Saturday January 11th 2025 "Do YOU look like Rod Stewart from the rear? Most of us do, don't we!"

Oh dear, my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I still aren't doing very much all day, to put it mildly.

We're in our new house, but we're spending most of our time in bed [What's new there! - Ed]. While moving from our former home in Malvern Worcestershire into this new house in Liphook, Hampshire on January 3rd we both somehow managed to pick up our first really heavy colds for 5 years - an astonishing health record for UK residents, and one that we attribute to just hobnobbing 24/7 with each other - mostly hobbing with the occasional nobbing - first under lockdown, and then afterwards just because we liked it. What madness!!!

flashback to October: us looking round the house in Liphook that 

we eventually decided to buy - little did we know that we'd be spending 

most of our first week here in bed in this room - what madness!!!

We're also getting quite filthy. Afternoons used to be shower then bed, but at the moment we're skipping the shower bit and just doing the bed bit. 

We thought about having our first shower on Saturday afternoon, but we've put it off again, because the shower hasn't been used for a few weeks, we suspect, and Lois read that you can catch Legionnaires Disease off of long-unused shower-heads. Is that true? I think we should be told, don't you?

we wrap our shower-head in a plastic bag filled

with our last of our 2020 Lockdown stockpiles of disinfectant,

because of the supposed risk of Legionnaires Disease - what madness!

Oh those heady lockdown days of 2020! Don't you miss them sometimes? As soon as the papers started talking about supermarket shelves being emptied by hoarders, I went and ordered mounds of essential products online. I expect you did the same, didn't you? [No, I've got more sense! - Ed]

Happy days !!!! And we're reminded of them more than once today, because, by coincidence, we finally use not only the last of the dozens of emergency black plastic refuse sacks I stockpiled in 2020, but even the last of our emergency boxes of Kleenex, as well as the last of our stockpiled emergency bottles of disinfectant (see above ref. shower-head, Legionnaires Disease, for the use of).

our few daily hours not in bed are spent filling the last of our 2020

Lockdown emergency black plastic refuse sacks with discarded paper

from our house move, and (right) bidding a tearful farewell to

our last box of Lockdown emergency Kleenex tissues - sob sob!

So, our appetites are still healthy, even if we're not, and our brains are as sharp as ever [I don't see much evidence of that in this post! - Ed] 

Well, just look at this, then - another sparkling 8/10 correct today (Saturday) in the Eggheads puzzles in next week's Radio Times. How many of these "doozies" do YOU know?

We haven't got proper broadband set up yet - I bought vouchers for 10 days of temporary service from EE, but the performance we get back is very variable - it can be quite rubbish. But at least we know that our shiny new broadband hub is on its way, so watch this space. 

In the meantime we can't see any catchup TV, and just have to watch whatever's on at the time - oh misery haha!

We watch a couple of programmes Saturday night. I expect you watched them too, didn't you, if you're honest!

First, in honour of Elvis Presley's would-have-been 90th birthday (Happy Birthday Sir - an honour!), we see a documentary about Elvis's relationships with his eventual wife Priscilla.

Did YOU see this "doozy", I wonder? [No! - Ed]

Elvis at 90? What the....?????

Hard to imagine, isn't it, and everybody in this programme - old friends, relatives, colleagues of the singer etc - all agreed that whenever they tried to imagine Elvis as an old man, they just couldn't ever really picture it, so I guess it wasn't that much of a surprise that he died aged just 42, in 1977. 

Lois and I didn't know much about Elvis's relationship with his eventual wife Priscilla, and we didn't realise that the two first got together when she was just 14 - what madness !!!! Elvis was in the Army in Germany at the time, and Priscilla's father was in the Air Force.

It still seems astonishing that she was allowed by her parents, or by any other responsible adults in the vicinity, to be spending such a lot of time at that age hanging around with the world's biggest rock star, who was 10 years older than she was. The story is that Elvis and Priscilla didn't fully consummate their relationship till they got married, in 1967, but then they would say that wouldn't they, particularly in those times.

Also we were surprised how Elvis was all the time trying to make Priscilla look more and more like himself, in appearance. He had her dye her hair jet black to match his own, and encouraged her to use make-up in a way that would emphasise their resemblances. Lois doesn't think that was very romantic of him - shouldn't he have loved her for the person she was? And does it mean Elvis was a bit of a narcissist? We think we should be told, and wouldn't you?

Priscilla (right) in later life, has revealed that

Elvis encouraged her to make herself look as much like him as she could

And why does the programme say so little about the influence of Elvis's manager Col Parker? Could it be that, even though he's dead, he still manages to pack a punch in the law-courts, when it comes to gagging the media from talking about him? I think we should be told, don't you? What madness!!!

20:00  I expect that after the Elvis programme, like us, you turned onto Channel 4 and watched the first of a new series about Britain's tiny islands? Am I right? Or am I right!

Aren't Britain's thousands of tiny islands wonderful? And they pop up all over the place, like Fair Isle, halfway between the Orkney Islands and the Shetlands.

The weird thing about these little faraway islands is that they tend to attract shy introverted types who want to get away from it all, but in fact that's the last type of person that these islands want. They want "joiners", "volunteers", "activists", "team-players" who are willing to help run these island's hard-pressed services. 

The parish council on Fair Isle, for example, do all that they legally can to prevent properties being acquired by introverts. I don't know how they manage this, but somehow they're having a lot of success, which is interesting. But what madness !!!!!

The island was much used as a stopping off point for the Vikings, and was part of the Kingdom of Norway for 500 years, till the 15th century.

21:00 Then after seeing that, did you turn over to BBC2 to see a bit of the channel's Rod Stewart night, in honour of the singer's 80th birthday this week? Yes, I thought  you would have!

Lois is, on the quiet, a bit of a Rod Stewart fan, something which first I noticed about her long ago. So, in order to remain in her affections, all these years I've surreptitiously been trying to make myself look as much like Rod as I can - the spiky blonde hair, the "tight" bum that you can bounce a 50p off, all that kind of thing, and there's no doubt I've had some success here, but there's still "much more to do" here at the same time, I confess - it's very much a "work in progress", let's say.

(left) Colin, at 78, and (right) Rod at 80

So, progress of a sort, anyway.

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!