Danskcolin: Tuesday January 14th 2025 "Are you our parents? And if not, are you our children? Your face seems familiar haha!"

Friends, are you elderly, and being looked after by your selfless offspring? Or are you the selfless offspring yourselves?

A lot of us fall into one or other of those two categories, don't we, and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I, now at the grand old age of 78, certainly fall fairly and squarely into the first group. And today marks the start of a new era in mine and Lois's life, because a couple of weeks ago we moved 130 miles south-east, to Liphook, Hampshire, to be living near our dear elder daughter Alison and her family, just to be on the safe side - yikes!!!!

And today we mark this new milestone, this new era in our long lives with our first visit, since the house-move, to Alison's crumbling Victorian mansion in nearby Headley, to say to her in a non-verbal way, "Please help us with this and that, several times a week possibly, from now on, Ali, because we're old haha!".

we visit our daughter Alison's crumbling Victorian mansion today,

non-verbally asking her, in effect, to "look after us for the duration" - yikes !!!!

Awwwww!!!! But aren't we just an adorable couple for Ali to look after! Who wouldn't like to look after us, that's what I'd like to know! [I can think of, like, a billion names that would go on that list! - Ed]

adorable us - a recent picture

We're just so sweet and cuddly, aren't we! And we did look after Ali for several years, when she was just little, all of nearly 50 years ago now - yikes!

Do you remember "My Old Mum", the old Cockney song of Max Miller's that goes like this:

Let's just hope that Ali is proud of us, just like Max Miller was proud of "his old mum" (!), because if not, we're in trouble, to put it mildly!

And we're trying to keep fit, so we don't have to make too many pleading phone-calls to Ali, or to her husband and hotshot lawyer Ed, or their 3 teenage children too often - like when needing to carry a 2lb bag of sugar from the larder to the kitchen worktops, you know the kind of thing!

We've both lost a few pounds in the last month - I'm down to 9 stone 9 lbs 12 oz, and Lois is only about 9 stone now, so that's all good. Lois has to have a special diet, but as she's the cook in the house, I'm on the diet too, effectively - poor me!

Elderly people have to be imaginative these days in seeking out ways to keep fit and to constantly test ourselves, other than the, frankly, over-cliché'd ritual of "trying to bounce 50 pence pieces off each other's bums", as young people say today - what madness! Look at this inspiring story in today's local Onion News for East Hampshire!

Awwww !!!! Another sweet old couple !!!!

Lois and I only moved into this house in Liphook two weeks ago, and we've both had stinking colds, and it's been barely above freezing outside, so this trip to our daughter Ali's house today is our first real excursion since moving to these parts.

We tend to sit here at home surrounded by mounds of stuff for recycling - luckily the council's recycling waste collection is tomorrow Wednesday. And we're also been surrounded by evidence of our old 2020 Lockdown hoards of "stuff" that we're only now really using up: our last drops of Lockdown disinfectant, our last Lockdown black refuse sacks, our last boxes of Lockdown Kleenex - all that kind of thing.

But did you know that recycling and hoarding aren't new? Well we get confirmation of that tonight in the latest fascinating programme in archaeologist Alice Robert's new survey of the most ground-breaking (no pun intended haha!) digs being carried out in the UK during 2024.

For tonight's programme Alice is in the north of England.

Lois and I always find "hoards" our favourite archaeological finds - we feel somehow connected with those people hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago, who, for whatever reason, went out and dug a hole in a field and put maybe money or other various stuff down the hole, thinking "We'll come back for all this when the coast's clear", "when the Vikings have gone away", "when the heat's off" - all sorts of reasons.

And the tragedy of these hoards is, of course, that the hoarders never did come back and collect their money or their "stuff", for whatever reason. So the modern-day archaeologists who dig them all up are the first humans to set eyes on their contents for such a long time, which must be such a great thrill.

One of the hoards found in tonight's programme, from Cumbria, is a metal-collector's array of bronze-age axe heads and some bronze sword-pieces, thought to have been temporarily stashed away at the end of the Bronze Age, when iron was the latest thing and bronze was becoming "so yesterday", yet people wanted to hang on to their old bronze bits-and-pieces in case they could be recycled into something else maybe.

The old bronze axe-heads were probably part of somebody's 10th century toolbox:

And, somewhat incongruously the axe-heads had been buried with a bunch of bronze sword-components.

Why were the axe-heads and the sword-parts buried together?

So it was a case of new technology coming in, and so, it's "What do we do with the 'old tech' "? Like when Lois and I had to do something with our old VHS tapes when DVD's came in - see, it's all beginning to make sense isn't it.

At Castleford, Yorkshire, another team of archaeologists discovered an illegal coin-counterfeiting operation outside the local Roman camp. The idea was to copy genuine silver coins but use less silver in the mix, combining it with lesser metals. The period was around 260 AD, when there was a lot of instability, with fake emperors popping up all over the Western Roman Empire, and, at the same time, rampant inflation etc etc.

Does that remind you of anything haha?!

You had to quite motivated to risk counterfeiting coins in those crazy far-off days, because if you got caught the penalty was crucifixion - yikes!