08:00 Lois and I feel a certain excitement in the air when we wake up this morning. We check our bedside smartphones to see what the "buzz" or the "vibe" is this morning in Worcestershire. It's hard to suppress our excitement but we have to avoid too much noise coming from our bedroom, because we've got our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twins staying with us in the two neighbouring bedrooms.
How often have you heard people say, "Nothing ever happens in Worcestershire!". It's become a bit of a truism hasn't it!
Well, things are happening in Worcester this weekend, no doubt about that, and the Worcester News (WN) has put their ace cub-reporter Charlotte Albutt straight onto the story.
But wait - there's more excitement on the way! As we eat breakfast, a woman in her 70's, a Lib-Dem volunteer, pushes the local party's latest newsletter, the West Worcestershire Bugle, through our letterbox.
The Lib-dems are making a bid to unseat the western part of the county's Conservative MP at the next election. The party is telling voters that only the Lib-Dems can beat the Conservatives, so a vote for third place Greens or fourth place Labour is a wasted vote.
Yikes - too much excitement, particularly for a Sunday! Let's all calm down for a minute shall we haha!
11;00 Cups of coffee all round, and a chance to calm down and meditate on life.
At last I have some peace and quiet to be able to think things out. "What an incredibly kind-hearted woman I married 51 years ago!", I think to myself. Lois is unbelievably self-sacrificing at times.
For the second Sunday in a row, events are conspiring to prevent Lois from taking part in her church's two Sunday meetings at Tewkesbury, the meetings which mean so much to her, and help her through the week.
Firslty, Lois's back is still playing up, so she doesn't want to attend the meeting in person.
And secondly, our daughter Sarah and her twin daughters' "stuff" - (1) Sarah's weekend unpaid overtime from her accountancy job and (2) the twins' artwork or English homework - is all over our only really serviceable table, so Lois can't comfortably take part in her Sunday meetings online either.
And anyway, Lois feels that she ought to be cooking a lunch for Sarah and the twins today, because Sarah's got a really heavy cold, and also, after our visitors drive home to Alcester this afternoon Sarah has to cook a week's worth of lasagne for the girls' school lunchboxes. Poor Sarah !!!!
See? Sarah's our daughter, and she needs her mother's help, and Lois doesn't hesitate for a second. What a woman!
11:30 Time to start the twins' homework. And their work this morning throws up an interesting question that leads to an impassioned debate about correct punctuation among us three adults.
The twins' teacher, the nice, charismatic Mr Palmer, has set the class an interesting punctuation question:- if a sentence ending in a question mark or an exclamation mark and enclosed by speech marks is followed by a "she said" or something similar, do you put a comma before the "she said"?
Do you see what I mean?
"What do you want?", she said. Is the comma incorrect here? Or "I don't believe you!", she said. Ditto - is the comma wrong?
After some research on the internet, we conclude that such commas are indeed incorrect.
But what do YOU think? And there's a tantalising shade of difference between the website's "there is no need to..." and "not required" (ie unnecessary but not wrong), and the website's final verdict of "incorrect", isn't there. Did YOU notice that?
Let me know by close of play Monday (20th) if you can, because the twins' English homework has a 2-day deadline imposed by Mr Palmer, and the twins are naturally anxious to get this one right, so be willing to put yourselves out a bit, won't you. It's worth dropping anything else that you happen to be doing - apart from (possibly) jury service, no question about that!
And don't despise these punctuation questions - they're by no means trivial or "piddling", as some people would have you believe!
Remember that when the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died in 1953, questions on the placing of apostrophes were on his lips when he finally expired, "so alone, in that place on the other side of the broad Atlantic", as we found out in an interesting documentary a few days ago.
Seth Gourley, tech billionaire and CEO of the "your mother's favourite website" Faceplace, has been found dead at City Public High School's 30-year reunion evening.
Detective Seattle and trainee Kumail Nanjiani are soon checking out the crime scene.
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