Danskcolin: Monday December 4th 2023

07:00 It's 7 am and Lois and I are already awake, discussing curvy women!

"Why so?", I hear you ask.

Well, the reason is that local landscaper Adrian and his brother will be banging on our door at 8 am ready to engineer a transformation - and that's not too strong a word! - of our back garden, and we've got to choose one of the curvy women in their "pattern-book" as the model for the curvy "yin" side of our planned "yin and yang garden".

Adrian's "curvy pattern book"

Both Lois and I quite fancy "The Kardashian" but it's awfully expensive, so in the end I have to say that we plump for the "cheapo" option in Adrian's pattern book, on the book's very last page, based on the popular local pantomime artist trio, Sudworth, Brown and Hasnip, who'll be performing "Rapunzel" pantomime, for the Kay's Panto, at Worcester's "Swan Theatre" this coming Christmas and New Year Season.

flashback to yesterday: Worcester News's ace cub reporter

Joseph Broady breaks the pantomime story in the local press

The decision has been made now, it's "The Hasnip" for us, and the die is cast!

Yes, we're going for "The Hasnip" for the "yin" side of our garden, and "The Sudworth" for the "yang" side. We're passing on "The Brown", which we feel has a distinct air of yin-and-yang-combined, which we think may offend some of our more conservative neighbours. But we'll see!

the master plan for our "yin and yang" back garden -

feminine and curvy on the left and no-nonsense on the right

And before we've hardly had our breakfast, the two men are already here, talking film stars and pantomime stars with Lois and finalising the plan for our garden's planned curvy "yin" side.

Lois and Adrian discuss Charlotte Hasnip's curves,

and the best way to immortalise them for all time

Soon the two men are digging out a load of soil, and, as you'd expect in the garden of a new-build home there's plenty of "builders' rubble" to dispose of. What a madness it all is !!!!

11:30 Excitement mounts again at 11:30 am when a lorry stops on the road outside our house, delivering the topsoil loam, and also the railway sleepers that Adrian is going to making the framework for our raised beds.

Lois gives a little scream when the lorry guy swings the pack of sleepers up through the air and dangerously close to our living-room window. Yikes! But these guys are known for their playful sense of humour, aren't they, so I persuade Lois not to worry too much, and, as I predicted, he misses the window by a good 2 feet, which is reassuring, to put it mildly!

the railway sleepers are delivered for

our raised beds...

...and the bags of topsoil loamy stuff

Soon Lois and I are getting our first glimpse of "The Hasnip", the guys' vision of the Charlotte Hasnip effect, on the curvy side, while the guys bring the railway sleepers round to store under the roof of their temporary gazebo.

Exciting, or what!!!!!

local pantomime artist Charlotte Hasnip's curves,

now immortalised for ever on the left hand side of our garden

By lunchtime the rain is getting so heavy that the guys decide to quit for today and come back tomorrow. Tomorrow they'll put the topsoil in, and make up the raised beds out of the 8'6" x 10" railway sleepers - the beds will be a "double sleeper" height, because we feel anything much taller than that will look out of place: but let us know your views, won't you!

13:00 We decide to celebrate the progress made so far, by popping out to get our synchronised statins. Lois and I have been married for 51 years, but we've never really managed to synchronise many of our daily bodily functions, like statin intake - until now, that is!

our statins - we both take the 20mg sort,

which makes life simpler

By an unconscious strategy of Lois often forgetting to take her statin at bedtime, and me not noticing that my statins have run out, we've gradually come to "synch" our requirements on today's December 4th date. And our intention is to keep it that way, because it saves a trip to the pharmacy when we run out of the pills.

our local doctor's surgery and attached pharmacy

And today, Lois is able to dash into the pharmacy to get both of our 8-weeks-worths, while I sit in the car in an arguably illegal parking spot, which is nice!

We're very much older generation and "old school", as you know. And I think younger people achieve this sort of coordination much more quickly than we have been able to do, like these young flatmates who've already managed to synchronise their periods.

Oh to be young again haha!!!!

14:00 In bed again for our afternoon nap, we discuss an email that's come in from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend. Apparently the Hungarian press has already broken the story of this year's "Word of the Year", as determined by the Oxford English Dictionary.

And apparently the winner has already been announced and it's "rizz", a word which Lois and I have never even heard, in our entire lives!!!! Now at last we'll HAVE to admit we're getting old, that's for sure!!!

And yet a bunch of Hungarian teens obviously know what "rizz" is all about, which is weird!.

The Oxford English Dictionary, it seems, defines 'rizz' as "style, charm or attractiveness, and the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner" and can be used to refer to a person who is able to "use their charms to sexually attract others". But it can also be used as a verb, for example "to rizz up" means "to attract or tempt (sexually)".

Who knew? [I think everybody knew, except for you two noggins!!! - Ed]

And we haven't even heard of last year's word either, "goblin-mode", which is defined as "an unabashedly arbitrary, lazy, negligent or greedy behaviour that rejects social norms or expectations."

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

16:00 We recover our morale with the puzzles in this week's Radio Times, scoring, for the second week running, an amazing 9 out of 10 on the intellectually prestigious "Egghead" questions, while failing miserably on "Popmaster" with a mere score of 3.

See how many of these YOU know!

20:00 Tonight, as we're both now very much in a "quizzy" kind of a mood, we decide to "build on success" by watching this week's edition of one our favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking.

Quite apart from the challenging lateral thinking questions, it's always nice when presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell keeps up to date with progress on her latest novel - have you noticed?

Good luck with that one, Victoria. But as Lois and I know so well, Victoria is never one to duck a good challenge, so watch this space, that's what we say!

And here's one of tonight's challenging "lateral thinking" questions. Can you see the connection between these 4 "things"?

Do you know this one? Yes, you're right, they describe people in the privileged position of having the right to sit in one of their country's legislative bodies, like the UK's House of Lords, where 26 bishops of the Church of England have the right to sit.

And how about this one.....

What's the fourth element going to be in this sequence?

Yes, right again! It's a question about British monarchs and their shortest-serving Prime Ministers with the same forename as the monarch, of course, in chronological order.

Under George III, the shortest-serving prime minister with a first name of George was George Grenfell and under George IV, the shortest-serving prime minister with a first name of George was George Canning. Under William IV it was William Lamb (Viscount Melbourne).

The next time this happened was under our late Queen Elizabeth, with her short-serving Prime Minister Liz Truss of course.