Men, when you visit the Gents in big hotels, have you ever been button-holed, or should I say "fly-button-holed" (!), by a candidate making an electioneering speech while you're queueing for the next available cubicle?
Most of us have, haven't we, particularly at local election time. And isn't it embarrassing!
There was a story about this kind of thing in this morning's local Onion News for East Hampshire (print edition) - see page 94 - did you "thumb your way through to it" haha?
However, Highnam's story kicks off a fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your viewpoint!) chain of events for my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and me this morning, as we work through the all the clutter in the Liphook, Hampshire home that we moved into just over 2 weeks ago.
Never move house - it's just not worth it! And there's a whole bunch of vital things that mysteriously "went AWOL" during our house-move in early January. Fortunately, most days, we find something or other on our extensive "missing list" (!), that we can then duly "cross off".
flashback to early January: (above) us dining at the Holiday Inn, Gloucester
en route from our old home in Malvern, Worcestershire to our new home
in Liphook, Hampshire, and (below) just one of the scenes of "house-moving
madness" that greeted us when we woke on our first morning in Liphook
Today, one of those "legions" of missing beloved belongings duly turned up (pardon my French!) in the bottom of an old plastic bag - our fridge magnets.
Fridge magnets are not exactly vital, you may say, but they can make a kitchen appliance seem more "human". And there's no sign of any awful magnet in our possession carrying local Hampshire county council candidate Phil Highnam's so-called "platform" (see Onion story above), I'm glad to say!
To my surprise, however, when I approach our old freezer with my new-found bag of fridge magnets, I find that it's orange warning light is flashing. Yikes! After it got unloaded off the removal van, we stashed it in the garage for the time being, because this house's previous owners have left us their superior one in the kitchen. I ring Curry's to book an engineer to come out and look at the freezer with its flashing light, but it takes me all morning to talk to a real person, and then it turns out they can't send an engineer out to us until we've changed our address "officially" with Curry's head office.
What a crazy world we live in !!! And as I say, never never move house!!! - it's just headaches headaches headaches all the way !!!!
Luckily some things are going smoothly - yesterday I unexpectedly managed, all on my own, to connect us to EE broadband, without risking a call to their "unhelpful desk" (only kidding, guys!), and today I follow this up by successfully connecting a "landline-style" phone to their service also. And it turns out it has an ordinary BT number with the local "STD" prefix of 01428, which is nice. EE don't tell you what the number is going to be - they like to surprise people (!) - so I had to use the phone to call my mobile, and then get the number of the landline off of that.
Yes, there are "no flies on me" haha - but what a madness it all is !!!!!
flashback to yesterday - I set up our new broadband router, while Lois "road-tests"
her kilt ahead of next week's Burns Night and our planned supper-a-deux
and today - me looking proud of myself again,
having set us up with a digital landline phone, which hopefully
will work wirelessly with an extension in our bedroom - nice one, Colin!
Incidentally, our plans for Burns Night suffered a setback yesterday when Lois's kilt "dropped off her" unexpectedly in the afternoon , a victim of our successful dieting: Lois has lost a stone over the last 2 to 3 months, and even I have lost half a stone (7 lbs). I can only keep my trousers on by using the "thinnest" hole for my belt-buckle, never before used, and still looking pristine.
Exciting times!!!!
Luckily Lois has a "spare" kilt, her "reserve kilt", somewhere in the house - if only we can find it in all the clutter haha, before the big day - oh dear !!!!
Also today, there's a piece of good news (of a sort) on our old house in Malvern. Our Malvern estate-agents ring me up to say somebody has put an offer on our house there, although it's a bit below our asking price, so we're not going to accept for now. Still, a hopeful sign of a kind - so watch this space.
flashback to January 2nd: we leave our old house in Malvern,
putting it in the hands of estate-agents to sell for us
Lois and I both thought that Lucy Worsley would struggle to come up with much that was new in this familiar, well-worn subject, but we were wrong - that's what we're thinking tonight.
One of her big points tonight is that British historians, with their notorious South of England bias, have paid far too little attention to what William did to the north of England, in counties like Yorkshire, where accusations of "wanton destruction" and even "genocide" have some leverage, she says. Sources of food were deliberately destroyed, for example, so that an estimated 100,000 are thought to have died in the resulting famine.
William was particularly hostile to the population in the north, partly because of its Danish-ancestry and strong links with Scandinavia - and this, despite the fact that William, although King of Normandy on the Channel coast of France, was of distant Scandinavian ancestry himself.
Viking expansion in Europe from the 8th to the 11th centuries AD
All this destruction in the north of England was the campaign which William and his followers euphemistically referred to as "the harrying of the north".
Village after village in Yorkshire, for example, which were listed in the immediate post-Conquest Domesday Book survey as containing land and property worth 'x' shillings and 'y' pence, were a few years later found to have a value of "nil", because they'd been "laid waste" and were utterly derelict.
Lucy looks through the records to find the example of the Yorkshire village of Asselby - the name is of Danish origin and means 'the farmstead of Askil'.
And there was nothing unique about the fate of Asselby - looking up and down the page, Lucy finds that there dozens of other villages in the county which seemed to have suffered the same fate.
Fascinating stuff, though, isn't it.
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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