Tuesday January 14th 2025 "Are you our parents? And if not, are you our children? Your face seems familiar haha!"

Friends, are you elderly, and being looked after by your selfless offspring? Or are you the selfless offspring yourselves?

A lot of us fall into one or other of those two categories, don't we, and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I, now at the grand old age of 78, certainly fall fairly and squarely into the first group. And today marks the start of a new era in mine and Lois's life, because a couple of weeks ago we moved 130 miles south-east, to Liphook, Hampshire, to be living near our dear elder daughter Alison and her family, just to be on the safe side - yikes!!!!

And today we mark this new milestone, this new era in our long lives with our first visit, since the house-move, to Alison's crumbling Victorian mansion in nearby Headley, to say to her in a non-verbal way, "Please help us with this and that, several times a week possibly, from now on, Ali, because we're old haha!".

we visit our daughter Alison's crumbling Victorian mansion today,

non-verbally asking her, in effect, to "look after us for the duration" - yikes !!!!

Awwwww!!!! But aren't we just an adorable couple for Ali to look after! Who wouldn't like to look after us, that's what I'd like to know! [I can think of, like, a billion names that would go on that list! - Ed]

adorable us - a recent picture

We're just so sweet and cuddly, aren't we! And we did look after Ali for several years, when she was just little, all of nearly 50 years ago now - yikes!

Do you remember "My Old Mum", the old Cockney song of Max Miller's that goes like this:

Let's just hope that Ali is proud of us, just like Max Miller was proud of "his old mum" (!), because if not, we're in trouble, to put it mildly!

And we're trying to keep fit, so we don't have to make too many pleading phone-calls to Ali, or to her husband and hotshot lawyer Ed, or their 3 teenage children too often - like when needing to carry a 2lb bag of sugar from the larder to the kitchen worktops, you know the kind of thing!

We've both lost a few pounds in the last month - I'm down to 9 stone 9 lbs 12 oz, and Lois is only about 9 stone now, so that's all good. Lois has to have a special diet, but as she's the cook in the house, I'm on the diet too, effectively - poor me!

Elderly people have to be imaginative these days in seeking out ways to keep fit and to constantly test ourselves, other than the, frankly, over-cliché'd ritual of "trying to bounce 50 pence pieces off each other's bums", as young people say today - what madness! Look at this inspiring story in today's local Onion News for East Hampshire!

Awwww !!!! Another sweet old couple !!!!

Lois and I only moved into this house in Liphook two weeks ago, and we've both had stinking colds, and it's been barely above freezing outside, so this trip to our daughter Ali's house today is our first real excursion since moving to these parts.

We tend to sit here at home surrounded by mounds of stuff for recycling - luckily the council's recycling waste collection is tomorrow Wednesday. And we're also been surrounded by evidence of our old 2020 Lockdown hoards of "stuff" that we're only now really using up: our last drops of Lockdown disinfectant, our last Lockdown black refuse sacks, our last boxes of Lockdown Kleenex - all that kind of thing.

But did you know that recycling and hoarding aren't new? Well we get confirmation of that tonight in the latest fascinating programme in archaeologist Alice Robert's new survey of the most ground-breaking (no pun intended haha!) digs being carried out in the UK during 2024.

For tonight's programme Alice is in the north of England.

Lois and I always find "hoards" our favourite archaeological finds - we feel somehow connected with those people hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago, who, for whatever reason, went out and dug a hole in a field and put maybe money or other various stuff down the hole, thinking "We'll come back for all this when the coast's clear", "when the Vikings have gone away", "when the heat's off" - all sorts of reasons.

And the tragedy of these hoards is, of course, that the hoarders never did come back and collect their money or their "stuff", for whatever reason. So the modern-day archaeologists who dig them all up are the first humans to set eyes on their contents for such a long time, which must be such a great thrill.

One of the hoards found in tonight's programme,  from Cumbria, is a metal-collector's array of bronze-age axe heads and some bronze sword-pieces, thought to have been temporarily stashed away at the end of the Bronze Age, when iron was the latest thing and bronze was becoming "so yesterday", yet people wanted to hang on to their old bronze bits-and-pieces in case they could be recycled into something else maybe.

The old bronze axe-heads were probably part of somebody's 10th century toolbox:

And, somewhat incongruously the axe-heads had been buried with a bunch of bronze sword-components.

Why were the axe-heads and the sword-parts buried together?

So it was a case of new technology coming in, and so, it's "What do we do with the 'old tech' "? Like when Lois and I had to do something with our old VHS tapes when DVD's came in - see, it's all beginning to make sense isn't it.

