Wednesday November 5th 2025 "Could Wonder Woman ever be played by a woman? Maybe at last it's becoming possible, but what do YOU think?!"

Could Wonder Woman ever be played by a woman? That's the question on everybody's lips here in East Hampshire today, following the unexpected local "furore" that's greeted the news of Lynda Carter's casting as the next Wonder Woman (news travels slowly in these parts!), replacing the long line of men in drag who've been "smashing" the role heretofore (!). 

Did you see the local Onion News's "splash" on the mayhem? No? Well turn to page 94 !!!!

And the story brings a bit of a one-sided chuckle to the faces of me and my light-to-moderate wife Lois today, here in our new town of rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire. 

my light-to-moderate wife Lois and me - a recent picture

There's a particular chuckle in the lower part of my face, because I don't need any so-called Lynda Carter to bring wonders into my life, to put it mildly! Yes, with Lois at my side, I've got my own 5' 3" Wonder Woman right here, to "hobnob with" 24/7, so Lynda, go eat your heart out - this guy's "taken" haha!!! 

Yes, despite intermittent aches and pains in her back, Lois is having another very active day today, taking her poor old "hubby" out for a walk on Old Man Lowsley's Farm, just outside town; then "getting down and dirty" in our little back garden, planting some wallflowers and heaven-knows-what; finally emerging for another strenuous hour of chair yoga in the online class run by her great niece Molly, in Leeds, up in the frozen North !!!!

another active day for Lois: taking her old "hubby" for a walk over nearby Old Man 

Lowsley's Farm, planting wallflowers in our back garden, and then sweating her way through 

an hour-long online "chair yoga" class, masterminded or should I say "mistress-minded" (!) 

by Lois's great-niece Molly (see bottom left - no pun intended!!!)

What a woman I married!!!!

And it's certainly a sign of the times that even viewers here in the notoriously conservative district of East Hampshire are willing to countenance a woman in the Wonder Woman role. The times, they are a-changing, that's for sure!

However, the mysterious wonder of women [no pun intended!!!!] is nothing new, as Lois and I discover on the couch this evening, watching this week's fascinating new series from the UK's favourite Dane and QI presenter, Sandi Toksvig, on the More4 channel:

Lois and I didn't know much about Sandi's back story. 

We weren't aware that Copenhagen-born Sandi started her career with a first-class degree in archaeology and anthropology from Cambridge, but that her future started to fall apart when she fell in with a bad crowd there - actor-comedians Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and others. It was after that that Sandi headed for a sordid career in TV comedy and science quizzes etc. 

We didn't know, also, that at Cambridge Sandi was almost expelled for having another young woman in her room overnight and that she came out as a lesbian in 1994. So fair enough - that all hangs together!

In tonight's programme Sandi is getting back into her first love - into archaeology, that is, not into young women (!) - visiting the excavation of an Iron Age settlement at Hengistbury Head in Dorset, just west of Bournemouth, in the company of TV archaeologist Raksha Dave.

Unusually, the Iron Age society being unearthed there was one that was dominated by women. It's the women's graves that have all the fancy grave-goods. And DNA testing of the skeletons found there in the Iron Age graveyard reveals that all the women buried there were local and related to each other, whereas the men weren't - the men had been "brought in" from elsewhere. 

Also remarkable is the emotion shown by Sandi at the lifting of the skull of a 16-17 year old girl after 2000 years in the ground. The whole lifting operation has to be done with extreme caution to avoid breaking any part of the skull, but it's successful, although bringing Sandi to tears. 

You don't get tears from men TV archaeologists, like Time Team's Tony Robinson for example, so it's nice to see Sandi reacting more sympathetically - and more humanly (?) tonight.

Poor Sandi !!!! 

But she's right - we shouldn't just be digging up skeletons without remembering that they were once living, breathing people. And it's particularly sad if they died when they were only teenagers. However it's also touching to realise that their friends and family must have loved them so much and taken such care to arrange their poor bodies in the graves, together with the jewellery etc that they had cherished in their lifetime.

Fascinating stuff, isn't it! 

Women, eh! Doncha love 'em !!!!!!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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