than that, can you - what a difference a day makes: 24 little hours. Yikes! 

I drive Lois the mile down the road to Barnard's Green and we take our places in the waiting room. 

We only moved to our house here in Malvern 9 months ago, and so far we've only been to this dental surgery for check-ups, but a glance at the TV screen on the waiting-room wall and the impressive-looking certificates on the mantelpiece convince us that the staff here are fully qualified, which is reassuring!

we take our seats in the dentist surgery waiting room

and scan the TV screen on the wall and the official-looking "certificates"

I caution Lois about dentists who try to "upsell you" - i.e. to persuade you, when they've got you in the chair and at their mercy, to buy ever more expensive treatments that you don't really need. There was a case here locally, just the other day, reported on the Onion News website.

Call me old-fashioned if you like [There won't be any argument there! - Ed], but I think 300 teeth are too many for most mouths, unless you happen to be a crocodile.

a typical crocodile who's obviously been "upsold" by his dentist

Lois's treatment goes well, but on the way home we stop in at the OneStop convenience store to get a bunch of "soft foods" that will carry us through the next few days, which is a relief.

the "OneStop" convenience store on Poolbrook Road,

where we pick up a bunch of "soft" ready meals etc

16:00 Yesterday we got an email from Liverpool Victoria, our car insurance providers saying that our premiums for next year will be going up from £342 to £549, without a word of explanation. I've been with this company for more years than I care to remember - at least 20, and probably 30. 

What utter, utter, madness !!!!

I look at a price comparison website and I see that the same sort of policy is on offer from the Post Office at only £210 a year. So from now on, LV is out, Post Office is in - no doubt about that!

That will teach LV a lesson, and no mistake!!!!

13:00 We get home, and Lois isn't allowed to eat or have a hot drink for a couple of hours, and she has planned to have some soup around 2:30 pm, and generally not exert herself for a couple of days.

Meanwhile I prescribe for her a seat on the sofa and a couple of movies back-to-back on the Romance Channel: 

We often discuss having the Romance Channel on in the background all day and all night, and what that might do to our brains. It's something that we can imagine some people must do, but we're only speculating really - we're too scared to try it out in practice, that's for sure. Oh dear!

While Lois is chilling out on the sofa, for me, it's my basic so-called "cookery skills" that have to spring into action: corn beef and baked beans on toast for lunch, and scrambled egg and baked potato for tea.

I feel a haiku coming on: "Corn beef, baked beans, toast, scrambled egg, baked potato" - and it takes me right back to my student days, I don't mind telling you!

20:00 We switch off the Romance Channel and get ready for bed with a nostalgic documentary about 1970's supermarkets on Channel 5.

When we started the 1970's, there were no national supermarket chains. The supermarkets that there were still tended to be smallish shops on the High Street, not self-service, so you had to ask assistants for everything you wanted, and they picked it off the shelves behind the counter for you, and then you had to lug it all half a mile or more to the nearest car-park. 

What a crazy world we lived in, back in those far-off days !!!!!

And most people didn't have freezers, so a lot of things were in tins that you could just put on a shelf somewhere - corned beef, spam, baked beans, tinned peas etc, and tinned fruit. I used to try and make sure we always had what, to me, was the full set of tinned fruit: mandarin oranges, pears, peaches and pineapples, the "Big Four", as I used to call them.

Decimalisation of money came in in 1971, while I was in Japan on my student year. When I flew back into Heathrow via Moscow, the customs man charged me £4 duty for bringing into the country my cheap Japanese cassette tape-recorder. My pockets were full of yen, so I had to write him a cheque, and I wrote "£4-0-0" on the cheque: i.e. 4 pounds, zero shillings and zero pence, the system Britain had been using for a thousand years. 

Of course he made me tear that cheque up and write another one with "£4.00" (i.e. new style) in the box. 

What total madness !!!!

flashback to 1971: I arrive back at Heathrow Airport, totally frazzled after my

long flight from Tokyo via Moscow, to be greeted by Lois and my sister Jill (13)

And Lois and I well remember how everybody thought that manufacturers were taking advantage of the decimalisation madness by edging their prices up ever so slightly, and "rounding up", thinking we wouldn't notice.

What bastards !!!!!

But there was much worse inflation to come as the 1970's started to bite, with the OPEC crisis etc, and more women entered the jobs market, while - let's face it - still doing all the work in the house, making all kinds of convenience food suddenly really attractive: with boil-in-the-bag solutions particularly popular. 

Remember my mother's favourite, the boil-in-a-bag "Cod in Parsley Sauce" solution? That takes both me and Lois right back to those years, I can tell you! 

But who knew it was also the favourite of Debbie McGee, "TV magician" Paul Daniel's glamorous assistant, and later wife, after he divorced his first wife?

Not to mention "Boil-in-a-bag rice" etc - no mess, no washing up haha! And desserts like the iconic Angel Delight. 

Happy times!!!!

And nobody cared a fig about the mountains of plastic waste we all generated in those days - my goodness no!

Gradually, self-service became the norm in the grocery trade, supermarkets became bigger, with trolleys that you could put lots of stuff in, encouraging people to buy lots, and wider aisles etc. 

Buying on credit also became easier, and people began buying freezers so they could stash big bags of frozen stuff away - and people were advised to stick band-aids over the socket switch to remind themselves never to switch the freezer off, and Lois and I certainly did that. 

Oh yes, let me tell you haha!

Yes, what crazy times they were !!!!!

Do you remember the heart-breaking TV commercial for those savoury Findus Crispy Pancakes? You know, the one where the wife leaves the husband because she's "bored stiff with him".

And meanwhile the man survives on his own, and discovers Findus Crispy Pancakes, and he's hoping each day that she'll come back and suddenly turn up at his door and they can have a crispy pancake or two together. You must remember that one haha!

Tonight, in this Channel 5 documentary, a panel of experts look back and discuss the significance of those iconic 1970's Findus Crispy Pancake ads.

Awwwww, bless !!!!!

And do you remember how, until 1972, there weren't even any "sell-by" dates on products, so you had to just use your common sense, have a look for any festering mould yourself, do the so-called "sniff test" and that kind of thing. 

What a madness it all was!!!

But fascinating stuff !!!!

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