Wednesday November 4th 2020

08:00 We wake up and Lois asks me to check my smartphone to see if we know who the next US President will be - but the BBC says nobody really knows of course, as predicted! What an astonishing system they have over there - my god!

Lois says Trump may win Florida because he's suddenly become popular with Hispanic men who admire his machismo:  and they seem to think that Biden is a socialist. She thinks they've forgotten about Trump's Wall perhaps. Oh dear!

09:00 We dress and come downstairs, because we don't want Ian the Window-cleaner to catch us in bed or in the shower - the bedroom and bathroom windows are, respectively, windows nos. 2 & 3 on his routine - yikes! Why can't he start at the back of the house!!! Come on, Ian, be fair!!!!

It's Ian's last working day before the lockdown starts. Lois's hairdresser James has also rescheduled Lois's next appointment to December. 

10:00 We realise suddenly that we are due to have our flu jab on Saturday, and so won't be at home to take delivery of next week's groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village. So we decide to order from Sainsbury's supermarket this week instead, but without having to feel disloyal to Budgens, which is nice.

Brand loyalty is a terrible curse - Lois and I suffer from it a lot! But we figure if we tell Budgens we didn't order anything this week because of an appointment for a flu jab, that they'll forgive us - if not, we'll ditch them and go over to Sainsbury's - simples!!!!

I know we're not the only ones to feel this kind of misplaced loyalty - witness this story from the influential American website, Onion News.

RUTLAND, VT– Area resident Teresa Grant was plagued by feelings of guilt Monday after buying a box of Snuggle fabric softener, ending years of unswerving brand loyalty to Downy. "I remember my mother using Downy when I was a toddler," a distraught Grant said. 

"It's just that I got a trial size of Snuggle in the mail and, well, I kind of preferred the smell." Grant added that, while taking the Snuggle box from the supermarket shelf, she strove not to make eye contact with the baby on the Downy bottle.

Lois and I normally stick to Snuggles, I have to say. But Snuggles only have a teddy bear on the label, so it should be fairly easy to switch if we feel the need, without worrying about getting eye contact with the bear! Who cares about what teddy bears feel haha!!!

15:00 Still no election result from the US, according to our phones. We are currently in bed again, and, while we doze, our bulk order of PG Tips tea arrives (6 packs = 420 tea bags) - a good morale-booster in a pandemic, that's for sure. 

We use 3 decaf teabags a day so these fresh ones will last us 20 weeks, which is nice. Not that we're at all predictable haha!

We hear the box thud down on the floor of the front porch: that's a relief! The delivery guy doesn't ring the bell, which is considerate. I'll give him a good review again, that's for sure - poor man, he must lead a horrid life haha!!!!!!

Onion News again confirms that tea is the drink if you're going through a period of stress.

DOWNERS GROVE, IL—Local man Karl Weist told reporters Wednesday his girlfriend Celia Page owns more than 200 products designed to serve the sole function of calming her. 

"Twice a week she comes home from the mall with these body creams, aromatic candles, yoga DVDs, you name it," said Weist, watching Page apply an oatmeal facial mask while simultaneously reading a memoir of one woman's life-changing journey across India. 

"She's got, like, 10 different kinds of soothing teas, and I've only ever seen her drink tea when she's sick." Weist added that he hasn't broached the subject with Page because she remains a seething cauldron of anger and fury.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!! But ordering groceries has now become our main interest. And what a fantastic hobby it is - my god!!!

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's monthly Business Meeting. I settle down on the sofa and watch Episode 4 in the new Danish crime-series "DNA".

Episode 4 is normally the point where I completely lose the plot in these series and start mixing up the characters, but with this one, so far, I'm staying half-in-touch with who's who, which is nice!

Danish detective Rolf is investigating two apparent child-kidnappings: firstly he's investigating the disappearance of a half-Iraqi, half-Danish toddler called Minna taken 5 years ago and taken to Poland; at the same time Rolf is (unofficially) investigating the kidnapping of his own child, that happened about the same time. He thinks the two kidnappings are linked. 

Rolf, just before his baby gets abducted - that'll teach him to take his baby with him to work haha!

