Thursday February 13th 2025 "What's your background like, when you're zooming? Something nice, I hope!"

Friends, do YOU spend an inordinate amount of time arranging the background view from which to zoom into online classes, or just for calls with relatives or friends, maybe, so as not to advertise too much the - let's not mince words - the squalor, yes, the squalor (!), of your so-called "office", that's maybe in your pokiest and "squalidest" [sic] bedroom upstairs ? 

A lot of us do, don't we. But I've got some news for you - local heiress Maria Viscount from the lovely Hampshire village of Gobley Hole does the exact opposite (!) [source Onion News Local East Hampshire].

Well, me and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois should be so lucky! We've moved into this 4-bedroom house in Liphook, Hampshire, just up the road from heiress Maria Viscount in Gobley Hole incidentally - and at the moment we're just displacing the clutter, moving it from room to room. Normally it's our so-called office that's the "default" place to store clutter, but that rather short-sighted policy just means it's a lot of work trying to make the office look "decent" when we've got a zoom or Skype call scheduled.

What madness, isn't it!!!!

Today, Lois and I have a Skype call on the calendar with the U3A 'Old Codger' Intermediate Danish group, that we lead, for our sins (!), reading together the Danish crime novel "Judaskysset" (The Judas Kiss) by Danish writer Anna Grue.

This morning I spend some time getting our Skype background just right for our Danish group's afternoon session, and this is what I come up with:

I'm pretty pleased with the result, bearing in mind the somewhat creepy story-line of the book, but surprisingly, Lois "vetoes" it, saying that it will "scare our members into logging off".

Your views on this, please - postcards only! - ideally in time for our next group meeting. I'm anxious to get this just right, to present myself "just as I am", to look friendly, but at the same time, to create a slight air of menace.

I wonder.....!

11:00 Otherwise it's quite a productive morning for us. We moved to our new home-town of Liphook, Hampshire on January 3rd, while our previous home in Malvern, Worcestershire was still unsold, but we currently have a buyer who's put in an offer, which we've accepted. 

flashback to January 2nd: we move out of our house in Malvern, Worcestershire,

without having sold it, which was a bit scary - yikes!

We have a solicitor in Cheltenham, Sue, who we've known for years, but we still have to "prove our identity" to Sue because of the usual statutory precautions against identity theft. This morning we finally send off to her by recorded delivery Lois's driving licence, updated with our new Liphook address. Sue told us that we were risking a £1000 fine anyway, by being tardy about getting Lois's licence updated. 

What a crazy world we live in !

Yes, a crazy world - that's for sure! So crazy, in fact, that, for the moment it's even given the makers of the lucrative James Bond franchise pause for thought (!).

Everybody's wondering who the next James Bond will be, aren't they. And remember this tongue-in-cheeky humorous "take" on the matter, in last week's edition of the satirical fortnightly Private Eye, as quoted in my blog?

Even Lois and I were tempted to join in the fun, with a light-heared suggestion to Private Eye Editor Ian Hislop that our daughter Alison's "elderly" Danish spaniel Sika could break new ground as the first canine James Bond, following his heroic chase of superduck villain, "Duckfinger" on Frensham Little Pond last week - remember?

Well, we all had a jolly good laugh about both those stories, didn't we! 

[Speak for yourself, Colin! - Ed]

Well, it turns out that there may not even BE a "new James Bond", canine or not, for a while, at least, would you believe! 

In our copy of next week's Radio Times, which "plopped" through our letterbox this week, nobody is planning a next James Bond at the moment, and Radio Times regular David Hepworth thinks he knows the reason why.

Hepworth's got a point there, hasn't he, to put it mildly!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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