Sunday January 12th 2025 "Are YOUR bedrooms soundproof? Mostly they're not, I suspect!"

Are YOUR bedrooms soundproof? I think a lot of us would have to hold our hands up and say "Sadly no!" to that question, wouldn't we, and, especially middle-aged parents Dale and Judy Nesbitt after their daughter Jenny, late one evening, sneaked into the house with her new "squeeze", Sam Tillard, whom Jenny's parents hadn't even been introduced to yet (!).

The story was "all over" the Onion News Local for East Hampshire the other day wasn't it.

Uh-oh! And let's hope that "that Mike guy" doesn't take the Onion News regularly, or he would have been in for a shock to put it mildly!

Bedrooms are a common locale for shocks of various sorts, aren't they, like when astronaut James Caudry returned from a recent mission. Did you see that article, source Onion News again?

Oh dear, poor Caudry !!!!!

But funnily enough, Caudry's bemusement, on awakening, is something that my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I can relate to, because when we wake up in the morning these days, we often say "Where are we?" and "Where can we find the bathroom?".

We were even in "The Onion" ourselves this morning talking about our feelings of disorientation in the early mornings - did you see us right there on page 94?

This story about us is actually reasonably accurate, to be fair, although "couple keep waking up in strange beds" would be more precisely worded as "couple keep waking up in strange bedrooms" - seeing as how, in the last 3 years, we've been waking up in 3 different bedrooms, from our two house-moves, from Cheltenham to Malvern, Worcestershire in 2022, and then from Malvern to Liphook, Hampshire in the last couple of weeks. 

What a madness it's all been! 

Now in our current home for nearly 2 weeks, and with temperatures scarcely rising about freezing outside, we're hunkering down inside at the moment, nursing our heavy colds, and waiting for the temperatures to rise marginally next week.

At the same time we've been trying to get familiar with our new house and also discover where all our belongings have been put by our movers - you know the kind of thing?

we're still trying to get to know our new house, and

discover where our movers decided to put all our "stuff", and

which boxes it's all hiding in - what madness!

Lois can't even join her fellow church-members online this morning for their two Sunday Morning Meetings, because of the poor quality of our temporary internet connections, so she just has to sit here in the house with her small glass of wine and hunk of bread, having to have a communion service all of our own, with God, something I always find incredibly touching to observe.

flashback to March 2024: Lois in her "meeting hat"

taking part remotely in her church's communion service

We can't even watch catch-up TV at the moment, so we have to make the best of what we can see live and as-it-happens, on our, like, billions of channels, which isn't as straightforward as you might suppose, given our weird tastes (!). [You're telling ME! - Ed]

We decide to start the evening with an old James Bond on ITV4 - "Doctor No" - I expect you saw it too, didn't you? [Are you crazy? - Ed]

Of course we've seen it before a couple of times, but once again, for, like, the billionth time, I'm struck by Lois's incredible recall for the plots of films and dramas of any kind, compared to me. 

British agent James Bond (Sean Connery) on a Caribbean

beach with local shell-collector Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress)

And Lois is really good also at diagnosing faulty plot-lines, like the number of times that attempts are made to kill Bond using far-from-foolproof methods: like leaving a tarantula in his room and hoping it will decide to bite him, or despatching a runaway truck down a narrow alley to "run him down", when any fool knows that he can deftly hop into somebody's doorway and get away unscathed. It isn't exactly rocket science is it, be fair!!!

21:00 We go to bed on an old 1970's edition of "The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club", the series that brought to TV the atmosphere of an evening in one of the somewhat rowdy working-men's clubs they have in the north of England, the evening compered by foul-mouthed stand-up comic Bernard Manning, ably assisted by dour northern "turn-manager" Colin Crompton.

dour northerner and ungenial club chairman and

"turn-manager" Colin Crompton - yikes!

I don't think either of us have seen a show from this series since its heyday in the 1970's so it's a delight tonight to see again such entertainers as large, middle-aged honky-tonk pianist "Mrs Mills", plus Budapest-born singer Eve Boswell [Who she? - Ed], maiden name Éva Keleti, singing her big hits from the 1950's  including "Pickin' A Chicken" and "Sugar Bush (I Love You So)". 