But there's also a parallel story we get glimpses of - a heavily pregnant Polish teenager who's been persuaded to have her baby in a special private maternity unit run by a bunch of nuns. The girl wants to bring up her baby herself, but the nuns keep putting pressure on her to agree to it being adopted. What I wonder to myself is, "Are the nuns members of some international child-snatching gang?". However my track record on solving who-dunnits is not good, I have to say. Oh dear!!!! 

20:15 Steve, my American brother-in-law, has sent me a link to a BBC radio series, "The Moral Maze", which is on tonight. I'm not quite sure why he's done this, but I give it a whirl.

The issue tonight is our response to the coronavirus crisis - the lockdown, the priority we lay on the saving of lives over everything else, and that kind of thing. An interesting discussion - several times attention is drawn to the fact that we have difficulty today in thinking about death, and tend to avoid the subject. We're a little bit removed from it, compared to the past, partly because people tend to die in hospitals rather than at home. And funerals happen often quite a bit later on, when relatives and friends have started to get over the death. The consensus is that it's probably a good idea if we're faced with life-threatening situations every so often, so we don't get too cosy a view of our prospects haha!!! And unlike our parents' generation in the UK we haven't had to live through a major war. 

Some of the contributors to the programme are young or middle-aged, and they perhaps don't realise that as you become genuinely old, the prospect of your own death gradually gets to really dawn on you, no doubt about that! 

George Harrison said the whole of life was a preparation for the moment you face your own death, but I wouldn't go that far myself. He needed to get out more haha!!! (But not during lockdown - Ed). People are the only species that know in advance that they're going to die, but usually you don't have the exact date and time, so you can always hope it's still a few days or weeks away haha (again)!

Tonight's contributors to "The Moral Maze" still seem to think, however, that we need to make sure our hospitals aren't choc-a-block with COVID patients - that won't really help anybody much. And if you say "Just shield the vulnerable", you're committing another white middle-class bias offence: non-white groups are much more likely to live in multi-generational homes. Also it's a slippery slope to start making judgments about who is "expendable" and who isn't. 

Pandemics have happened regularly over history, but this is the first one in the age of penicillin and anti-biotics. And it's affecting Western countries with a long tradition of individual freedom, where people aren't used to being told what they can and cannot do in their private lives. 

During the 1918 "Spanish flu" epidemic, Western countries couldn't afford to shut down because they were still fighting a war against the Kaiser. Lois's grandfather died in that epidemic - luckily he and his wife had already had Lois's mother Ruth - born 1916: otherwise Lois wouldn't be here today, which is an awful thought!

21:15 Lois emerges from her Business Meeting, and we watch tonight's Autumnwatch, with its network of live cameras monitoring wild life across the UK. 

Michaela shows us pictures of an Arctic quahog, a type of clam, which scientists at Bangor University in Wales calculated a few years ago was the oldest known animal in the world, at 507 years - my god!

It's an Arctic quahog, and the scientists christened it "Ming" because it was alive in the Ming Dynasty in China. It was born before Henry VIII came to the throne in England. Unfortunately the researchers killed the animal accidentally when they opened it up to find out its age - oops!!!! 

You can tell the age of a clam by counting its "growth rings" - a bit like the rings inside trees, which also by their width give scientists information about environmental conditions in each year of the clam's life. The clam's longevity is enabled by its extraordinarily slow metabolism, apparently.

Welcome to the crazy world of Arctic clams!!!!

The Autumnwatch and Springwatch series are renowned for their famously amateurish "visual aids", but I completely fail to understand what the following one is about. And I don't think I want to know, either, thank you very much!!!!

Presenter Chris seen here with his stepdaughter Megan: but what on earth is this amateurish Autumnwatch "visual aid" designed to show exactly????

We give up on this one!!!!! Answers on a postcard, please!!!!!

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

Tuesday November 3rd 2020

09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower and have a quick breakfast before Mark the Gardener arrives to do a couple of hours of gardening for us. 

Lois and Mark put their heads together to plan the little flower bed in front of the house, which is currently empty, after Mark recently cleared out all the past-their-sell-by-date lavender bushes. He's going to plant instead a circle of brand new vigorous lavender bushes with possibly a rose tree in the middle - but the jury's still out on that one.

This flower-bed is what visitors walk past when they approach our front door, so it's important to give a good impression haha! The old impression they got with the old lavender bushes was "the people who live here must be clapped out, just like these bushes haha!

flashback to Sep 2020 - Lois about to pass the old clapped-out lavender bushes Mark has now removed

This is the kind of thing we pay Mark for, after all - to fine-tune our image by creating visually exciting in-your-face floral displays haha!

