Danskcolin: Tuesday February 6th 2024

08:00 It's another early start for Lois and me - and we are both 77 you know [Will you stop telling us that! - Ed], so it's no joke! You see, Lois has a 10 am appointment for an eye-test at the local Specsavers in Malvern's premier Retail Park.

There should be no trouble, though, I reassure her. The so-called "Optician Wars" of the "noughties" decade (2000-2009) are a thing of the past in our area. Remember those headlines om Onion News?

The game-changing story continued as follows - I expect you still have the cuttings from Worcester News, don't you?

10:00 Those days seem just like a bad dream now, don't they. And certainly when we arrive at Specsavers this morning for Lois's eye examination, all seems quiet and peaceful. And we feel instantly at home because, while the assistants and optometrists etc are certainly young or youngish, all the other customers are as old as we are, or older, which is nice!

While Lois has her eyes looked at, I take a seat in the shop's compact "waiting-area" along with 4 other old codgers. When she comes back from her test, it's a good result - Specsavers are going to refer her to a hospital at Worcester for NHS cataract surgery.

I take my seat in the shop's "waiting area" to observe the young

assistants and old codger patients, and take a few souvenir photos.

In the above photo, by the way, did you notice actress Mayim Bialik (crazy name, crazy gal!), the new "public face of Specsavers"? I'll make it easy for you by ringing her face in this doctored photo below, specially edited by my Graphics Team, ie me:

the new public face of the Specsavers Optician chain,

actress Mayim Bialik (ringed)

It was Mayim who famously "made glasses sexy for women" for the new millennium, wasn't it. Did you catch her dressed as a glamorous, bespectacled kangaroo in this classic episode of boyfriend Sheldon Cooper's video podcast, from the E4 Network's Big Bang Theory?

Amy dresses up as a kangaroo for boyfriend Sheldon

in a memorable "Fun With Flags" video podcast from "The Big Bang Theory"

And talking about "glamorous" - do you remember Amy's sexy low-cut dress that she buys, when she and Sheldon win the Nobel Prize for Physics, and get ready to travel to Sweden to attend the ceremony?

Here's the scene where Sheldon is writing his acceptance speech, planning to lambast many of his "mortal enemies", figures from his past, including school teachers, university colleagues, etc., all the people in his life who had told him that he would never succeed. He wants them all to "rue the day".

Amy, looking enchanting in her sexy spectacles, low-cut dress and little tiara, tries to discourage Sheldon, however, saying the Nobel Prize isn't about settling old scores. Remember?

Lois and I think Amy was 100% "on the button" with this.

Tremendous fun, though, wasn't it!!!!

And who was it who made glasses "sexy" for men? Come on, you remember!! It was film-star Michael Caine, wasn't it, spiritual leader of Britain's thousands of "nosey neighbours".

After all, you're never going to be one of the country's top "nosey neighbours" if you've got the incorrect lenses in your frames, and everything looks blurred. It's not exactly rocket science is it !!!!

flashback to Caine in his younger years,

seen here checking up on his neighbours' activities

flashback to a few years ago: Lois "doing a Caine" one early morning

at the bedroom window of our former house in Cheltenham,

as, still in our nightwear, we monitor the suspicious delivery of

building materials to one of our near-neighbours across the road

Happy days !!!!!!!

But back to reality !!!! [Do you even know what reality is, Colin? - Ed]

Valentine's Day is only 8 days away, and I've got to decide on my presents to Lois.

I've "gone firm" on the pictures of the kind of skirts I'm interested in. Lois told me the other day the heart-breaking incident from her past, which I'm sure is certain to come up in her acceptance speech if we ever get a Nobel Prize and travel to Sweden.

The thing is this - as a youngster of maybe 6 years or so, Lois was famously made to give up her favourite plaid skirt by her parents, on the grounds that she had "worn it to death".

For my Valentine's gift to her, getting a skirt of the right length will be the crucial part - I don't want to spoil the surprise by ostentatiously taking a tape measure to her thigh, now do I haha !!!

Lois likes her skirts knee-length or a fraction below, and I'm plumping for 20 inches (51cm).

So shorter than Kate's....

..but longer than this tiny scrap of material, obviously!!!

In case the skirt isn't right, however, I'm backing it up with a couple of heavily-reduced-price books from the Postscript Catalogue that came with the post today. The first is "The Dark Side of Oxford".

Lois is Oxford born and bred, and she's as Anglo-Saxon as anything - she's a modern-day version of that feisty Anglo-Saxon Queen of Mercia, Æthelflæd (c.870-918 AD). And although her direct ancestors were God-fearing folk, some of her less-direct relatives certainly got on the wrong side of the law in Victorian times, although only over some well-documented petty misdemeanours luckily. So I think this book about Oxford "low life" will be just the ticket for her.

Aethelflaed (c.870-918AD)

the feisty Anglo-Saxon Queen of the Mercians

My second choice of book stems from my knowledge of Lois's famously deep-rooted aversion to any form of unfairness in life. And what section of humanity have suffered the most in this way? Well, it's the 50% of the population who are women, needless to say.

So I've chosen a half-price copy of Time Heath's "Hitler's Housewives", all about German women on the Home Front during World War II.

Our elder daughter Alison has inherited this trait from Lois and is herself acutely apt to show her displeasure at any unfairness meted out to women. Recently, while waiting on Haslemere Railway Station for the train to London, she posted this picture on social media of the latest book she's reading, all about the DNA discoveries of Rosalind Franklin - "one woman did the work, three men took the glory". That says it all, doesn't it.

21:00 Lois and I wind down for bed with the second programme in crazy art critic Waldemar Januszczak's new TV series on "Mannerism" - the weird period of art history that nobody wants to talk about - the "loony" period "wedged in" between the Renaissance and the Baroque.

And Waldemar shows us some right "doozies" in his programme tonight, that's for sure. Mannerism was the first "school" to really accept women artists, artists like Properzia de' Rossi. Legend has it that she learnt how to sculpt by carving things into the stones of peaches and cherries.

What a woman !!!!

In Bologna Cathedral she made this spicy relief set in Egypt, of Joseph running away from Zuleika, a woman who has taken a fancy to him - Zuleika was being naughty here, because she was already married - to a "bigwig" in the Egyptian court of the day.

And here's another "doozie" for you - Correggio's "mannerist" painting of the god Jupiter and the nymph Io. Here, Jupiter (or Zeus), is secretly pleasuring Io, but he's disguised as a cloud of fog. So Io doesn't even know he's there, which I guess must have meant that she could concentrate more, do you think, without Zeus "chuntering on" about the latest gossip from Mount Olympus maybe?

Or look at Bronzino's famous "Allegory with Venus and Cupid".

Yes, why is Cupid kissing his mother Venus? And why, also, has Venus got her tongue out? I think we should be told, don't you?

And if YOU know, drop me a postcard, will you? By Friday if possible, if that's not asking too much! Or use email or the comments section on this blog if you like - unlike the postal service it's free, so the price is right!