Eve Boswell, born Éva Keleti in Budapest in 1922,

singing her 1950's hit "Pickin' A Chicken"

And most of all, what a delight to see a very young-looking Gene Pitney as the evening's "star turn", trying gamely to imitate a northern English accent for the benefit of the assembled club-members and their wives, and even persuading two of the club's barmaids to be his backing singers on one of the many songs he wrote for other artists, in this case "Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)", which he wrote for Ricky Nelson.

Fantastic stuff, isn't it! [If you say so! - Ed]

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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

Saturday January 11th 2025 "Do YOU look like Rod Stewart from the rear? Most of us do, don't we!"

Oh dear, my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I still aren't doing very much all day, to put it mildly.

We're in our new house, but we're spending most of our time in bed [What's new there! - Ed]. While moving from our former home in Malvern Worcestershire into this new house in Liphook, Hampshire on January 3rd we both somehow managed to pick up our first really heavy colds for 5 years - an astonishing health record for UK residents, and one that we attribute to just hobnobbing 24/7 with each other - mostly hobbing with the occasional nobbing - first under lockdown, and then afterwards just because we liked it. What madness!!!

flashback to October: us looking round the house in Liphook that 

we eventually decided to buy - little did we know that we'd be spending 

most of our first week here in bed in this room - what madness!!!

We're also getting quite filthy. Afternoons used to be shower then bed, but at the moment we're skipping the shower bit and just doing the bed bit. 

We thought about having our first shower on Saturday afternoon, but we've put it off again, because the shower hasn't been used for a few weeks, we suspect, and Lois read that you can catch Legionnaires Disease off of long-unused shower-heads. Is that true? I think we should be told, don't you?

we wrap our shower-head in a plastic bag filled

with our last of our 2020 Lockdown stockpiles of disinfectant,

because of the supposed risk of Legionnaires Disease - what madness!

Oh those heady lockdown days of 2020! Don't you miss them sometimes? As soon as the papers started talking about supermarket shelves being emptied by hoarders, I went and ordered mounds of essential products online. I expect you did the same, didn't you? [No, I've got more sense! - Ed]

Happy days !!!! And we're reminded of them more than once today, because, by coincidence, we finally use not only the last of the dozens of emergency black plastic refuse sacks I stockpiled in 2020, but even the last of our emergency boxes of Kleenex, as well as the last of our stockpiled emergency bottles of disinfectant (see above ref. shower-head, Legionnaires Disease, for the use of).

our few daily hours not in bed are spent filling the last of our 2020

Lockdown emergency black plastic refuse sacks with discarded paper

from our house move, and (right) bidding a tearful farewell to

our last box of Lockdown emergency Kleenex tissues - sob sob!

So, our appetites are still healthy, even if we're not, and our brains are as sharp as ever [I don't see much evidence of that in this post! - Ed] 

Well, just look at this, then - another sparkling 8/10 correct today (Saturday) in the Eggheads puzzles in next week's Radio Times. How many of these "doozies" do YOU know?

We haven't got proper broadband set up yet - I bought vouchers for 10 days of temporary service from EE, but the performance we get back is very variable - it can be quite rubbish. But at least we know that our shiny new broadband hub is on its way, so watch this space. 

In the meantime we can't see any catchup TV, and just have to watch whatever's on at the time - oh misery haha!

We watch a couple of programmes Saturday night. I expect you watched them too, didn't you, if you're honest!

First, in honour of Elvis Presley's would-have-been 90th birthday (Happy Birthday Sir - an honour!), we see a documentary about Elvis's relationships with his eventual wife Priscilla.

Did YOU see this "doozy", I wonder? [No! - Ed]

Elvis at 90? What the....?????

Hard to imagine, isn't it, and everybody in this programme - old friends, relatives, colleagues of the singer etc - all agreed that whenever they tried to imagine Elvis as an old man, they just couldn't ever really picture it, so I guess it wasn't that much of a surprise that he died aged just 42, in 1977. 

Lois and I didn't know much about Elvis's relationship with his eventual wife Priscilla, and we didn't realise that the two first got together when she was just 14 - what madness !!!! Elvis was in the Army in Germany at the time, and Priscilla's father was in the Air Force.

It still seems astonishing that she was allowed by her parents, or by any other responsible adults in the vicinity, to be spending such a lot of time at that age hanging around with the world's biggest rock star, who was 10 years older than she was. The story is that Elvis and Priscilla didn't fully consummate their relationship till they got married, in 1967, but then they would say that wouldn't they, particularly in those times.

