Tuesday October 27th 2020

08:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower and do our last preparations for our daughter Alison's visit with her 3 children, Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10). Ed is staying back in Haslemere today and working from home - the Government regulations specify social gatherings must be limited to six.

12:00 Our guests arrive - we've set up a table and 4 chairs in the utility room, and a smaller table with 2 chairs in the kitchen, so we can talk to each other through the doorway - simples! We have hot dogs and baked beans: yum yum!

(l to r) Rosalind (12), Isaac (10), Josie (14), with our daughter Alison: what a lovely family they are!

we talk to them through the open doorway

After lunch they go off to check into their Airbnb self-catering apartment, while Lois and I go to bed for a couple of hours. It's been absolutely exhausting already - usually it's just ourselves all alone in this big house, and we're not used to the non-stop chatter and laughter there's been this morning: my god! But it's fabulous to have them all around, even if it's only for a few hours today and a few more tomorrow. 

15:30 We roll out of bed. Alison and the children arrive and we go off for a walk round the local football field and over to the new housing estate where there's a zip-wire.

Long shadows: Josie, Rosalind, Isaac, Alison and Lois, with Cleeve Hill in the background

me and Ali: Rosalind and Josie in the background

Josie, Isaac and Rosalind working the zip-wire

17:00 We come home and have a dinner of jumbo fish fingers, mash potato, broccoli and carrots, followed by various desserts.

19:00 They go back to their Airbnb for the night, and leave Lois and me to collapse in a heap. We're completely exhausted - oh dear!!!!! They'll be coming round again at 10:30 am tomorrow, so we've got to get our strength back by then.

20:30 We watch a bit of TV, the first edition of this year's Autumnwatch, which covers wild-life stories from around the UK.

Unfortunately both Lois and I fall asleep on the sofa, not waking up till the closing titles appear. Luckily we stay awake at least long enough to see giggly presenter Michaela Strachan celebrating her return to the programme. She wasn't able to take part in this year's Springwatch - she was back home in South Africa in March and unable to travel to the UK because of the coronavirus travel bans.

Here we see Michaela doing what her co-presenter Chris Packham calls her 'good-to-be-back' "mum-dancing".

This is the first time Lois and I have heard the expression "mum-dancing". The derogatory expression "dad-dancing" is well known, and must have deterred large numbers of ageing dads from strutting their outdated stuff and 'grooving on down' at many a disco, party or wedding, that's for sure! Perhaps if the phrase "mum-dancing" catches on, it'll do the same for ageing mothers. After all, we are living in the age of full equality of the sexes, so fair enough, we think!

21:30 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!

Monday 26th October 2020

08:00 Lois and I stay a bit longer in bed - Lois didn't have a good night. She tells me about the book she is reading, "Some Tame Gazelle" by Philip Larkin's favourite novelist, Barbara Pym. It's about two middle-aged spinsters, active in the local church, sisters called Harriet and Belinda, who like to have a young curate to mother. The current one gets married, which is a sad loss to them, but the sisters are happy again just as soon as a replacement is appointed, a young man they can start to mother.

The title comes from a poem by Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839):

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove: Something to love, oh, something to love!

The suggestion is that Harriet and Belinda need nothing so much as having somebody gentle to love, and then they have everything they need. 

My smartphone is just on my bedside table so I research the poet Thomas Haynes Bayly. I notice he's buried in Cheltenham, so he's got something in common with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. He died quite young - aged 41 - but he seems to have been an interesting guy, with a personality quite modern in feel, I think, the kind of person I'd have liked to have been if I'd had his talent for writing. 

At school in Winchester he amused himself by writing a weekly newspaper about the master and pupils at the school. Aged 17, he began training to be a lawyer, but didn't get very far, preferring to spend his time writing humorous articles for public journals.

  the writer Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839)

In the course of his short life he wrote many poems, novels and plays. He was also a song-writer. You wouldn't expect any songs written that long ago to be remembered now, but that isn't quite true.

In 1833 he wrote a song called "Long Long Ago", which I remember I used to play on the piano when I was a little boy learning to play - it's quite a simple melody. Bayly could never have guessed that this song would have the long life it eventually did. It wasn't published at all in his lifetime: it was first published posthumously in a magazine in Philadelphia USA, and became a popular hit song in the US in 1844.

