Danskcolin: Tuesday January 9th 2023

Two sure signs of the New Year - Lois has planted something in the new "curvy" bit of her back garden flower bed, which is nice, our very first back-yard planting since we moved to this new-build house in Malvern just over a year ago.

It's just some grape-hyacinths (?) and some narcissi, but it's a start, isn't it. She's says the topsoil that local landscaper Adrian put down in the curvy bit (see picture) is really "friable" and "just heaven" to run her fingers through, so that's nice (???).

Let's just hope that none of that "friable" topsoil ends up in our scratch bacon-and-baked-beans lunch today! [It seems you evidently don't know what 'friable' means, Colin! - Ed]

flashback to last month: local landscaper Adrian installs "The Hasnip

Flowerbed" from his "pantomime range", one of his cheaper

options, based on the curves of local pantomime artist

Charlotte Hasnip (right), currently performing in "Rapunzel"

at Worcester's Swan Theatre

And - second sign that it's New Year - in our online order to supermarket giant Ocado today, we include two packs of Seville Oranges, and a few lemons, so that Lois can start on her this year's marmalade batch. Yum yum!

extract from the "fridge and freezer" portion of our

online grocery order to Ocado today: two packs of Seville Oranges

January just wouldn't be January without getting some marmalade on the go, now, would it! Just look at these flashback pictures starting with January 2016 and ending with Lois's famed record-breaking "monster batch" of 2021, those magic ten 1-lb jars that have seen us through till today. At time of writing, we're currently on the very last jar of her 2021 "production" - I don't think that's too grand a word for it.

January 2016 through January 2021: what we're calling

"The Marmalade Years", all pictures taken in six successive Januaries

in the kitchen of our former house in Cheltenham.

What a woman I married, back in 1972 ! Looking at these photos, it stares me in the face that Lois just doesn't get any less attractive with the passage of time, does she.

This gives me even more extra motivation to "keep Lois sweet". I don't want to risk us falling out and having to consult the local marriage guidance counsellor, and yes, you've probably guessed it, our nearest local counsellor is none other than that Laurie Hartford in the nearby village of Lower Wick. You know, the woman who's been plastered all over the local Onion News this month, following her work with that lovely, but troubled, local couple, the Carters.

Yikes! And I don't need to say it but you can guess who Laurie would side with if she was helping me and Lois, can't you. My goodness - it's a "no-brainer" really isn't it !!!

20:00 Here's another sign that it's January again. We've been waiting all day for it, and now it's here - Prof. Alice Roberts with the 4th programme in her annual TV series "Digging for Britain", the series which gives a digest of the most sensational archaeological discoveries made in the UK over the last 12 months.

Tonight, Alice is "doing" Eastern England, mainly in the county of Lincolnshire. And it's always nice also to see the city of Lincoln, isn't it - the former Roman town called Lindum Colonia: "lindum" being an old word for a pool, and "colonia" being the Latin word for a high-status retirement village for former soldiers, which is a nice idea.

And how nice it is to see that old 3rd century archway in Lincoln, the only Roman arch in Britain that you can still drive through. But take extra care when you go through, okay? I don't want you hitting one of the sides, and bringing the whole lot tumbling down, to put it mildly!

the route of the Roman road Ermine Street

which runs from York, through Lincoln, down to London

Historians know a lot about Roman Lincoln, but surprisingly perhaps not much is known about the countryside outside the modern-day city.

And until 2023, nobody knew that there was a complete high-status town just a couple of miles down the road towards London. Most Roman settlements left visible traces of ruins, and got built on etc, but this one totally disappeared under the soil for over 1500 years from the 4th century AD, and nobody knew it was there.

Disappeared until last year, that is - isn't that amazing?

Handily also for the residents, the town was on Ermine Street, so relatively easy access to Lincoln as well as to York and London. Archaeologists last year even found some 1500 plus year-old wheel ruts on it, just nearby.

And it turns out that this "vanished town", which flourished for 3 centuries from around 100AD, was quite a high-status place to be living. Archaeologists last year dug up all kinds of fancy jewellery, and also a piece of some poor sod's tombstone:

some of the finds: fancy jewellery....and...

....Latin inscriptions on some poor sod's tombstone...

Fascinating stuff!

21:00 We go to bed on a Channel 5 documentary about Hugh Hefner's "Playboy" Empire.

Lois and I didn't know that Hugh Hefner and his brother and sometime collaborator Keith, had a very conventional upbringing in Chicago, being brought up in a strict Methodist, religious household, in which he later confessed to "feeling trapped". Hugh's mother had ambitions for him to become a missionary.

It wasn't Hefner's ambition to become a Methodist missionary, but it wasn't his ambition to start a men's magazine like Playboy, either. Just to be a publisher was his dream.

He fell into the world of "glamour /porn " publishing a bit by chance, after getting hold of a set of nude photos of Marilyn Monroe These were pictures from a photo shoot she had taken part in when still an unknown, trying to make it into the world of modelling. Hefner bought them up - at the time, back in the 1950's, they were thought to be "unpublishable" - no respectable publisher would publish nude photos back in those crazy, far-off days.

From that moment on, Hefner was "quids in", and the first edition of Playboy sold out. The rest is pretty much history, and Hefner was eventually opening clubs all over the world, staffed with his famously bunny-tailed waitresses, the "Bunny Girls".

He expanded into "swinging London" in 1966.

Lois and I didn't know, either, that the London Playboy Club, run by Hefner's associate Victor Lowndes, eventually became a big "jewel in the crown" of Hefner's empire - we had assumed it was just a pale imitation of his US venues, but not so. It attracted loads of celebrities: Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski got married in it. And after casinos were introduced into most of the Playboy Clubs in the 1970's, the London outlet seemed to flourish even when his US business outlets were in financial trouble - by 1978 the London club was the biggest casino in Europe, knocking all those South of France places "into a cocked hat".

What madness !!!!

Let's not forget "the dark side". Vulnerable women were brutally and shamelessly exploited and abused both in the Playboy clubs and in Hefner's Californian mansions, as is now well known. But it's also clear that women "with their heads screwed on" were able to take precautions and not get themselves into danger.

And it's interesting to see our own British former 1980's Sun Newspaper Page 3 Girl Samantha Fox recount how she was careful to take her mum along with her when she arrived to do a photo-shoot.