11:00 Lois and I have a cup of coffee on the sofa and I look at my smartphone. I see that New Hampshire has an odd law that permits some of its communities to open for polling, if they wish, just after midnight, at the very start of election day, and also to declare the results provided all their residents have voted.

In Dixville Notch (NH), all 5 voters have voted for Biden, according to the New York Times. I consider sending a telegram to Biden to advise him to quickly declare himself the 2020 winner, but before I get the chance, another community, Millsfield (NH) has declared their results - Biden 5, Trump 16. So I guess it's too late for Biden now to jump in with a statement. Damn !!!!!

11:30  We pick up the latest cooking apples from our tree - we've had most stupendous year for cooking apples, the best since we moved into this house in January 1986. For some reason the weather must have been just right this year.

And there have been another 22 apples just since the weekend, some of them blown down by Storm Aiden.

we've harvested all these 22, some of them real whoppers at 12 oz,  just since the weekend - my god!!!!
   

It's cooking apple madness, I tell you !!!!!

12:00 Lynda's U3A Middle English group is holding its monthly meeting on zoom on Friday afternoon, so I take a quick look at William Langland's 14th century poem "Piers Plowman", which is the group's latest project, to see if I can spot any interesting words.

Langland is always keen to give a bit of moral instruction through the mouth of the poem's hero Piers, and the pages I read today are no exception.

Here's Piers is advising a knight to "hold with no harlots, nor hear their tales, and to avoid such men especially at meal-times, because they're the devil's minstrels, I'll have you understand.". And the knight agrees to do this, swearing an oath "by St James" to gain greater credence for his promise.

It comes as a surprise to me today to realise that in those days 'harlots' could be men as well as women, because the word just meant 'a ruffian': it only came to mean 'a prostitute' in the 15th century. And a  'disoure' is a word I haven't come across before, but it seems to have meant originally a story-teller (from French diseur, or 'speaker') and later came to mean also a minstrel - somebody who played a musical instrument.

It's funny what was regarded as wicked in those days. If you were a minstrel or story-teller, I suppose today you'd be regarded as part of the entertainment industry - perhaps with an Equity card. And you'd be rich and famous, and get to open supermarkets etc.

And why does Piers want us to avoid such people "especially at meal times"??? I suppose that's the equivalent of sitting in a pub or restaurant today and having to put up with piped music. So maybe on reflection it's fair enough to complain about minstrels in the restaurant! Lois and I find it can be annoying if we can't have a nice conversation with each other because of some loud, looped tape of somebody's idea of a Mariachi band, for example.

But what a crazy world they lived in in those days!!!! 

Piers in one of his notorious 'grumpy' moods - oh dear!

In a famous medieval picture we see some typically annoying medieval minstrels - the landlord is trying to get them to clear off, and the diners in the tavern have had to give up trying to have a conversation - they are just sitting there, waiting for the minstrels to stop and move away! 

some typically annoying medieval minstrels

What madness!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa to watch some TV, the latest edition of Autumnwatch, which monitors wild life live across the UK using a network of hidden cameras.

Tonight we learn from Michaela a little about a peculiar type of duck, the goosander.

Observers noticed some time ago that in June to October every year the male goosanders disappear completely from the UK and nobody had a clue where they went to ("The Leavers"). The females remained ("The Remainers").

It was noticed, at some point, that every June the males begin to moult and lose those green feathers on their heads and they end up looking remarkably like the females. So at first it was thought that the males didn't fly away, it's just that they were, for a while, indistinguishable from the females. 

Eventually however it was discovered that the males had indeed gone away for 3 months, and they were finally tracked down to northern Norway. And so in effect, the males had left the females to do the business of rearing their young alone, back in the UK.

The area in North Norway where the males "went on paternity holiday" was found to be a place with lots of food, plenty of sand-eels for instance, and very few predators. Very nice!!!

The reason for this extraordinary annual "males only" holiday is, that in June, when the males moult, they lose all their flight feathers, so for at least a month or more they are extremely vulnerable. So that's why they fly all that way up to northern Norway, where they are safe and can moult in peace, and do "men's things" and talk "men's talk". What madness!!!!