It was updated and given a more up-tempo rhythm in 1941, with new words, and a new title "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me)", and it was recorded by Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters and others, including Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke etc.

There is also a Hungarian version of this song, "Régi mesékre emlékszel-e még?", which is on YouTube, sung by a Hungarian children's choir - Hungarian version - luckily I know quite a bit of Hungarian, and I know the title means "Do you still remember the old tales?". You see, it's worth the investment of learning Hungarian now isn't it!!

Hungarian version of Bayly's song: a HeppStúdió archive recording by the choir of the Dr. Ferenc Hepp Primary School, Békés, presented at the school's Ki-Mit-Tud gala.

Is wikipedia not totally fascinating? Who would want to read anything else???!!!!

09:00 Eventually we get out of bed. We're becoming so lazy - oh dear!

We spend the morning setting up our socially-distanced eating facilities for when our daughter Alison visits us tomorrow with her 3 children. Ed will be staying at home in Haslemere, Surrey, working online. This will mean that, when they visit,  we won't be breaking the "Rule of Six" - the prohibition on social gatherings of more than 6 people. My god, what a crazy world we live in !!!!

We bring our patio table-for-two into the kitchen, where Lois and I will sit. And we set up our green kitchen table in the utility room, so Ali and the children can eat there. Simples! And we can talk to each other through the open door. 

I'm sitting at the patio table in the kitchen, while Lois demonstrates where Ali and the children will eat,

out in the utility room - simples !!!!!

11:30 We take the car out to give it a run, to Bishops Cleeve and back.

16:00 Lois also bakes a tray of Weetbix Slices, a kiwi-inspired biscuit delight, that we're hoping our visitors will like as much as we do. 

Lois showcasing a tray of her Kiwi-inspired treat, Weetbix Slices - yum yum!

ditto, with chocolate topping applied (Lois not shown) - yum yum (again) !!!!

20:00 Lois is too tired tonight to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar, so we settle down to watch some TV, an interesting documentary called "How Safe Is Going Out".

The Government has been trying to encourage people to use public transport, to go out to shops and restaurants, and to go off and stay in hotels etc, with the idea of helping to keep more businesses afloat financially. And for their part the businesses have been promising prospective customers that they have instituted a thorough cleaning regime into all of their premises, so that there was nothing to be anxious about - hmmmm!!!! 

Channel Four's "Dispatches" team had the idea of visiting some of these businesses and establishments and testing various surfaces for hygiene and cleanliness. They didn't expect to detect any COVID-19 - that would have been extremely unlikely - but if they found that other harmful substances or bacteria were present, the idea was that they would be able to show that, in the wrong circumstances, that COVID also could be harboured there.

There were interesting results: the Dispatches team tested surfaces in half a dozen Costa coffee shops, half a dozen Tesco supermarkets and half a dozen Britannia hotels, and they also tested surfaces in a number of London buses. 

The results were mixed for the most part, and only the London buses had a 100% clean bill of health, interestingly. 

In many or most branches of Costa, Tesco and Britannia, the surfaces were all completely satisfactory, but there were other branches where they were not: this proved that it is perfectly possible to disinfect surfaces if you are conscientious about it, but that some branches were obviously being less strict about it than others. The chains concerned were informed, and they say they have initiated appropriate action to reinforce the message with all their branches. 

Hmmm !! Well it doesn't exactly encourage Lois and me to "get out more", that's for sure!!!

20:30 We see our two favourite quizzes, Only Connect and the student quiz University Challenge.

We are both tired, and we don't expect to score well tonight against the students in University Challenge, but once again we surprise ourselves. We get 8 questions right that the students either can't answer or get wrong. 

21:30 We go to bed early - it'll be a busy day tomorrow, with Alison and the three children coming to see us, for only the second time since Christmas.

Zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!

