Yes, phew - what a scorcher! And weathermen say there's more to come!
It sounds like a joke but I'm alerted to the upcoming 79F (26C) heatwave horror, due to start Monday, by Steve, our eagle-eyed American brother-in-law in Pennsylvania in a timely email from him today, ending in a pertinent question, which I ask my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois about on our daily walk today.
Well, are we ready for it? And the answer from Lois this morning is a tentative-sounding "Well...maybe", adding, "thank goodness at least we've got our new motorised patio awning in place."
flashback to yesterday: Lois sips a coffee from
her "Smarties" mug as we "road-test"
our shiny new motorised patio awning,
installed the previous day
To get things into perspective, however, it's maybe not so much of a "heatwave horror" as all that, because, in a additional background email, Steve writes that over there in Pennsylvania "it's been in the low 90's [i.e. about 33C - Ed] for the past 3 days and will be in the mid-to-upper 90's through the weekend", adding, "Thank God for A/C".
It's essential not to lose your sense of humour in these trying times, though, isn't it. No wonder that some wags in the Government over there have been suggesting "opening the windows on the east and west coasts to get a bit of a through-draught.
Hahaha! We all had a jolly good laugh over that, didn't we! But there's a more serious point here also - don't you wish sometimes that our own government officials could be a bit less po-faced sometimes and let their sense of humour - if they've got one (!) - come out in public for once. It doesn't hurt, fellas, honest!!!!
Lois takes me for a walk this morning through
the long-grass beside the Hereford to Worcester railway line
14:00 I don't know if you knew my dear late mother, but if you did, you'll know that she liked her cups of tea, to put it mildly. Without exaggeration, I would say that she probably drank a dozen to two dozen cups in the course of a single day. And to that end, she kept a kettle of water simmering on top of her gas-stove from morning to night, so that she could make a fresh cup of tea the very minute the previous cup had been drained.
It's what got her through the war, she used to say. And I don't think she was the only one in that generation who liked their cups of tea. Do you remember the old song, as sung by Gracie Fields?
Singer Gracie Fields, entertaining British troops
near Valenciennes, France, in April 1940
Well, it gives Lois and me something to talk about this afternoon, when we're in bed for our afternoon nap-time. And what a relief to find ourselves back in bed in the afternoon at last - well, we haven't been able to do it since Sunday, due to pressure of workmen calling or threatening to call and then not turning up etc. What madness!
And it's not long after we get under the covers before Lois's Huawei starts beeping under the bedclothes, and my Samsung soon starts "diddling" in response - let me tell you haha!
Lois's Huawei a-beeping and my Samsung a-diddling
like crazy, under the bedclothes this afternoon
A good question to raise, because back in 1938 the UK accounted for about half the total world's import of black tea - at 200,000 tons annually. My goodness!!! But during World War II this tonnage dropped by 45% due to the threat to shipping posed by German submarines and aircraft.
What was the government's answer to this obvious threat to British morale?
Richard writes, "Tea was rationed from July 1940, with each adult receiving two ounces of tea a week which would allow about three cups of tea a day. Tea didn’t come off the ration until the 5th of October 1952.
weekly adult ration in the UK during World War II
"To avoid a morale crisis, in 1942 the Government decided to buy every available pound of tea from all over the world. Some sources indicate that the largest government purchases in 1942 were, in order of weight, bullets, tea, artillery shells, bombs and explosives.
"The tea was imported by the same routes as all the other foodstuffs the UK needed to survive. It came across in convoys, either the Indian Ocean/South Atlantic convoys or the Atlantic convoys - all running the gauntlet of the U-Boats.
Fascinating stuff isn't it !!!! [If you say so! - Ed]
Later I check our own food stocks, because we've got an Ocado supermarket delivery coming tomorrow, and I find that we're okay at present, but we'll probably need to restock next week haha!
flash forward to Friday morning - I check our tea stocks
that stand next to our kettle. We should be okay for a
couple of days before we need to re-order....
..especially as we've got a few extra boxes
in the larder, in case of emergency haha!!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch an interesting documentary about Artificial Intelligence on the PBS America channel.
And how fascinating that, in a way, it all goes back to Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing and his insightful prediction that "by the end of the century, machines will be able to answer our questions in a manner indistinguishable from a real person": this criterion has become a bit of a yardstick in the AI industry, where question-answering processes are being designed so as to pass what's become known as "the Turing test".
Lois and I have read about self-drive cars, obviously, but we hadn't realised that it's no good them being powered by a computer the size of a large building, because you'd never fit it into the boot. Hence the use of things called "liquid neural networks", which are a lot more compact, and can fit in, even if you're also carrying a bunch of suitcases.
And they can imitate the thoughts in a driver's brain with just 19 liquid neurons, inspired by the brain of a tiny worm, called C. elegans, known for its navigational skills.
some typical C. elegans worms navigating
their way through a dark stretch of water
There's plenty in the programme about the beneficial effects of AI - the presenter himself has a prosthetic arm that he can move just by thinking about it. But there's plenty also about the dangers to our world, when for example we can no longer tell real videos from fake ones, and the dangers to the survival of the human race, if the robots decide they don't need us any more - yikes!
Coincidentally there's an article today in our copy of "Which?", the consumer magazine, that "plopped" through our letter box today, as Lois points out to me.
21:00 We lighten the mood for bed by watching another old episode of 1970's sitcom "Are You Being Served?" about staff in the clothing department of a large London department store, "Grace Brothers".
Marvellous stuff isn't it! And every bit as fresh as when the episode was first broadcast, back in 1975!
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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