Unusually, I'm going to be on my own for most of today. Normally Lois is here with me, and we live in each other's pockets 24/7, on the sofa, at the dinner-table, on our patio, in our little car, in our bed - a situation I'm very happy with.
living in each other's pockets - it's so nice and we're so lucky,
but there's a downside, that's for sure.
There is a downside, however, for both of us - we never really do very much that demands a lot of concentration, because we're always chatting or having one of our many regular daily drinks of tea and coffee together, doing a crossword, going out in the car, or watching something on TV. You know? That kind of thing.
Plus, Lois has more or less given up driving except very occasionally, so if she needs to go anywhere I normally take her.
And if either of us needs to do something which demands concentration, it seems to take forever to finish, that's for sure, too.
if either of us needs to do anything that requires
concentration it seems to take forever - oh dear!
Today, however, will be different.
Lois is going to go to the Mazie Maze at Powick, near Worcester, with our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twin daughters Lily and Jessica, who are staying with us for a couple of nights. And I can't go because somebody's got to stay in to take in a couple of deliveries.
Yikes! I'm going to be here all on my own all day - help !!!!
09:00 The day starts slowly - I know that Lois is anxious, in view of the weather forecast, that she, plus Sarah and the twins, get going fairly early with their trip to the Maize Maze. However, first, the girls have got to do the extra maths study that our son-in-law Francis has been scheduling for them for months, starting right back in the times when they were all still living in Australia.
early morning: Sarah helps the twins, still in their pyjamas, with the extra
maths study that their father Francis has scheduled for them for today
The pressure is on, because the family is now back in England and living in Alcester, Warwickshire. And Warwickshire is one of the many counties in this part of the country with what some would call an old-fashioned education policy - all children in the county still have to take the terrifying Eleven-Plus exam, to decide whether or not they can go on to one of the county's prestigious grammar schools at age 11. Lily and Jessica have the added handicap that they've moved from Australia to England in the last couple of months, and at their local school here so many things are different for them from their schooldays in Australia.
a typical scene as 10-11 year old kids from local counties
struggle to take the terrifying Eleven Plus exam
Lois and I often say how lucky Lily and Jessica are, when it comes to science and maths, because Sarah is a chartered accountant, has a maths background and works with figures every day in her job. And Francis has an engineering degree, so what could be better? Compare the situation for the majority of parents, who I'm sure wouldn't have a clue if they ever picked up a modern maths school textbook.
It's madness, but that's the modern world isn't it - oh dear!
later, when everybody's gone out, I sneak a look
at the girls' extra maths study workbook. I've got
a maths degree myself, but yikes: this is scary stuff !!!!!!
11:00 Eventually everybody goes off in Sarah's electric MG to the Maize Maze at Powick, near Worcester. Lois tells me later about some of the terrifying features of Sarah's electric car.
Sarah's white electric MG
A lot of the country lanes round here are quite narrow and lined with trees and hedgerows, but the car likes to keep you to the side of the road if it thinks you're straying towards the middle: this often means, in these parts, that it's trying to pull you left, into the hedge. You can disable this function, but you have to remember to do it every time you switch the engine on.
Also the car can be fooled, if, for instance, a bird flies across the road ahead, it sometimes thinks there's some sort of obstruction ahead and it forces you to slow down.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
11:30 Alone in the house I get going with my mountainous to-do-list. Lois and I are leading the new study-year's first meeting of our local U3A Intermediate Danish group on Thursday, and then on Friday I have to give a presentation on Elizabethan English to Lynda's local U3A "Making of English" group: I'm asking the members of Lynda's group to each analyse the English in about 70-80 lines of typical Shakespearean scenes, all taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth Act III.
I also have to set up a new phone system for the house that arrived yesterday from the Vonage phone company.
We live on a newbuild housing estate here in Malvern, and the builders have somehow managed to keep BT from wiring the houses up with standard telephone wiring. House-buyers here have no choice but to sign up with Fibre Nest for their broadband with a phone-via-internet option - we can change provider in due course, but we have to do a minimum period with Fibre Nest first.
Fibre Nest initially provided a phone-via-internet system as a substitute for conventional landline, but this month they told us that they were discontinuing this service, so I have changed to a company called Vonage. Typically for these crazy days, Vonage are expecting the home-owners to wire all the equipment up themselves and they just offer the phone number of an unhelpful helpdesk if you run into problems.
Needless to say, it takes me a while to figure out how to wire everything up, and the corner of our living-room is now a total mess of boxes and wires.
we've now gone live with Vonage Voice-over-Internet and the corner of our living-room is just a tangle of little boxes and wires
What madness!!!
Another little job I do is to order 100 first-class stamps online. The cost of these is going up 15p to £1.25 on Monday, so it will pay us to buy them now at the old price, saving us £15.
See? It's all starting to make some sort of crazy sense now, isn't it haha!
17:00 Lois, Sarah and the girls finally arrive home, just after I pour myself a gin-and-tonic, and I hear about their day at Maize Maze.
It's quite a place, this Maize Maze: lots of different mazes laid out in amusing shapes, as seen from the air, with lots of challenging challenges for curious youngsters to puzzle out, based on signs they come across in the mazes, you know the kind of thing! Plus secret codes you have to work out before you progress to the next bit of the game. You know, a bit like the Crystal Maze show that used to be on TV, with Richard O'Brien. And the twins just lapped it all up, needless to say.
the Maize Mazes, near Worcester
Sarah, Lois and the twins, with Lois showcasing
the question-sheets - yikes!
one of the typical question-and-answer sheets - yikes (again)!
lunch at the Maize Maze café - yum yum!
Tremendous fun!!!!!
19:00 After dinner, another evening of chat and YouTube, with the girls watching some children's series about a talking dog, Waffle, which is nice.
Ten years old is a magical age to be at, Lois and I think. Lily and Jessica can tell you all about basic science and the universe, the planets of the solar system etc, but they also talk to their cuddly toys as if they were real.
And also tonight, Lily finally loses her wobbly tooth, and she asks for pen and notepaper so that she can put the tooth under her pillow with a note for "the tooth fairy".
I wish I were 10 again haha !!!!!
flashback to the mid 1950's: me, aged 10, on the beach
with my father at Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset
However all of them, Lois and Sarah included, are dreadfully tired - they must have walked miles round all the mazes today, they think.
The twins, and even Sarah herself, all disappear up to bed about 9 pm, but Lois and I can hear a lot of noise coming from upstairs, so I think it's probably taking them all a bit of time to "settle down". Oh dear!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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