Sunday October 25th 2020

 06:00 We wake up to discover that it's only 6 am not 7 am, because the clocks went back one hour last night - damn! Still it gives us a bit more time in bed and more time to get ready for our daughter Sarah's call from Perth, Australia: clocks in Western Australia stay the same year-round. As it happens, Sarah texts us to say the family - she and Francis and their 7-year-old twins Lily and Jessie - are on a whale-watching cruise near Rottnest Island. I text back to say let's try a whatsapp call around 9:30 am our time, or 5:30 pm their time.

10:00 Sarah's whatsapp video call comes through, and Lois and me are ready for it. They went on their whale-watching cruise, on a boat that wasn't too crowded: a 300-seater with only about 100 people on it, so there was no problem seeing the whales. They're going to send us photos in due course, which will be nice.

Till the photos come Lois and I will just have to imagine it from pictures on the web, which is fair enough!

It looks fantastic to us!

The twins are anxious to wish us Happy Grandparents Day, which is a thing in Australia apparently. We don't have such a day in the UK, so that's a pleasant surprise, to put it mildly - my god!

flashback to April 2018: Lois and I go on a cruise with Sarah and family around the Swan River

10:45 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in the first of her sect's 2 worship services taking place today on zoom. I settle down in the living-room and watch the first part of a new Danish thriller series, "DNA".

Lois and I have been studying Danish since 2012, when our other daughter Alison, together with Ed and their 3 children, moved to Copenhagen for a 6 year stint to do with Ed's job as a legal adviser. 

I carried on studying Danish even after Alison's family returned to the UK, because I became fascinated with what a big influence Danish was on the English language, to the extent that some academics actually classify English as a Scandinavian language. It's partly a chance effect that the dialect of English that became the standard was the one spoken in the East Midlands area of England, where the population was massively dominated by Danish settlers - witness, for example, all the towns that end in the "-by" suffix: Derby, Grimsby, Whitby etc: "by" means 'town' in Danish.

And Lois and I still like to watch Danish films occasionally to pick up tips on pronunciation etc, also to pick up any cultural pointers.

Unfortunately the dialogue in these films is far too fast for us to catch more than the odd word - damn! Also, Danish actors, just like British ones, tend to mumble. And not only that, the lighting in most of the scenes is incredibly dark - this adds to the tension, no doubt, but for us it adds to the annoyance, to put it mildly. It's not that we're getting old by the way - that's totally irrelevant haha!!!

Episode 1 opens with the hero, Copenhagen detective Rolf Larsen, who's about to go on a trip to Poland to try and solve a kidnapping, realising he's got to take his baby, Andrea, along with him on the ferry. That's nice in a way, though. I couldn't imagine we'd ever see a UK detective carrying a baby around with him in a little buggy. It's very Scandinavian isn't it. He has to take the baby with him on the ferry, basically because the baby-sitter didn't turn up and Rolf's wife is in London on a health-and-safety course - very British haha! 

Unfortunately the ferry trip to Poland is a rough one and Rolf is no sailor. While he's throwing up in the toilets, the baby disappears. 

(stage direction) "he mumbles" - you're telling me !!!! He checks the baby is okay.

he weighs up whether he's got time to just slip into the toilets to throw up

he emerges from the toilets, to find that the baby has vanished - yikes!

he tries to get the captain to stop the ship, but they're already docking in a Polish port - oh dear

Oh dear - I don't think Rolf's wife will be very pleased with him when he rings her in London and she hears what's happened, that's for sure. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. Watch this space - yikes!#

Naughty Rolf! Bad Rolf!!!

21:00 We watch some TV, an interesting documentary about the Swedish pop group Abba, featuring recent interviews with 3 of the group members.

An enjoyable programme. Lois and I didn't know that, in the early days of the group, what they most wanted was acceptance by the "Anglo-Saxon world" - 50 years ago, record companies in the UK and US wouldn't in general look twice at groups from continental Europe or Scandinavia. 

And it's well-known that their breakthrough came in 1974 when they won the Eurovision Song Contest, staged that year in Brighton in the UK, with the English-language version of the song "Waterloo", which became a number one hit in the UK and many other countries.

flashback to when Abba weren't yet famous in the "Anglo-Saxon world" - the original Swedish version of "Waterloo", which the group won the Swedish heats with for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest

Lois and I didn't remember, however, that "Waterloo" was followed by an absence of any further hits in the UK for many years - record companies were still reluctant to issue any of the group's follow-up releases, including songs like "Mamma Mia". It was only when these songs became popular in Australia that UK record company executives changed their minds, and unimaginable success followed, continuing to this day with the Mamma Mia musical and spin-off films. 

