Tuesday July 1st 2025 "How do you like YOUR cucumbers? Spindly or chunky? And be careful how you answer haha !!!!"

We gardeners, especially those of us who grow cucumbers, we all secretly hate criticism, don't we - particularly from beloved family members. Go on, admit it !!! And never more so than when it's our very own dear cucumbers that have come into the firing line - like this local man who was all over the local papers this morning [source: Onion News] !!!!

Poor Jason !!!!

And part of the trouble, my medium-to-hard-pressed wife Lois and I think, is just changing styles and generational shifts - in Jason's dad's day cucumbers were praised for their chunkiness, but not suddenly "spindly is good", and "Dad" hasn't clocked this yet, and is still living in the past, which is a pity! 

How do you like YOUR cucumbers: short and chunky, or long and spindly? Think carefully before you answer, because at the same time, you may be revealing more about yourself than you intended: your politics, your social class and sexual "persuasion", what part of the country you hale from, but most of all, your exact age in particular !!!

changing fashions in cucumbers: Lois is here showcases (left) "long and spindly"

which was all the rage in 2021, and "fat and chunky" - that was in 2022 !!!  

What madness, isn't it!

I know how Jason in that Onion "shocker" this morning must feel, however. It's never nice to be criticised, is it, and especially by your nearest and dearest, just because of some changing whim or fashion, that's been proclaimed by the UK's high-and-mighty and volubly vociferous, and vocal,  "cucumber pundits" !!!

This morning Yours Truly was on the end of some criticism, and from none other than Mrs Yours Truly - yes, step forward, Lois (again) !!!! Nothing to do with cucumber size, however, on this occasion!!! 

Apparently Yours Truly hangs washing out incorrectly, would you believe, on the rotary washing-line in the tiny back garden of the house in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire that we moved to in January, which isn't a million miles away from poor Jason, over there in Betty Mundy's Bottom. 

I got into trouble with Lois this morning, having been sent out to hang out the washing while she was busy talking to her fellow female church members in their monthly online "sisters' class".

flashback to earlier today - while Lois slaves away upstairs over a hot laptop, 

I hang out some washing, including pillow slips with the open end 

gloriously uppermost, just like I was taught to do it back in the crazy 1950's  !!!!!

Yes, you see, I was brought up in the 1950's when kids were taught to hang, say, a pillow slip, with the open end at the top, by the pegs, but Lois says that's considered "old school" now - the open end should be firmly at the bottom nowadays, Lois says, according to all the big UK laundry pundits, like Kathy off of trending website "DIYwithKathy.wordpress.com".  

Well, excuse me for staying true to my roots !!!!

Honestly, you can't lift a finger in the UK these days without some so-called "pundit" telling you you're doing it all wrong!!!

[Is that all you two "noggins" have done today, Colin, an hour on the laptop and 10 minutes in the garden hanging out some washing? - Ed]

Well, maybe, yes, but what else would YOU want to do in this "Phew, what a scorcher!"-type weather, that the UK is bathing in at the moment !!!! The end of the heatwave is in sight, however, because weathermen are saying that "there's less to come", which will be a relief, "be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade" as the old song has it !!!

Luckily, today, there's nothing on our calendar apart from being up and about by 9:30 am for our Ocado supermarket groceries delivery - so apart from that 9:30 to 10:30 delivery "slot", we can mostly strip off and lounge about in our lightly clad tee-shirts etc, which is what you want in this kind of weather, to put it mildly (no pun intended!!!!). 

"scorchio" weather again today, but luckily no appointments to go out for -

we just have to be suitably dressed when "Alfie" from Ocado calls with our order 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!! Roll on tomorrow !!!!!!

flashback to earlier today: the news that Alfie is coming, but

they're out of M&S Aberdeen Angus Beefburgers - bummer !!!

Lois reacts by making her own for us - what a woman I married !!!!

20:00 However, I'm sorry to report that, even with our portable fan going full blast, it's still an incredible 80F (27C) just in our living room this evening, when we turn on the "telly" for a bit of so-called "culture" (!).

We liked the idea that Scottish abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (crazy name, crazy gal !!!), whom neither of us has heard of, had a bit of an epiphany atop Switzerland's Grindelwald Glacier, because we thought it might cool us off a bit  - what fools we were !!!!!!!

Wilhelmina was a Scottish artist from St Andrews but she moved to St Ives, Cornwall, as a young woman back in the 1930's, "to escape Scotland and her parents".

Wilhelmina - or "Willie" as she was confusingly known - was an animated young woman, pretty, and a bit of a flirt, we hear. And the male artists in the St Ives artist "set". were all attracted to her. This had its downsides however, particularly when local artist Ben Nicholson asked her out on a date.

It's something to think about, though, isn't it. If some artist offers to take you for a drive, surely a sensible precaution would be to check their painting style first - it may affect their driving skills, and not always in a good way - just saying !

Lois and I got to know the Cornish seaside resort of St Ives well from the 1990's onwards, and we really like Willie's Cornish paintings (see above). Unfortunately this period didn't last, and we see her soon doing awful "abstracts" a lot of which seem to consist of little coloured squares arranged in patterns - something a four-year-old child would be able to put together with a Woolworths two-shilling set of junior "Ladybird" "butterfly brand" shapes and stickers to put it mildly !!!!

(left) one of Willie's early drawings of St.Ives, Cornwall,  and (right)

for comparison purposes, something from her later "Butterfly brand" sticky squares period

Lois and I keep watching, however, because we want to know about Willie's "sudden glimpse to deeper things", as the Sky Arts programme guide promises, in other words, the epiphany that she had in the late 1940's, when atop the Grindelwald Glaciers in Switzerland.

