Danskcolin: Saturday October 7th 2023

An easy day for me - Lois drives off with our daughter Sarah and Lily and Jessica, our 10-year-old twin granddaughters, to Malvern Library. The idea is that Lois, as a resident of the town now, for, incredibly, almost a year, can join the library today and start borrowing books, either for herself or for the twins: the twins are 10 years old and are voracious readers, to put it mildly. And the little library at nearby Alcester, where the family lives, is quite limited in scope and numbers of books.

See? It's all beginning to make a crazy kind of sense, isn't it: admit it !!!!

Lois goes off to the library with our daughter Sarah and the twins,

leaving me alone in the house - a rare event these days

So, obviously, I have the house to myself for the moment - but not for long, presumably so I just plan to have a couple of cups of Earl Grey tea and just "potter around".

I'm rarely on my own here, because Lois and I, as two old codgers, normally just rattle round this house like two peas in a drum, mainly consorting with each other all day and all night, and we're rarely more than a few feet away from each other - which is fine by me.

Call me unambitious if you like haha!

just me on my own here, pottering around this house

- call me unambitious if you like haha !!!!

Did you read about that pickle in Minneapolis on Onion News the other day, you know - the one that finally got to spend some time on his own? It's not easy for pickles, is it, generally. You know, squashed maybe for weeks or even months in a little jar with a bunch of other pickles that you didn't choose to be rubbing shoulders with, and maybe not particularly like, even - it can't be any "picnic" can it!

Oh!

And there the above Onion story ends, and the website then goes on to display some amusing notes you can leave for your neighbours when they annoy you.

A pity, because I would have liked more detail, particularly about the stabbing! And let's hope nothing like that happens to me during my hopefully short period of solitude here in Malvern this morning, with, say, a giant fork piercing the roof of the house, and coming down to horribly skewer me.

Who wants that!

I suppose it's not very likely. However, I write down the phone number of the local police on my little pad, just in case: you can't be too careful, can you haha!!!

included for research purposes: some typical

"nasty notes" you can leave for your neighbours

11:00 Yikes! The time's getting on now, and Lois, Sarah and the twins are still not back from the library.

Luckily, thanks to the magic of smartphones, Lois and Sarah eventually send me a message - they've discovered that there's a special event happening at the town library today, an event which Lois and I didn't know about, as we're allegedly "too busy" to read the local paper, the Malvern Gazette.

Yes, what are the chances of that happening, eh? This festival will be just up the twins' street, and it's no surprise when they all decide to have lunch at the library café, and stay the rest of the morning and afternoon there, sending me pictures by the magic of smartphones, as the day progresses.

12:00 The postman drops by with a letter, for Sarah by coincidence, and it gives me a surprise - it's from the City of Wanneroo in Western Australia.

Eventually "the penny drops" - Sarah, and husband Francis and the twins spent 7 years in Western Australia from 2015 to 2023, becoming Australian citizens.

And of course, unusually in the free world, in Australia it's illegal for citizens not to cast their vote at election time. So Sarah and Francis will each have to vote, every time there's an election there, even the little local ones in City of Wanneroo North Ward. Otherwise they face a fine.

I understand why Sarah and Francis are keeping their Australian citizenship on, as well as their British citizenship, which is theirs for life anyway, whatever they do - who knows when you're going to need an alternative?

My late sister Kathy eventually got US citizenship, and after that she had the choice, at airports and the like, of joining either the US queue or the UK queue, depending on which looked shorter.

Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it haha !!!!!

13:00 I make myself one of my quick "scratch lunches" and then go upstairs to bed for the afternoon, as usual.

Today, for once, just like the proverbial "lonely pickle in the jar", I get our whole 5 ft bed to myself, although I'm still a bit anxious about the possibility of a giant fork coming through the window. It reminds me a bit of those afternoons when Lois and I are in bed and Martin the window-cleaner comes by with his famous menacing "pole".

flashback to June: Martin, our friendly local window-cleaner

comes to do our upstairs windows with his long pole...

I keep my smartphone by the bed and it's nice to see the pictures of today's Science exhibition coming in from Sarah and Lois, and making that delightful "notification" sound.

Jessica, in the pink jacket and Virtual Reality glasses,

having fun with the Flight Simulator

The twins also drive a tank today (also just in Virtual Reality), and do numerous other things, many of which I don't understand, and they also get to crush a strawberry and examine its DNA.

Would you like to crush a strawberry yourself and examine it's DNA? Well, you're in luck, because later I find out exactly how you do that when the excited twins bring the instructions home, and show me.

See? Simples, really, isn't it!

I don't know - we didn't do things like that when I was school, that's for sure!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

[You're not going to show us another picture of yourself when you were a schoolboy, are you? - Ed]

Well, seeing as how you're obviously interested, how about this one of me in my first year of grammar school: back row second from right.

flashback to 1957: me (back row, 2nd from right) in my first year of grammar school,

at Manchester, with my class 1-gamma classmates and our teacher, Mr Snook.

16:00 Lois, Sarah and the twins arrive back, and the twins can't stop talking about the day's excitements, which is so charming. However, they immediately fall completely silent when they open one of the many books they've borrowed from the library and become immediately engrossed. The library lets them each borrow 6 books, and they've taken full advantage, I see - no surprise there!

However, is it not worth all the money in the world to have grandchildren like that?

our 10-year-old twin granddaughters, Lily and Jessica

and the 12 books they've borrowed from the town library today

21:30 Sarah and the twins go up to bed, leaving Lois and me to watch half an hour of TV before turning in ourselves. We watch the first programme in a new series of the comedy news quiz "Have I Got News For You", presented tonight by Victoria Coren-Mitchell.

Predictably, perhaps, one of the questions tonight is all about the sacking of the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy.

And it's fortunate that tonight, team-leader Paul Merton has on his team, Carol Vorderman, who used to do the maths questions on the day-time quiz show "Countdown" - remember her?