Also we were surprised how Elvis was all the time trying to make Priscilla look more and more like himself, in appearance. He had her dye her hair jet black to match his own, and encouraged her to use make-up in a way that would emphasise their resemblances. Lois doesn't think that was very romantic of him - shouldn't he have loved her for the person she was? And does it mean Elvis was a bit of a narcissist? We think we should be told, and wouldn't you?

Priscilla (right) in later life, has revealed that

Elvis encouraged her to make herself look as much like him as she could

And why does the programme say so little about the influence of Elvis's manager Col Parker? Could it be that, even though he's dead, he still manages to pack a punch in the law-courts, when it comes to gagging the media from talking about him? I think we should be told, don't you? What madness!!!

20:00  I expect that after the Elvis programme, like us, you turned onto Channel 4 and watched the first of a new series about Britain's tiny islands? Am I right? Or am I right!

Aren't Britain's thousands of tiny islands wonderful? And they pop up all over the place, like Fair Isle, halfway between the Orkney Islands and the Shetlands.

The weird thing about these little faraway islands is that they tend to attract shy introverted types who want to get away from it all, but in fact that's the last type of person that these islands want. They want "joiners", "volunteers", "activists", "team-players" who are willing to help run these island's hard-pressed services. 

The parish council on Fair Isle, for example, do all that they legally can to prevent properties being acquired by introverts. I don't know how they manage this, but somehow they're having a lot of success, which is interesting. But what madness !!!!!

The island was much used as a stopping off point for the Vikings, and was part of the Kingdom of Norway for 500 years, till the 15th century.

21:00 Then after seeing that, did you turn over to BBC2 to see a bit of the channel's Rod Stewart night, in honour of the singer's 80th birthday this week? Yes, I thought  you would have!

Lois is, on the quiet, a bit of a Rod Stewart fan, something which first I noticed about her long ago. So, in order to remain in her affections, all these years I've surreptitiously been trying to make myself look as much like Rod as I can - the spiky blonde hair, the "tight" bum that you can bounce a 50p off, all that kind of thing, and there's no doubt I've had some success here, but there's still "much more to do" here at the same time, I confess - it's very much a "work in progress", let's say.

(left) Colin, at 78, and (right) Rod at 80

So, progress of a sort, anyway.

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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

Wednesday January 1st 2025 - Friday January 10th 2024 "Make sure you never move house ever ever haha!"

We're till waiting for proper broadband to be set up at our new house in lovely Liphook, Hampshire, and that broadband won't be happening till Friday January 17th at the earliest. What madness !!!!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

This gives you a flavour of our moving out, on Thursday January 2nd, from our new-build home in Malvern, and getting through a day of sitting around in coats while the movers kept all the doors open  - brrrrrr!!!!!

This crazy day was followed by a crazy night in a hotel with a bar and a big bed (one of several in the hotel - just saying!), at the Holiday Inn, Gloucester, to break the journey.

In the hotel's purple-themed bar, it's lasagne and sparkling water for Lois, a burger and chips plus G&T for me.

Then, next day, January 3rd,  it's defrosting the car and heading off to Liphook, Hampshire, where our daughter Alison and husband Ed are kindly on hand to give us a head start with the unpacking.

Then on Friday January 3rd we moved into our new house in Liphook with Ali and Ed's help.

Lois and me with our first pizza meal in the new house

To celebrate our arrival, I here showcase my "Best Grandad Ever" mug, which, may I say, came as something of a surprise - I didn't even know I'd been nominated would you believe! 

It's a great honour, though, so thanks, guys!

Sadly, yesterday Thursday January 9th was the funeral of one of my oldest and dearest friends, "Magyar" Mike, who used to study the Hungarian language with me. The funeral took place in Amberley Parish Church, Gloucestershire. Lois and I had hoped to be in attendance, but as luck would have it, we've both come down with our first real stinker of a cold since lockdown days - probably caused by stress of moving, I shouldn't wonder. What madness!!! 

[That's enough madness for today! - Ed]

Luckily, however, there's an internet link for the service. In the front row are sitting Mike's widow, "Magyar" Mary, plus their son-in-law Charles and 2 grandsons, Stephen and Adam, and Adam's girlfriend is supporting Mary.

