Danskcolin: Friday October 13th 2023

Do you know what the name of that "scraper" thing is? You know, the thing that you scrape some of the moisture off the shower with, when you've finished and you're going around "cleaning up" ? Well, Lois and I have been using the same "scraper thing" since we first got a shower installed where our old bathtub used to be, in our old house in Cheltenham, nearly 10 years ago.

flashback to 2014: Lois stands in the wreckage of our old bathroom

nearly a month later and our shiny-new

walk-in shower is beginning to take shape

Yes, it all happened nearly 10 years ago, and, much like us ourselves, that "scraper thing" is itself beginning to look very frayed at the edges to put it mildly - oh my goodness, yes!

To order a new "scraper thing", we first had to find out what they're called, and apparently it's a "squeegee". And our new one came with today's post from the "Peace with the Wild" people, which is nice - we can use it in our shower this afternoon.

The exciting thing about this "vegan", and generally eco-friendly, squeegee is that it's got a hole in the wooden handle so you can attach a bit of string and then hang it up on anything in the shower that's available, and looks handy and firm, which is nice, isn't it. I bet your squeegee hasn't got that! Oh yes, Lois and I make it a badge of honour always to be up-to-date with new sustainable technology, that's for sure!

In anticipation, I spend some time this morning trying to find our balls of string - we moved into this new-build home in Malvern nearly a year ago now, but loads of things that we know we brought here have yet to be found, needless to say. When the squeegee is delivered, however, it turns out to have a piece of string already attached, so that's all right.

when we take delivery of our shiny-new squeegee today,

we find that it comes with string already attached, which is a great relief

Do you remember the Woody Allen film, "Zelig" (1983), which is one of our favourite films?

Woody Allen as Zelig, in the film of the same name (1983),

here getting not just a second opinion, but also a 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th one

- what a madness that was !!!!

Lois and I learnt a lot from this film - there were several "take aways" for us. The hero, Leonard Zelig, played by Woody Allen, is told by his father, Morris Zelig, on his deathbed, that "life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering", and that the only advice he could give his son was to "save string".

Since Lois and I first saw the film, I had always thought that "saving string" was maybe an American thing, or maybe even a Jewish thing, but apparently not.

Lois tells me today that in the book she is currently reading, Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) admitted to habitually getting her pockets "full of little hanks of [string], picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come".

And Gaskell hated it when she saw people recklessly cutting the string from a parcel instead of "patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold".

Gaskell also wrote about an old-codger penny-pinching friend of hers who hated the waste of paper involved whenever people used that recklessly pound-foolish new invention of the Victorian era - envelopes !!! And he particularly hated it when his daughters used a whole sheet of paper to write a 3-line acceptance to an invitation, writing "on only one of the sides".

What waste! What profligacy!

What madness!!!

Or is it?

When I think about it, Lois and I are much the same. If we do a print on our printer that only takes up one side of the paper, we never throw it away. We tear it carefully into two pieces, to use later to write a shopping list on, or something similar. And we're still using some of the old torn-in-half "cover sheets" that I scrounged from my office in the months before I retired, nearly 18 years ago now, in March 2006.

Don't worry, incidentally, they're just cover-sheets and all completely unclassified haha! [So "The Realm" is still safe - that's a relief haha! - Ed]

18:00 Our daughter Sarah arrives from her home in nearby Alcester to spend the night here. And with her are our twin granddaughters, 10-year-old Lily and Jessica, who are still in their school uniforms, having come straight from school.

our 10-year-old twin granddaughters, still in their school uniforms,

arrive with our daughter Sarah to spend the night here

The twins are particularly excited this weekend, because on Monday their class is going on a bell-boating trip on the river, possibly on one of the 9 British rivers called "the Avon", with their teacher, the nice Mr Palmer. And the twins' dad, Sarah's house-husband husband Francis, is going to be helping out on the trip, together with 3 of the other parents.

"What exactly is bell boating????" I hear you cry.

Well, probably you don't cry that, because I expect you know already, but Lois and I had never heard of bell-boating.

And Jessica assures us that "bell boats are incredibly stable, so you don't need to worry, Granny and Poppa", which is a relief, to put it mildly!

20:00 For once, Lois and I don't watch any TV this evening. And we all sit and spend the evening just chatting, and watching one of my old 1980's pop music video DVDs, which is nostalgic for Sarah.