We learn tonight also, that the later divorces of Agnetha and Björn, and Anni-Frid and Benny in 1979 and 1981, which at the time were portrayed to the press as "amicable", weren't really as jolly as was made out at the time - oh dear!

The divorces proved fortunate for the men, however, in the sense that it gave them inspiration to write deeper, more emotional lyrics, and tonight we hear Björn say that this is a "very Nordic" thing - Nordics like to be sad, it seems. 

Lois sympathizes with the women in the group, particularly Agnetha who was torn between the pressure of going touring across the world with the group and what she really wanted - to stay at home and bring up hers and Björn's children. Lois thinks it was all right, fine and dandy for the men - they could go touring without these torn feelings, and even after the marriages were over they were still able to continue much as before, writing and arranging their songs.

There are some interesting and unexpected anecdotes, like the reported sight of the then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, seen dancing in the aisles at a performance of "Mamma Mia, the musical".

And it's nice to see a rare reunion picture of all members - Agnetha doesn't travel - appearing at the 2016 opening of an Abba-themed "Mama Mia the Party" dining experience in Stockholm, which now has a branch in London apparently, since 2019.

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

Saturday October 24th 2020

07:00 I wake up to find that Lois is not in the bed - she wasn't well last night and at some stage during the night she crept out and crawled into our daughter Sarah's old double bed, so she could read without disturbing me. She got back to sleep and seems to be a lot better today, thank goodness.

09:00 We tumble out of the shower in time to take delivery of next week's groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village. 

Budgens convenience store (on the left)

We suddenly realise we forgot to order cheese - damn! And Waghorne's, the butchers, who also sell cheese, won't be delivering now till Wednesday = damn (again) ! How will we survive without cheese for nearly 5 days?

11:00 We have our morning coffee and look at our smartphones. Our daughter Sarah, who lives just outside Perth, Australia with Francis and their 7--year-old twins, Lily and Jessie, has put a picture up on Facebook of the twins - last week at school, pupils were encouraged to come in dressed as a favourite fictional character.

Jessie - who is she meant to be ???? Some fairy or other, we hazard a guess!

...and Lily - ditto !!!

Lois and I don't keep up with children's fictional characters so we have no idea who they are dressed as - oh dear, we're completely past it these days, no doubt about that! But how cute they look - Gawd bless 'em!!!

Sarah has also posted a picture of two kangaroos she saw earlier today in their backyard. The family has lived in Australia for 5 years now, but it still seems a strange idea for us, that she lives somewhere where this kind of thing is an everyday routine experience. 

a couple of kangaroos in our daughter Sarah's backyard - how weird!!!!

16:00 We have a cup of Earl Grey tea and a piece of cake on the sofa, and Lois reads me bits out of "The Week" - one of our Saturday afternoon rituals.

Lois reads me out articles from "The Week", our Saturday afternoon ritual 

The "bad boy" image of rock group "The Who" has taken a bit of knock from lead singer Roger Daltrey's new book, apparently. One of the group's claims to fame was guitarist Pete Townsend's nightly smashing of his guitar at the end of concerts. 

Pete Townsend of The Who, smashing up his guitar on stage

In his book, however, Daltrey reveals that the guitar-smashing was all just for show. The group realised that as long as he didn't break the neck of the guitar it could be glued back together after the concert. And they always smashed up the same guitar, it seems, while keeping a pristine set of un-smashed guitars for use as their primary instruments.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

18:00 We have dinner, and look forward to tonight's moving of the clocks back one hour, which will make it a bit lighter in the mornings. 

Someone on Lois's whatsapp group has published a useful guide about how to make the changes needed: 

That's a useful guide, no doubt about that, but somebody in Lois's whatsapp group has asked why there are no instructions included for reprogramming your dog, who of course will expect to be fed on British Summer Time for a few days or weeks, despite what the clocks say. 