The females, having brought up their young in the UK, do their own moulting a bit later, in September, but remain in the UK. So the females are presumably fairly vulnerable then, but that's just "bad luck" apparently. They don't get a holiday, which Lois thinks is grossly unfair.

Welcome to the crazy world of British goosanders !!!!

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

Monday November 3rd 2020

10:00 Lynda's U3A Middle English group has its monthly meeting on Friday afternoon on zoom, and she's emailed members with what we're doing this time - an extract from William Langland's Piers Plowman, written c. 1370-1390. To each member Lynda has assigned a passage that we have to read aloud with (approximate haha) Middle English pronunciation, before translating it into Modern English.

I look at my bit. Piers Plowman is an earnest work that praises manual work and honest men, and castigates the sinful and the lazy. Langland is also quite hard on the clergy and is good at highlighting their shortcomings - the work is sometimes regarded as a precursor to the 16th century Reformation, which swept away the Catholic Church and all the monks, friars, nuns and monasteries with it.

Piers Plowman, written in the late 14th century

I've never been into monks or 'enlightenment studies', but it used to be big business in Langland's time, no doubt about that. People used to spend a lifetime learning to be enlightened, but I think nowadays we've become a bit more sophisticated, and we can absorb enlightenment and quickly inject it in the 'mix' of all our attitudes, without having to spend too much time on it, which is nice! Witness this recent story from Onion News, the influential American news website: 

SEATTLE—While watching a dharma talk recorded at the Ancient Mountain Zen Center, local 32-year-old Mark Davis told reporters Tuesday that he felt like he pretty much got the gist of enlightenment after the first few minutes of hearing a Zen monk speak. 

“Yeah, yeah, you let go of attachments, dissolve your ego, and then you get enlightened—why is he still going on about this?” said Davis, noting that he understood the nuts and bolts of “the whole nirvana thing” within the monk’s initial few sentences, and everything after that about selfhood and thusness just seemed like repeating the obvious. 

“Basically, identity is an illusion and accepting that lets you awaken to reality. Check. Did he really have to take 45 minutes talking about this? Maybe I’ll just skip to the end and see if he has anything different to say.” Sources confirmed that—at that moment—Davis became enlightened.

Certainly the whole thing seems to be a lot simpler when viewed from the modern standpoint, that's for sure!

But putting all talk of "monking" aside, today my main interest is in the words Langland uses. And as always there are plenty of interesting old words for me to get my teeth into. 

Piers Plowman has no time for people who don't do honest work. As a ploughman his job is to provide food for the local community. And in the passage Lynda has assigned to me, Piers singles out some people he's determined he's not going to supply food to, certain local residents that he doesn't approve of :

Jack the juggler · and Janet of the stews,
Daniel the dicer · and Denot the bawd,
All lying friars · and folk of their order,
And Robin the ribald · for his smutty words -- 

(Harvard translation)

Obviously no god-fearing ploughman would be enthusiastic about providing food for people like these good-for-nothings, although to refuse to serve such people would probably be an offence today - oh dear! 

So how does Piers's blacklist stand up today?

Jack the Juggler - there aren't many of these jugglers around in our neighbourhood, as far as I know, and juggling has become more of a hobby than a profession, I suspect. But it's hard to be sure! I would say on balance though that being a juggler today probably carries less of a stigma nowadays, compared to the 14th century. And I would personally feel quite surprised if a supermarket, say, refused to serve somebody just because they were rumoured to indulge in juggling from time to time. 

Janet of the stews - she may not have been really called Janet. 'Janet of the stews' was a common expression in those times for any prostitute. A 'stew' was originally a bath-house, but came to mean a brothel because bath-houses had that kind of reputation in those days - oh dear! A 'stew' only became a meal of stewed meat with vegetables in the 18th century, and people could at last use the word without causing offence or embarrassed giggles. 

a typical medieval "stews"

Daniel the dicer would probably be doing his gambling online today. 

Denot was a "bawd" - ie a lewd person: in the 14th century this word could be used of both men and women. I don't think there are many bawds living near Lois and me, but it's hard to be sure - they don't exactly have it embroidered on the backs of their jackets now do they!

Robin the Ribald would have been a bit of a bawd certainly, and he would have compounded this by using some smutty words - I think we all know people like that!

