Yes, friends, it's a frightening experience sitting in a rental car, isn't it, with your passengers expecting you, the driver, to, you know, just switch on and drive away, as if you'd been driving that make of up-to-the-minute, whizzy, modern-looking car, equipped with all the latest gadgets", for like, a billion years - more probably!
Did you read about poor local man Sam Mancini in this morning's Onion News? If you missed it, here it is now, in all its "gory details" (!).
However, today is also a bit of an unsettling day, with us feeling we have to stay close to home, and keep an eye on our phones, even in bed during afternoon "nap-time". We're essentially waiting to see when our Alison tells us when she wants us to take her to the garage where her car is being worked on, so that she can pick it up and drive it home, so she can then take one or other of her teenage kids to this event or that event.
Busy, busy, busy!
We're nonetheless so glad to be able to do this very small favour for Alison, because it makes us feel a bit less guilty about all she does for us, now that we're 79, going on 80, and are now official, fully paid-up members of the local "Old Codger Club", here in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, to put it mildly!
Poor Alison is being, even more than usual, run off her feet, as always, with this or that errand this week, while husband Edward, a Transport UK executive, is away in Liverpool, "schmoozing" delegates to the Labour Party Conference. And she had another late night last night, with her son Isaac performing at a Guildford pub with his boy-girl band - she says Isaac band didn't even start its "set" till 9pm. What madness, isn't it!
At least Lois and I have managed to squeeze in a quick walk round nearby Radford Park, but all the while keeping our eye on our phones - what a madness it all is !!!!
[That's enough madness! - Ed]
21:00 Feeling like something a bit saucy to go to bed on tonight, Lois and I turn to the Sky Arts channel for the first programme in a new arts series from chubby presenter Waldemar Januszcak - crazy name, crazy guy! - all about the history of erotic art.
The problem that presenter Waldemar Januszcz faces in this programme is that simply too much of art is erotic, and, starting 50,000 years ago with cave art and ancient erotic fertility figurines of women with exaggerated features, poor Waldemar has trouble galloping through 50,00 years of the most erotic of it all in a mere 60 minutes, including adverts - what madness!
And if you quickly tire of seeing pictures and sculptures of male and female genitals and copulation, then this programme is not for you to put it mildly!
However, there are some penetrating insights (no pun intended!!!) and a barrel-load of interesting facts about the erotic art that Lois and I didn't know, which makes it worth the struggle for us tonight, so that's all good!
Waldemar starts by showing us the most famous ancient fertility figurine of all, Venus of Willendorf, in his chubby little hands, with a number of others, all symbolising what Waldemar calls "a pint-sized sanctity", a good-luck charm for what has always been the most important thing of all in those crazy, far-off times - the survival of the species: people believed that holding one of these figurines would simply help you to have a baby.
There was none of that stigma in Roman times. The Romans had 120 words for the penis, but the many representations of gigantic penises in Pompeii and elsewhere were for comic effect, Waldemar tells us - the ideal was the small penis.
Only 25 of the original 85 temples here remain, but Lois and I didn't know that the entire site became completely overgrown, and forgotten about for almost 1000 years, until 1838, when a certain British army engineer, Captain TS Burt, came across the ruins of it in 1838.
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