And atop the glacier, Willie began to experience some weird, primeval, impulses.

Thank goodness she resisted those impulses, however, because she lived on, to paint, like a billion, probably more, pictures of bits of glaciers over the next 40 years, to the delight of her many fans.

just 3 of the, like, billions of pictures of bits of glaciers that Willie

turned out over the four decades following her Swiss epiphany

It's interesting that Willie suffered from synaesthesia, just like Sheldon in the old sitcom "Big Bang Theory", a condition which causes sufferers to associate the like with the unlike, for instance associating prime numbers and non-prime numbers each with their own colour. 

flashback to 2016, where the Big Bang Theory's "Sheldon" explains

how he sees prime numbers in pink

Willie was right-handed, but liked to sometimes vary it by writing sentences backwards, with her left hand. She also used to constantly turn her paintings upside-down while painting them, to see what they looked like that way, and she liked to have set proportions of colour in each painting, measuring their exact percentages.

No wonder no man was up to taking her on as a wife or long-term "squeeze"! She was married briefly, just after her "glacier experience", but it didn't last, which was a shame, although we think that any man would have found her an interesting challenge in the bedroom, paticularly if she wanted to keep checking everything from all possible angles,  so maybe it was for the best.

Poor Willie !!!!!

But what a great pity that the Big Bang Theory's "Sheldon" was born too late for her. And I wonder what their children would have been like? Super-weird, but also super-intelligent - what could they not have achieved!!!

I wonder....!

[Big Bang Theory was only a story, remember, Colin! - Ed]

Oops! Oh yes !!!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed ! - Ed]

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

Monday June 30th 2025 "Phew what a scorcher! But don't 'send the wrong message' with an over-skimpy 'get-up' ! Just saying !!!!!"

Phew what a scorcher!!! 

But in this kind of weather, it's more important than ever to dress to a minimum level of decency - you don't want to "send the wrong message" - and maybe cause friction with your spouse or current "squeeze" !!!!

a typical housewife relaxes while on of her husband's

staff cleans the couple's luxurious swimming pool.

Did you see that extraordinary outburst, under the by-line of influential local "hack" Glenda Slagg, in this morning's local Onion News for East Hampshire - if you live in this area, that is !!!! But if the outburst shows nothing else, it give a hint that "all is not well" between the Slaggs - journalist Glenda and local banking-high-flyer Gordon, the nearest thing East Hampshire's go to a "power couple" - to put it mildly!

Poor Glenda !!!!!! And let's hope she and Gordon have managed to patch things up after her article - see p.94 of the print edition! Go on, do it now haha !!!!

But let me put my cards on the table at this point, and declare a possible interest (!). You see, my medium-to-hard-pressed wife Lois and I don't have any servants, being "a humble but sweet old couple (!)", living in quiet retirement, here in nearby Liphook, Hampshire, not so very far away from the Slaggs, over in Beaulieu, as it happens

"Care for some cake?" - mine and Lois's picture that we've

put on the front page of our 16-page "welcome brochure" that 

we give all our visitors and callers these days - which is nice !!!!!

And reading Glenda's open letter to her husband in today's "Onion", Lois comments this morning that she would never dress in a skimpy bikini and paint her toe-nails, even in this current heatwave that we're "blessed with" (???!), here in East Hampshire, if, say, a "workman" was coming to call - for example, local high-tech handyman Scott, or gardener Mitchell, say.

But today she's sorely tempted! Phew what a scorcher!!! 

And with highs of 88F (31C) forecast, Lois says she's sorely tempted to "strip off", even though we've got a visitor coming to see us - Sarah P. who's going to "measure us up" for a new set of Venetian blinds etc. We moved into this house in Liphook just 6 months and we've "had it up to here" with the ghastly and ancient horizontal ones, that keep getting stuck. 

Call us over-fussy if you like!!!

(left) my medium-to-hard-pressed wife Lois relaxing in temperatures of 

up to 88F (31C) here in our living-room in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, 

and (right) blinds-salesperson Sarah P doing things on her i-Pad, or whatever,

taking down our requirements while Lois and I thumb through 

Sarah's "swatch catalogue" and other "blinds literature", on the sofa

It's a pity that we've got to go out at all today, but we don't trust delivery firm Evri to drop off an online purchase to our house, so we have to pick it up this morning from local convenience store Premier in down-town" Liphook (!), and Lois had got to do a routine blood test at our doctors nearby, so we "kill two birds with one stone", and then allow ourselves to be a bit more "lightly clad" at home this afternoon, which will be a relief!!!!

flashback to this morning: we visit our local doctor's surgery

in "downtown Liphook" - Lois has an appointment for a routine blood-test

Last night we sweltered through ancient rocker Rod Stewart's set at the Glastonbury Pop Festival - Lois is a big fan, plus, he's the only singer on the bill this year that we've ever heard of, so we decide to give him a chance! 

"Voice not what it was, but the showmanship still there, and in spades" - that's our verdict! And he only made one mistake with the lyrics, that we noticed, getting completely lost at one point - well, he is a bit older than us, if only by a year or so, so fair enough, we say!

Poor Rod !!!!

we watch Rod Stewart's set from this year's Glastonbury Pop Festival

= well, he's the only artist on the bill we've actually heard of, so we can't miss this!

"Do you think I''m sexy?", sings Rod. Well, we'll get back to you on that one, Rod!

Will this do? 

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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