And that goes for cats too, of course. Lois and I don't have any pets now but we remember how our last cat, the late lamented Minx, used to kick up a racket for several mornings at the hour that she thought was our getting-up time, and it was quite a painful process trying to explain to her why she had to wait another hour - what madness!!!!

I remember in the old days I used to go round the house on the night before the change altering all the clocks before going to bed. I can't be doing with that kind of nonsense now - I must finally be becoming a bit more laid back, for some reason. 

The main thing for us to watch out for is the time in Perth, Australia. They don't alter their clocks at all in Western Australia, so our regular Sunday morning zoom call with Sarah, which is at 9:30 am in summer, changes to 8:30 am in winter - yikes! No lying abed for us tomorrow, no doubt about that. No peace for the wicked haha!!!!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the latest instalment of "The Bone Detectives", where a team of anatomical experts look at some dug-up skeletons.

Lois and I have got a bit fed up with this series, but Saturday night TV is a wasteland for us, so we've stuck with it so far. Maybe this is the last in the series, we're not sure.

Once again the blurb in the Radio Times is misleading - Tori Herridge and her team don't excavate anything, as per usual. They just arrange to have skeletons brought into their lab from excavations carried out some time ago, and then invite various experts in to answer their questions.

Tonight they look at some skeletons from the early 19th century found in an old graveyard near the centre of Bristol, quite near to the hospital, the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI). It turns out that many of the skeletons found have had cuts and other manual incisions etc done to their bones, also amputations, but these measures were all taken after the person's death, so not part of any treatment.

Although in some cases the cuts and amputations could have been due to an autopsy having to be done, in most cases it seems that the skeletons had been used to train budding surgeons at the BRI, which was also a teaching hospital: you can in many cases see the teacher's expert marks on one side of a bone, for instance, and a student's ham-fisted cuts on the other side. 

The early 19th century was a time of big advances in techniques of surgery. Medical students were being trained in their droves - there were 700 of them being trained every year in London alone. 

It seems that people who died at the BRI were very likely to have their skeletons being used for training students, before they were sent for burial. However even this was not producing skeletons in sufficient numbers to meet the demand. Significantly, anatomy trainers at the hospital had possession of the keys to local churchyards, which suggests a little illicit grave-robbing was also going on.

My god, what madness!!!!

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

 

Friday October 23rd 2020

10:00 Lois and I ring our daughter Alison, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, with Ed and their 3 children. She has just come back from walking their Danish dog Sika at the beautiful valley known as the Devil's Punchbowl, or "Ye Bottom", as it was known in the 17th century.

The picture Alison took this morning, while walking Sika at the Devil's Punchbowl

Alison has a plan to visit Cheltenham overnight next Tuesday/Wednesday, bringing the three children. 

Ed will be working, and also Government regulations limit social gatherings to a maximum of 6 people, so we'll be 2 + 4 - you do the math!!!! 

It will be so nice to see them - they have only visited us once since last Christmas, due to the lockdown. Ali has booked an airbnb house about a mile away from us. 

10:30 We phone our grocery order in to the Budgens convenience store in the village. We plan to give the family sausages-in-a-bun with baked beans for Tuesday lunch, and jumbo fish fingers, potato and veg in the evening. We order some treats for the children, including Magnum ice-creams, chocolate mini-rolls and Kit-kat chocolates - hopefully there'll be a few left over for us when they've gone. 

Lois and I don't normally get much in the way of pleasure, sob sob!!!!

11:30 We take the car out for a run, to Bishops Cleeve and back. We linger along the main shopping street which we used to frequent so often before lockdown - sob, sob (again) !!!!!

12:30 Lunch followed by afternoon nap upstairs. Later we order some wallflowers from Amazon, something that passes for a big event with us nowadays haha!!!!

16:00 We settle down on the sofa with a cup of Earl Grey tea and a delicious brace of McVities Digestive Biscuits. 

We listen to the radio, this week's edition of "Last Word", We have a habit of hearing this program every week because we want to find out if anyone died or not in the last 1-2 weeks (I have noticed that most weeks exactly 5 deaths occur). The host of the program is the charming Matthew Bannister.