Mike had an interesting life, to put it mildly. He was doing National Service in the RAF in the 1950's, but he was such a good all-round sportsman in cricket, football, you name it, that his commanding officer pulled strings to stop Mike having to be posted abroad  - they wanted him to remain the star player in their local RAF Gloucestershire sports teams. 

So that's how you do it - Cold War or no Cold War! And Mike's old cricket bat was in display in the church just in front of where Mary was sitting, which was a nice touch.

 

our friends "Magyar" Mike and "Magyar" Mary,

on their wedding day, and in later life

flashback to 1994 and my first ever visit to Hungary:

me (left) with my friend "Magyar" Mike:  showcasing

our newly-purchased second-hand "excellent worker" medals

from the communist era

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed, and don't come and see me, either of you, until you've got over those stinking colds! Just saying!!! - Ed

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

Tuesday December 31st 2024 "Are YOU an accountant? Most of us are these days, aren't we!"

It's a rude question, I admit, but I've got to ask it! 

Are YOU an accountant? 

Most of us are these days, aren't we, and it's a poignant day for accountants everywhere today, to put it mildly. Because although my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I are bucking the trend by not being accountants, we can't help feeling sorry for all of you others, who are accountants - unable to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of the next today and tonight, with the population in general.

Because, yes! You guys have already had your New Year celebrations, back in April, haven't you! Do you remember those crazy pictures from Trafalgar Square in Onion News?

Happy times! But it means that accountants world-wide have got to wait another 3 months for their "big bash".

Poor accountants !!!!!!

And our daughter Sarah is an accountant living 9000 miles away from us, in Perth, Australia, so for her, as for all accountants worldwide, today is just "another working day" for her, apart from the fact that she's allowed to take 2 weeks off - her agency normally closes for Christmas and New Year. Otherwise it would have been a normal working day, but she's got a lot of time off work like everybody else, if that makes sense! [Not really, does it! - Ed]

The Non-fiscal New Year "starts early" if you're in Perth anyway, at more or less 4 pm Greenwich Mean Time, and we've been hoping to speak with Sarah, husband Francis and their 11-year-old twins Lily and Jessica at around 4 o'clock, but we hear from them that they're all falling asleep and won't make it till then, which is a pity. 

However, as consolation, before going to bed, the sleepy twins send us one of their delightful emoji-filled messages.

Awwwww!!!!!

Even for Lois and me, today, our 78th New Year's Eve, is overshadowed by having to move house in 2 days time to a house in Liphook, Hampshire, and tainted by our growing feelings of panic - yikes !!!!!

This morning, however, Lois and I try and stave off the burgeoning panic feelings for an hour or so, by taking one of our "history walks" round the nearby parish of Hanley Castle, just a couple of miles from our current home here in Malvern, starting the walk at the local High School, which is all shut up for the holidays.

Hanley Castle High School, possibly 700 years old, as it looks today

Hanley Castle High School is one of England's earliest grammar schools. It's got a plaque claiming it was founded in 1326, but the original buildings must have been long gone, because the oldest around today date "only" from around 1600.  

"What else was going on in England in 1326, Colin?", I hear you cry! [Not me, I've gone to the pub! - Ed]

Well, seeing as how you're "gagging to know" (!), here's a digest. It was quite a year, seemingly.

What a crazy year !!!!!

And there are a couple of old bits of the original school still standing - these both date from the 17th century:

the oldest bits of the original school that are still standing today - 

they're "only" 17th century - what madness !!!!!!

The village's oldest cottage still standing is "Glebe Cottage", which dates from the 1450's. Dendrochronological analysis identifies one of the cottage's timbers as being from a tree felled in winter 1457/8.

Glebe Cottage, the oldest dwelling in the village dates from the 1450's

The cottage has timbers with burn marks, which historians say were intended to ward off evil spirits and keep witches at bay. 

Glebe Cottage: (left) split-oak panel filling, and (right) taper burn marks to ward off evil spirits

What a crazy world they lived in, back in the 1450's !

"And what was going on in England in 1457, Colin?", I hear you cry (again) (!) [Not me, I've only just started on my second "pint"! - Ed]

What utter utter utter utter madness !!!!!

So, now, for us, it's back to our packing, I'm afraid.

Poor us !!!!!

So, till I can resume my blog in our new house, I wish you all a very happy New Year, and also, so as not to leave it till the last minute (!), a very happy Fiscal New Year 2025-2026, in advance (!).

Till then, it's byeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!