Saturday October 21st 2023

Well, Lois and I are both 77 - yes, we're so old that we remember food rationing booklets, and we remember King George VI's passing and watching our late Queen's coronation on tiny 12 inch black-and-white TV screens, and all that stuff.

And in particular, we remember "prefabs" - the mainstay of those post-World War II emergency mass housing projects, basic but comfortable 2-3 bedroom "huts" with corrugated roofs, assembled in factories and delivered on the backs of lorries to hundreds of bomb-shattered towns up and down the country. 

Oh yes, Lois certainly remembers "prefabs", all right! She lived in a prefab for the first few years of her life.

flashback to the late 1940's: little Lois swinging on a swing outside 

the "prefab" in Summertown, Oxford where she and her parents lived

Yes, and Lois knew all about how to have fun, even then. And she still knows how to do it. She's a bit of a "goer" - to put it mildly! 

And today she proves beyond all reasonable doubt that, in the words of the old saying, "there's life in the old dog yet", during a trip to an adventure playground in the middle of Malvern, with our daughter Sarah, who's 46 herself (yikes!), and Sarah's 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica. 

Yes, Lois is "still swinging after all these years".

Lois, "still swinging after all these years", in an adventure

playground in Malvern today with our 10-year-old twin granddaughters

What a woman I married! 

And Lois still needs fun, no doubt about that, and I try to do my best to give her some. 

But am I giving her enough? She's always "game", but am I giving her every bit as much as she so obviously needs? I probably ought to be told, but I'd rather you didn't say anything, if you don't mind haha! 

No more caustic comments on postcards, thank you very much haha (again) !!!

flashback to the 1990's: charity Red Nose Day, and Lois dresses up 

as a sportswoman and footballer for the old vicars in the Church of England 

care-home where she worked: just a rumour, but the County Air Ambulance 

was reportedly put on standby in the event of incidents or casualties 

among the vicars - but what crazy days those were!!!

12:00 Meanwhile this morning an email comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law in Norristown, Pennsylvania, with a link to a Guardian article all about the awful standards of the UK's new-build housing. This is very relevant to Lois and me, because we finally downsized in October 2022 and moved from a 1930's house in Cheltenham to a brand-new house here in Malvern.

Oh dear - and the article makes uncomfortable reading for us, no doubt about that. And, in the article, Persimmon, the building firm responsible for this partly-built 300-house development in Malvern, comes in for particular criticism for its standards, its unsatisfactory cost-cutting "hacks", and also the massive profits the firm is making. The only crumb of comfort for us is that, as far as we can tell, the defects with our particular house are on the minor side, compared to some of the faults detailed in this article. 

flashback to November 2022: I showcase our shiny-new home

for our other daughter Alison and her daughter Rosalind

I sit and cower in our brand-new home - and stacked up in the window behind me

you can see some of the disassembled cardboard boxes we were using

to cover the window in the evenings, just for minimal privacy, 

because at that stage we hadn't even had any window-blinds fitted

What a madness it all was !!!!!

14:00 Sarah and the twins depart for their rental home in Alcester. They have only stayed one night with us this weekend because Lois and I have an appointment to receive our COVID booster jab at our doctor's surgery this afternoon. And we've warned Sarah that we sometimes don't feel 100% after these jabs, and that we will probably want to go to bed for the rest of the weekend - oh dear!

We say goodbye to Sarah and the twins and drive off to the surgery in good time. We're a bit worried about parking problems etc and the queue. Last month, for our winter-flu jab, the old codger queue was snaking as far as 20 yards out of the building, and there were about 12 old codgers in front of us, even before we even got inside. 

 

What madness!!!! [That's enough madness for today, Colin. No more, please, or I'll have to ask you to take another dose of your medication! - Ed]

flashback to September: the "old codger queue" for winter flu jabs

finally snakes its way to inside the building, but we're still about

16 old codgers away from one of the nurses' rooms - oh dear!

15:00 We arrive home and have a cup of re-energising tea on the sofa. 

Unexpectedly Sarah and the twins pop in on us again, having failed to get to Alcester by their normal route because of horrendous tailbacks near Worcester, caused by the last two days of flooding. They stop by to pick up some of the usual "objets trouvés" - things that they forgot to pack in their little suitcases when they left us, and then they go on their way back to Alcester by a different, less flood-affected route.

15:30 Lois and I are on our own now, and we can go to bed, as planned. And what do you know? We feel 100% okay so far, but we stay in bed anyway, out of sheer self-indulgence, not getting up till 6 pm. 

18:00 Our usual early-evening routines go out the window, and instead, we first enjoy a Belgian bun each with another cup of tea on the sofa, then after that, a couple of pieces of toast, and we find ourselves just snacking on this and that, no proper meal. However, we did have fish and chips and peas when lunching with Sarah and the twins at midday, so that isn't really a problem. 

And "peas is good food" as the man said, so fair enough!!!!

And please note, also: contrary to much of the criticism about that now-famous remark, "that man" was using the correct singular verb-form here, "is" in this expression "peas is good food", because "pease" was originally a singular noun, from the Greek, "pison". It was later assumed by the English to be a plural form just because it ended in an "s-sound", just like cherries, which came originally from the French "cerise". 

See? It's all starting to make a crazy lot of sense now, isn't it!!!

a typically meagre medieval lunch, consisting of one "pease"

21:00 Eventually we get round to switching the TV on, so we can "wind down" for bed. We see last night's edition of the weekly comedy news quiz, "Have I Got News For You?".

As usual, there's a lot of fun to be had in the "Guessing the Blacked-out Bits of Newspaper Headlines" Round.

Team-captain Paul Merton suggests that the full headline could have been "Colin is concerned that his wife's having an affair with an octopus", which is a reasonable guess, we think.

It turns out, however, that the full, "unredacted" headline is actually another "climate change" reference, a topic that is very much a "hot issue" at the moment, that's for sure!

Enough said!

[A TV zoologist comments: Did presenter Bill Bailey really mean "eight pairs of shoes" were found in Colin's bedroom? Does that mean that there had been two octopi in bed with the diver's wife? This would be a first in all my 40 years of being a TV zoologist, that's for sure, and I've heard some stories in my time, stories that would make the hairs on your neck stand on end, I can tell you. Oh yes!]

[That's enough TV zoologist comments! - Ed]

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