15:00 After a nap in bed Lois and I drive over to Bishops Cleeve to give the car a run and also get some cash out of the TSB cash machine: we last had to get cash out about 4 months ago, so this is quite an adventure. We get the maximum (£200), and this should last us for another 4 months hopefully.

the Trustee Savings Bank (TSB), Bishops Cleeve

We rarely use cash these days. Ian the window-cleaner asks for cash (£11), and Lois always puts £10 in with any birthday cards she sends to her great-nieces in Oxford. And that's about it.

17:00 Bob our neighbour brought us round a brace of partridges last night, so Lois has a look online for a suitable recipe: she finds one of the BBC Food website, courtesy of the BBC's Theo Randall. It looks promising, but we'll have to see. I notice nobody has "rated" it yet, according to Randall, which must be disappointing for him. But watch this space!

Poor Randall !!!!!! And he looks so enthusiastic, bless him !!!!

18:00 Yum yum - we vote the recipe a success! [Note to self: I must try to get a message to the recipe-writer, poor Theo Randall, who so far has had no feedback on his concoction, but he is still trying to "keep smiling", poor chap!].

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the sofa to watch part 3 of a new Danish crime series, "DNA".

Episode 3 is the point at which I normally start to lose track of the plot in these sorts of series - and this is a confusing storyline because the hero, Danish police officer Rolf, is investigating two rather similar cases of abduction/kidnapping at the same time, and I keep muddling them up. I hope Rolf is keeping a clear head!

Rolf is basically a nice chap, but in the first episode he made the mistake of taking his little baby with him on a trip to Poland to investigate a crime - quite a Scandinavian thing: Nordics often have their babies along with them in their workplaces, and it's considered quite normal to "park" your baby on a spare desk and feed them from time to time if they start crying.

It worked out badly for Rolf, however, because his baby disappeared (swept overboard or abducted - the jury's still out on that one) and I guess his partner wasn't too pleased. At any rate it's now 5 years later and his partner has taken up with a younger man: she's a stewardess and her new man is a pilot or something similar. Poor Rolf !!!!!

flashback to episode 1: Rolf takes his baby with him on the ferry to Poland, where he's going to investigate a kidnapping; unfortunately Rolf has to nip to the toilets to throw up, and his baby disappears - poor Rolf (again) !!!!!!

It seems tonight that the Danish police went on to mishandle or botch the search for the kidnapper in the case Rolf was pursuing. Now the French police are angry because the kidnapper has just killed a woman in France, and when they ask the Danish police for help, they find that the Danes have no records about him - oh dear!

21:00 Lois emerges from the zoom seminar and we watch our favourite TV quizzes, first Only Connect and then University Challenge. As usual we try to pit our wits against the students on the programme,

We're always quite hard on ourselves, and only award ourselves points when we get an answer right that the students get wrong or don't know. Tonight isn't bad for us - we get 6, but we're a bit lucky because one of the subjects is the American singer Woody Guthrie, someone my late brother Steve was a big fan of all his life.

1.     We recognise the group singing "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" as Manfred Mann. As this was a record that came out in the 1960's we considered this a gift to old fogeys like us, to put it mildly.

2.     The US author Sarah Hale published the 1830 collection "Poems for our Children", containing which nursery rhyme, later notably recited by Edison?

Students: Humpty Dumpty

Colin and Lois: Mary Had A Little Lamb

3.     (a) The Roman goddess of childbirth and fertility, (b) the husband of Pompeia and Calpurnia, and (c) the author of the Res Gestae, give their names to which 3 consecutive months?

Students: January, February, March

Colin and Lois: June, July, August

4.     Give the 2 words that complete the title of a song by Guthrie written as a retort to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America"\; "This land is.....".

Students: "Our Land"

Colin and Lois: "Your Land"

5.     In a song written to promote federal hydro-electric projects, what structure on the Columbia River does Guthrie describe as "the greatest wonder"?

Students; Hoover Dam

Colin and Lois: Grand Coolee Dam

6.     Photographs of Guthrie often show him playing a guitar bearing the legend, "This machine kills..." who or what?

Students: "People"

Colin and Lois;  "Fascists"

Christmas 1975, Lois with Alison, my brother Steve in his "Woody Guthrie" days, and my sister Gill

from left to right Steve (23), Lois (29) with little Alison, me (29), and my sister Gill (17)

finally, Lois and me, with little Alison

Ah memories!!!!