Herbert Kretzmer, the lyricist, has died, sadly, aged 95. He wrote the lyrics for the musical "Les Miserables", as well as the English words for two of Charles Aznavour's hits, "Yesterday When I Was Young" and "She". He always said he never translated lyrics from foreign languages into English - he took the idea of the song, and then basically started from scratch to write something that sounded natural in English, something that translated lyrics usually didn't do, he used to say.

"She may be the reason I survive
The why and wherefore I'm alive
The one I'll care for through the rough and rainy years
Me, I'll take her laughter and her tears
And make them all my souvenirs
For where she goes I've got to be
The meaning of my life is she."

He was once challenged to find a rhyme for the English word "orange", and he came up with "An orange - should never be offered to a foreign gentleman" - my god, the ingenuity of the man!

Only 36 hours or so to go now, till the end of BST (British Summer Time) and we go back onto GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). But I think Kermit the Frog has the right idea on this one, as so often!

Atta boy, Kermit haha!

19:00 We settle down on the sofa. It's clear that Lois is feeling a bit out of sorts this evening - we're not sure whether its genuine tummy trouble or tiredness. Neither of us has slept particularly well this week. She's not certain whether she wants to go to bed just yet, so I suggest to her that she choose any film she'd like to see. She chooses an old children's film, "Just William's Luck" which was made in 1948, and which we recorded a few weeks back. 

The "Just William" stories by Richmal Crompton first appeared in the 1920's, all about a mischievous boy William Brown and his three friends. William is the youngest child of a middle-class family. The father gets the train into London on weekdays, and does some job "in the city". There's an older brother Robert and an older sister Ethel, both of whom go out on dates. 

Last but not least there is the long-suffering Emily, described as "the maid", who must be in her 50's or 60's by the look of her. She lives with the family and has to do all the housework, including cooking, washing up, cleaning etc. It's noticeable that the family are quite rude at times to Emily, but always feel sorry about this soon afterwards and try to make it up to her. However I suppose this is all faithfully reflecting social standings and attitudes in the 1920's and the decades following - oh dear!

In this film we see the family all complaining that "breakfast is so late today", and Emily can hear their grumbling from the kitchen: she drops a plate when she hears it.

Poor Emily!!!

Lois sometimes reminds me that my childhood was a bit more socially elevated than hers. My mother used to employ a cleaner, who came in a couple of times a week, whereas her mother worked as a cleaner. Oh dear (again). The advantage is that Lois has often been able to point out to me what a hard life these live-in "maids" and housekeepers had, while "the family" swanned around doing what they wanted. And you can certainly see that phenomenon unselfconsciously spelt out very clearly in films like this, much more so than you do in big "period dramas" like "Downton Abbey".

The main plot of the film is about William and his 3 friends, Henry, Douglas and "Ginger", who manage to ensure that a gang of local fur-coat-thieves get caught by police. The thieves catch the boys snooping and tie them up in the back of their big van. The van drives off with all the stolen fur-coats, and (for some reason) some enormous bags of flour. William and his friends manage to make holes in the bags of flour, so that the van leaves a trail of flour all down the country lanes it's travelling on, enabling the local police to track them, and eventually stop and overpower them. 

It's nostalgic for Lois and me to see this film, but it's far too long, at 2 hours 20 minute (including commercials). What madness!!!!

21:30 Lois finally goes to bed, and I watch the satirical news quiz, "Have I Got News For You", with, tonight, guest presenter Jennifer Saunders, who played Edina in the sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous".

The show is recorded on Thursdays and aired on Friday evening, so the news in the quiz questions is sometimes a little out of date.

The BBC have taken to installing perspex screens between the team members as part of their coronavirus precautions. These screens are becoming a problem for ageing team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, however, as their hearing is not what it was, apparently. 

Oh dear, join the club, Ian and Paul !!!! That's why Lois and I always keep the subtitles on these days, because of all the people on TV who talk too fast or "mumble", allegedly.

22:00 I go to bed. Lois is still awake, so we can have a little chat about the show, which is nice.

22:30 Zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!