At Castleford, Yorkshire, another team of archaeologists discovered an illegal coin-counterfeiting operation outside the local Roman camp. The idea was to copy genuine silver coins but use less silver in the mix, combining it with lesser metals. The period was around 260 AD, when there was a lot of instability, with fake emperors popping up all over the Western Roman Empire, and, at the same time, rampant inflation etc etc. 

Does that remind you of anything haha?!

You had to quite motivated to risk counterfeiting coins in those crazy far-off days, because if you got caught the penalty was crucifixion - yikes!

Fascinating stuff isn't it. And more proof, if proof were needed, that human nature doesn't really change and we seem to be stuck with it. Oh dear!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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

Monday January 13th 2025 "Are YOU 'poncing about' without fear, now the fogs of winter have gone haha!"

If you live in East Hampshire, like, "for our sins" (!), my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I do, I bet you're glad that those awful post-Christmas fogs have gone, now that we're well into the New Year? And no more so than local elite commando Major Teddy "Sandman" Hawthorne, who's lost most of his best men in the great fogs over the 3 weeks since the middle of December.

It was in the Daily Mail, I know, but see this significantly harder-hitting local Onion News report, which paints a still more horrific picture, to put it mildly! And by the way, it's all highly classified, needless to say, so don't spread it around - it'll just give comfort to Britain's many enemies, don't forget!

Poor "Sandman" !!!!! And let's hope somebody, maybe one of those hard-working local "Onion" journalists was able to "cut the poor guy down" in time for evening roll-call (!). If there's one thing that Lois and I know about the guy, it's that he "likes his tea", so fingers crossed !!!

And with the fogs now clearing, he should be able to "ponce about the Hampshire downs without fear", as the unit's motto has it! 

Certainly Lois and I are starting to "ponce about" our new surroundings, the little Hampshire town of Liphook, with only a small amount of fear now, after the great fogs have gone, the temperature is rising marginally above freezing, and our heavy colds are starting to recede. 

We venture outside for the first time for a week today, just to post a letter, and, certainly we aren't "picked offf" by any unseen assailants on the 250-yard walk down the road to the postbox on the street corner near the infamous terrorist haunt of Locke Road, so the omens are good! 

We even manage to have our first shower in this house, which we only moved into on January 3rd,  having disinfected the showerhead from any legacy Legionnaire's disease germs, which is comforting, and also having checked the shower cubicle for unseen assailants, not to mention unseen Dr No-style, Chinese-trained tarantulas etc, just to be on the safe side (!).

(left) flashback to October, when we viewed this house for the first time, in the company

of estate agent James, and (right) flashback to earlier this week, when I wrap the showerhead

in a bag filled with legacy Lockdown 2020 24/7 disinfectant , just as a precaution (!)

[Is that all you two "noggins" have done today, Colin - walked down the road to post a letter and had a shower? - Ed]

[Well, we also had 2 hours in bed this afternoon, if you must know, so no peace for the wicked haha! - Colin]

20:00 We wind down on the couch with this week's edition of our favourite TV quiz, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking.

Some fascinating connections are on offer again in tonight's programme, many of them new to Lois and me. See how many of these "doozies" you know.

Who knew, for example, that dogs like to urinate and defecate when they're aligned on a north-south axis? It's been proved statistically by studies, would you believe.

And who knew what "heterological words" are? Lois and I certainly didn't, but quiz presenter Victoria explains that it means words that can't be used as an example of the thing they're denoting. So the word "verb" is not a verb, "abbreviated" is not an abbreviated word, "monosyllabic" isn't a monosyllabic word, and "hyphenated" isn't a word that's hyphenated etc etc. 

What's the point of having a word that means that? I think we should be told, don't you?

It's sheer madness !!!

As long-standing cryptic crossword buffs, however, Lois and I are particularly disappointed not to spot the fourth element in this sequence:

Have you seen the connection, and can you spot the sequence? Well, it's pretty tough, we know, trying to spot anagrams when you don't have any reference points, but yes, these are anagrams of the names of successive US presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. And presenter Victoria reveals the programme's suggested fourth anagram of George Bush as "He bugs Gore", which is as good as anything Lois and I are likely to come up with, we think!

No surprise that neither of tonight's team got that one.

But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!

21:00 We go to bed on an old edition of QI XL, the comedy quiz show, presented by the UK's favourite Dane, Sandi Toksvig.

Who knew that in 2016, two psychologists, Francis McAndrew and Sara Koenke, decided to quantify "creepiness", by finding out what most people would think of as a creepy person.

It turns out that what people find the creepiest kind of person is statistically likely to be male and thin, and have a few other worrying habits, as Sandi explains:

Long=time team member Alan Davies finds a redeeming feature in "Creepy Guy" however:

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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