22:00 Somewhat over-complacently feeling that "we've still got it", we go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!

 

 

Sunday November 1st 2020

08:30 Lois and I roll out of bed and come down to have a quick breakfast before our daughter Sarah's weekly zoom call from Perth, Australia, where she lives with Francis and their 7-year-old twins Lily and Jessie. 

Sarah has already sent me of a picture taken earlier today when they stopped in at the Burns Beach Café in Iluka, one of mine and Lois's favourite places in the Perth area, to have a hot chocolate and something to eat, and to get out of the rain. 

(left to right) Jessie, Francis, and Lily earlier today at the Burns Beach Café

flashback to May 2016: me having a coffee at the Burns Beach Café - happy times!!!!

Summer is a-coming in over there - they say it was 100F / 38C there yesterday - my god!

09:30 The zoom call with Perth starts - the twins are so cute again - they want to show us lots of exhibits and examples of their art work as usual. They also got their faces painted earlier today at their Swimming Club's open day.

Lily showcases her face painting..

... Jessie too

(left to right) Lily, Sarah and Jessie...

...and a rare sight of Francis - right, on the sofa with one of the twins

Sarah and Francis haven't heard that England is going into full lockdown again later this week, but we assure them it won't affect our lifestyle one bit haha! Lois and I are so grateful that they are all in Western Australia, where the coronavirus isn't a concern, thank goodness. 

Life returned to normal in WA a couple of months ago, and now even Victoria is reporting zero cases - Lois's cousin Sylvia lives in Melbourne, and she and Rod are very pleased to have a bit more freedom of movement at last, to put it mildly.

Sarah and Francis introduced a new routine for pocket money last week apparently - they each get $1 a day, presumably on the condition of good behaviour haha! Jessie shows us some of the money in her little money box. Australian money looks much like ours, as regards size and shape, and the Queen's head of course, but the denominations are changed of course, so our 50p coin is marked 50 cents over there, which is convenient.

Later in the day, Francis posts a picture up on Facebook that he took last weekend when the family went on a whale-watching cruise out of Hillary's Harbour, a place Lois and I know very well. Jessie says she was a bit disappointed that they didn't get to see the whale's face, but Francis assures her that the tail is the best bit!

Francis's picture of a whale, taken from the whale-watching cruise boat at about 200 yds distance

flashback to March 2010: we spend an evening at Hillary's Harbour : (left to right) Sarah, Lily, Jessie, Francis, Lois

20:00 We watch some TV, a documentary we recorded a couple of weeks back all about Princess Di's famous BBC TV interview with Martin Bashir, that took place 25 years ago.

Quite nostalgic for Lois and me to see this programme, although it seems like it's from another world nowadays, that's for sure!

Apparently an unpredictable chain of events led to Diana granting the interview. 

Firstly there was an interview given by Charles, in which he admitted that he'd committed adultery with Camilla, but "only after his marriage had irretrievably broken down". This was actually the second version of the interview - in the original one he had kept quiet about his affair. But it was suggested to him that the interview, conducted by a sympathetic interviewer, would perhaps be the best place to get the story out into the public domain in a low-key manner, and so a re-recorded interview finally went out with the shock confession of adultery in place.

Charles's confession made Diana feel that she had to give her side of the story, but she might never have given the interview to Martin Bashir if Bashir hadn't engineered the forging of some bank statements that played on the rampant paranoia that both Diana and her brother Charles Spencer were displaying at the time. Bashir had some fake bank statements produced that made Charles Spencer think that he and his family were being targeted and spied on by mysterious agents or agencies. 

All this made Diana determined to speak out on her own behalf to Bashir, although she subsequently "bitterly regretted" giving the interview. Although the BBC appeared initially to deny the existence of the forged bank statements, they appear to have gradually backtracked on this. Bashir apparently pulled a similar trick on an earlier interview he did for the BBC. He was "ill", it's said, and "not available for comment" and didn't take part in this documentary - and his career didn't really much go anywhere after a few years, for unknown reasons.

The implication of this documentary is that, to get his interview, Bashir played on the Princess's paranoia at a time when she was in a very vulnerable state and believing the silliest stories that she had heard about threats against her both from inside and outside the Royal Family.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

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