Yay!!!! A lovely day for Yours Truly's 80th birthday, with blue skies and some sunshine, although temperatures not ideal - brrrrr!!!!
It doesn't really feel quite real to be actually 80, but it happens to a lot of lucky people these days, and I'm certainly not grumbling!
To celebrate, Lois and I drive 10 miles down to Petersfield to take a walk round the lake - the locals call it "the heath pond". It looks sunny but you can tell from our coats that we're battling a chilly breeze, but no matter, because it's my birthday, yay!!!
Local couples have obviously been busy making babies (!), and today we see, like, a billion of these babies and toddlers etc, more probably, together with their mums, grannies and grampas, walking round the lake and saying hello to the ducks etc.
What madness!!!!
After our walk, there's just time to have a snack lunch at the aptly named Plump Duck Tea-room, a coffee and a bacon-and-brie panini, before it's time to go home for a lovely afternoon in bed, which is nice!
Lois outdoes herself again with the lovely message on top of my jam-sponge birthday cake. Her formula for deriving the number 80 looks a bit random, but TV Countdown quiz presenter Carol Vorderman would be proud of her. Lois literally had just these 5 figures left in her box-of-tricks, one two, two threes and one five, and she somehow found a way to combine them to produce a game-changing formula, now free to use by the general public.
Even the local wildlife has been "at it", and on our walk, Lois and I find time to greet a couple of geese with their 5 or so little chicks - awwwww, bless!!!!!
Then, around 4pm, we get a visit from our daughter Alison and her three teenage offspring, Josie (19), Rosalind (17) and Isaac (15). Our son-in-law Edward can't be here - he's in London on business, but we'll see him tomorrow when they take Lois and me out for a birthday meal at a local Thai restaurant, which will be nice!
Josie, a first year student at Durham in the far north of England, is home for the Easter break, but the big news is that Rosalind, who's taking her A-Levels this summer, now has University College London (UCL) as her first choice for university in September, and earlier today, she even visited her potential bedsit in a student residential block in the Bloomsbury area of London.
Rosalind hopes to be taking a degree course in "international relations" or some-such nonsense (!) but including a subsidiary course in the Danish language, with it, like! And she'll get a study year in Denmark as part of her degree, which is nice.
flashback to earlier today: our daughter Alison
in London with Rosalind (17) checking out her
potential student bedsit if she's accepted
to do a degree course in International Relations
and Danish Language, which will be nice!
This is very good news, because it'll maintain the family's links with Denmark. Alison and family lived in Copenhagen for 7 years from 2012 to 2018, and Lois and I visited them there several times.
All 3 kids went to school there and they still have a lot of friends in the city. Plus, it will tempt all the rest of us - even Lois and me "if we're spared", as Lois's old dad Dennis used to say (!) - to take the short flight over there, just to check that Rosalind's keeping to the straight and narrow, and not getting up to any Scandi-mischief while she's out of the country haha!
What a woman I married!!!
TV's Carol Vorderman, presenter of daytime quiz Countdown
Also on the cake, Lois finds the time to showcase her progress in Latin with the phrase "Amamus Te Poppa" (English: we love you Poppa), with musical notes suggesting possibly a Gregorian chant or something similar! Awwwww!!!!
Kudos, Lois!!!!
And finally to the slightly "seamy" side of my birthday. It turns out that my main gift-donors - (1) Lois, (2) our daughter Alison and family in nearby Headley, and (3) our daughter Sarah and family in Perth, Australia, have all, completely independently, chosen to give me gin this year.
This is very welcome, although it makes me look a bit bad, I feel. A nice gin and tonic, just at G&T o'clock (!) obviously, is my favourite tipple, but it's not as if I'm drinking myself under the table every night - moderation in all things, that's my motto!
[How can we be sure of that, Colin! - Ed]
(top left) Lois's present to me, (top right) Alison and family's gift,
and below my sweet card and present from Sarah and family in Perth, Australia
And that, in brief, is how you do it - becoming 80, that is! But if you're over 80 yourself, you'll know all that already anyway, so "Kudos!" to you!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!!
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