Today Meg and I slept in a little because last night we were a little late into bed, having stayed up to watch the opening match of the Rugby World Cup. France beat the All Blacks in quite a convincing display and this was a marvellous start to the tournament as a whole which does go on for 50 odd days. It looks as though we are going to have weekends permanently filled with rugby for weeks ahead but Meg and I do not mind, although we will need to watch a little selectively. After we had got our act together this morning, I made Meg some simple cereal breakfast and then we made haste for the Waitrose cafeteria. Here I bought a chocolate cake which turned out to be absolutely scrumptious (what an old-fashioned word) The staff divided it into eight pieces for us and we were soon joined by four friends, including our University of Birmingham friend. We had no hesitation is pushing the tables together so that we could have the makings of a pleasant little party. Our friends had bought for us a wedding anniversary card which they had all signed and we were just in the course of some jolly conversations when our University of Birmingham friend realised with some dismay that his credit card was missing. He knew that he had used it in a pub last night and I tried my best to reassure him that it was probably not ‘lost’ or stolen but in all probability he had put the card into a shirt picket or some other trouser pockets and that is where he would probably find it after all. But it is a horrible feeling when you know a credit card has gone missing so our friend shot off as rapidly as he could to try to retrace his steps and, if necessary, put a stop on the card before the worst could happen. The rest of us carried on munching chocolate cake and eventually realised that it was time for us to go our various ways. I rescued our friend’s hat for safe keeping and the remains of the chocolate cake and I am sure that I brought them home but I have put them down somewhere (I think) in a strange place and cannot find them. When we got in, I took the various bundles of Asian and Indian food out of the fridge in readiness for when our son and daughter-in-law were shortly to join us. Then it was a microwave job to get the starters going (onion bhajees and mini spring rolls) and then we had main courses of generally rice based foods, all washed down with rather a fine rosé wine I had picked up from Aldi. Normally, Meg and I are are not great rosé drinkers but with Indian/Asian food and a hot day, it made the meal into quite a little occasion.
Once we had got lunch out of the way, my son and I started to tackle the TV installation. The initial part of this seemed to be quite straightforward but we found we need to install a spare ‘gizmo’ to extend the WiFi through the electrical wiring of the house – fortunately, we had a spare one of these in stock but I left it for my son to install. The rest of the installation seemed to be pretty straightforward but I needed to go onto my laptop to feed into a code which the installation process demanded. This sort of thing only has to be done about once and we got the BBC iPlayer sorted out, as well as the ‘normal’ Amazon Prime to which we have had a subscription for quite a long time. A lot of the afternoon, we devoted to the watching of the Ireland-Romania match but, as you might expect with Ireland one of the stongest teams and Romania one of the weakest, the whole match was a bit of a walkover. The quality of the high definition images on the new TV seems superb to us and to my mind is superior even to the Panasonic which is our ‘main’ TV but is getting a little dated and long in the tooth by now. After we had got the rugby matches out of the way, my son, daughter-in-law and I (but mainly the younger generation) set ourselves the task of mastering the navigation of some of the facilities on the new TV. Certain apps are already ‘built in’, some of which we have be never heard of, but others tried and tested favourites such as YouTube (which we use extensively for watching opera) Here we ran into some intricacies as my Amazon Prime subscription gives me some access to some musical albums as part of the subscription but, at the same time, I have an individual subscription which I recently activated to ‘Music Unlimited’ All of this seems a little complicated and we discovered that we needed to download the Amazon music app and add it the apps already loaded on the TV. One way or another, we think we have the two kinds of apps downloaded and disentangled from each other. My daughter-in-law ensured that I knew what was I was doing with the TV control before we were let for the day. Meg and I intended to go to church this afternoon but as Meg was feeling somewhat wobbly again, we thought we would probably give it a miss today of all days, although it had been our intention to have made it if we could possibly could.
© Mike Hart [2023]