I'm happy to report that Lois, my wife of 52 years, seems to be getting her driving "mojo" back. After 2-3 years of me doing all the driving, because she doesn't particularly like doing it, she's been forced this month to do all the driving, because I'm not allowed to drive for 6 weeks after my hip replacement operation.
This morning she has to drive us both to our doctor's surgery so we can get our COVID booster. And immediately she pulls out of our driving space in front of our house, I start feeling a bit scared - that's how I REALLY REALLY know she's got her mojo back - it's the tell-tale sign haha!
flashback to Thursday - with me in the passenger seat, Lois
takes me out for one of her first "practice drives" after my operation
In her natural style she drives much more aggressively than me, keeping the car - in my humble opinion - too close to the car in front, and not leaving a satisfactory braking space.
And now at last she's doing it again - and I feel so proud of her !!!! Awwwww, Lois !!!!!
Do you remember Stephen Potter's advice to car passengers wishing to make sure that they were somehow one-up on their driver? His advice was, that if the car's driver had Lois's style, to be sure to make annoying silly imaginary "brake and clutch" movements with their feet while sitting in the passenger seat, or even imitating the squeal of brakes from time to time while being driven perhaps a little shall-we-say hot-bloodedly?
In came as a result of Potter's study of what he called the annoying "Back-Seat Drivership" of his friend Godfrey Plaste. Potter noted,
Well, I would never dream of behaving like that with Lois in the driving seat. I've always been quite envious of her hot-bloodedness - a side of her that she seldom shows to others, apart from me, I'm glad to say, to put it mildly!
Potter's friend, Godfrey Plaste, seen here saluting
passing drivers, even when he was being driven by somebody else
10:00 We arrive at the doctor's surgery way too early - 9:55 am for a 10:20 appointment, even though the surgery had expressly asked people
not to turn up early for their COVID boosters. The nurse doesn't object, however, and this year there's no queue, even. Isn't the NHS wonderful?!!! Somebody somewhere is looking after us, that's for sure.
I have been secretly nervous that there'd be a queue out of the door and into the car-park like last April, and with my shiny new hip still "bedding itself in" inside my body, I didn't want to be standing in a hugely long queue of old codgers shuffling a few inches forward every 10 seconds, thank you very much!
flashback to last April: we take our places at the end of a long queue of
old codgers that's slowly snaking its way round a corner of the surgery building
And the only other "punters" that we do see this morning are at least as old and doddery as us, which is a relief. The surgery must be adopting a strict "oldies" first policy, we suspect. I had been afraid that Lois would be forced to ask for a wheel-chair for me, if there had been a long slow queue, which would have been a bit of a malarkey, to put it mildly. As it was, I find I'm able to make it through the building's long corridors under my own steam.
But you would not BELIEVE how relieved I feel when we're both back in the car in the car-park with our new booster jabs inside us and now ready to ride furiously home again, thanks to Lois's new-old "driving mojo", which is nice!
with our booster jabs safely inside us, Lois prepares to drive
us home in her new-old "hot-blooded" style, which is nice!
10:30 When we get home, our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica, have already arrived for one of their frequent weekend stays at our house.
The twins immediately settle down to demolish the most enormous bowls of Cheerios you could ever imagine. Nobody can get more Cheerios into a bowl than the twins can.
What's that all about, eh? Once more they arrive here mid-morning, not having had any breakfast. Lois and I, growing up in Britain in the 1950's , were told, and firmly believed, that we would die at the very least, if we went out of the house without having had breakfast! [What do you mean, 'die at the very least' ? - Ed]
After bringing their stuff into the house, Sarah and the twins plus Lois leave me to do my hip exercises, while they go out for a walk over the common followed by lunch at a local café.
our daughter Sarah takes the twins and Lois for a walk on
the local common, followed by lunch at a nearby café
I always encourage Lois to take full advantage of Sarah and the twins' presence to inject a bit of a special kind of fun into her daily life. She has lots of extra duties helping me recuperate, and particularly since my operation this month, I have to be very careful with my movements to avoid dislocating my new hip, so I'm not much help in the kitchen, or tidying up generally.
Not that Lois and I don't have our own kind of fun together, but she also needs a bit of going-out-and-doing-things fun, which I can't help her with at the moment, at least, not for a few weeks.
20:00 The evening passes with an attempt to watch a so-called "children's film", entitled "102 Dalmatians" (Disney).
we start watching "102 Dalmatians", while Lois works
on the "Enigma" puzzle in this week's Radio Times
It's been a source of endless fascination for me over the last 10 years to observe the differences between our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica. The same genes, the same upbringing etc, but with the twins showing quite marked differences from each other from a really early age.
Jessica is perfectly happy watching the film, but Lily, who's more sensitive generally, is soon showing huge signs of distress at the prospect of cute little puppies getting a bit of rough treatment from the film's monster-woman main character, Cruella de Vil, played by Glenn Close.
In response to Lily's obvious distress we soon switch to watching an old version of the 1980's game show, The Crystal Maze, that Sarah was herself addicted to when she was around the twins' sort of age.
How time flies !!!!!
21:00 Sarah and the twins go to bed, exhausted by all the fresh air they've had and all the walking that they've done today. Lois and I call it a day an hour later, exhausted more generally, I would say, summing up haha!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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