Reducing Plan

            On Thursday morning I continued to work out the chords for “Bourrée de complexes” (Buried in Complexes) by Boris Vian and "Variations sur Marilou) by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I bit my tongue while singing again but didn’t seem to do any damage this time. It happened just when I was getting into it.

            I weighed myself before breakfast and found that I’m 92 kilos which is overweight. I decided to cut back on my food portions again.

            Around midday I washed one of the shelves in the southwest corner of my bedroom and cleaned all the pens and cutters and the cups I keep them in.

            I had sunflower seeds and a spoonful of yogourt for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish had taken out a loan with his and Sapphire’s furniture as collateral but he hasn’t been making the payments. They are about to lose their furniture. Kingfish decides that he and Andy will start their own loan company. Kingfish tells Andy that if he puts in $500 then he’ll put in the brains. Andy says he'll only invest $300 and so Kingfish says he'll only put in a third of his brains. Their first customer is Longshot Harrison, who borrows $300 and says he’ll pay it back in a week. But after a week he says he can't pay it back because he spent it at the track. Kingfish and Andy try to take it to court but the judge finds out that they had no license to be in the loan business and they were charging interest far beyond the legal rate. In order to avoid being charged with loan sharking they had to drop the charges. When Kingfish gets home Sapphire tells him this is the day the collector would be coming for their furniture. The doorbell rings and it’s Longshot Harrison. He really works for the loan company and he had only conned Kingfish into giving him the money he owed. He came to give him his receipt.

            I didn’t take a bike ride because there was a chance of rain and so I just went to Freshco. I bought three bags of cherries, a half pint of raspberries, two containers of Greek yogourt, some raspberry skyr, a box of spoon size shredded wheat and some shaving gel. All of the gel containers had gel all over the outside. I assume one of them leaked on the others. It seemed odd that the shelf stocker didn’t at least wipe them off. No pride in their work.

            I looked at a few more recordings of me playing “One Hundred Hookers”. They still had mistakes but less each day.

            I had squash, a pork chop and gravy while watching two episodes of  "The Adventures of Robin Hood".

            In the first story a medieval equivalent of an archaeologist named Dr Quince is passing through Sherwood Forest and Robin recognizes him as having been King Richard's antiquities expert in the Holy Land. He says that he is excavating the villa of Septimus Superbus. Robin remembers a legend about the treasure of Septimus Superbus but that no one knows where the villa is. Quince says he has found the villa and there are art treasures there but there is no gold. He says he has to go to Nottingham to recruit labour to dig at the site but Robin offers that he and his men will do the job. They uncover enough artefacts to require wagons to transport them to a monastery for safe keeping. Quince needs to go to Nottingham to hire the wagons and Robin tells him to get help from Friar Tuck while he is there. Meanwhile Robin and his men stay behind to continue digging. Derwent falls through a trap door and discovers a chest which they assume contains the treasure. Meanwhile in Nottingham Quince meets with Tuck in a tavern. Quince insists on paying for their ale but absent mindedly gives the innkeeper Roman coins. He is arrested for passing false money and taken to the sheriff. The sheriff knows of the legend of the Roman treasure and after holding Quince for a while he releases him and provides him with wagons to take back to the site of the villa. But the sheriff secretly follows him and when he gets to the site demands that Quince turn over the treasure. Robin tells the sheriff he will exchange the treasure for Quince but when the chest is opened the sheriff leaves disappointed. The treasure is the oldest copy of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

            In the second story it is the flood season and some local farmers need to dig a trench to drain the water from their fields but one of the farmers, the widower Simon Dexter does not want his land touched. The farmers believe Simon’s land is haunted because they hear howling, rattling and see arrows shot from nowhere. It’s really Simon creating these effects to scare people away. A local widow named Jenny comes by to do Simon’s washing and she constantly bothers him about his stubbornness. When Friar Tuck comes with Little John to prove there is no ghost Little John is shot in the ass with an arrow. Robin spreads a rumour that Little John has been killed and then puts him in white clothing and covers him in flour to frighten Simon into digging the ditch. Simon is terrified and begins to dig but there is a sudden rainstorm and the flour is washed from Little John. Simon attacks Little John with his shovel. As the river rises Robin has all of his men and the farmers confront Simon but he refuses to budge because of pride. Finally Little John coaxes Simon through his ego. He challenges Simon that he can dig a ditch better than he can and Simon accepts the challenge. The ditch is completed and the farms are saved. Little John pushes Jenny into Simon’s lap and they both like it.

            Jenny was played by Barbara Lott, who trained at RADA, made her stage debut in 1944 and her first TV appearance in 1950. She starred in later life in the shows “Rings On Their Fingers” and “Sorry!”. She played Ewan McGregor's mother in The Pillow Book.

            In between the two shows I noticed that my kitchen sinks were backed up. I tried to plunge them but nothing happened. Later when I came back to make coffee the water was draining freely. Afterwards it was plugged again and I noticed the floor was wet. I looked under the sink and the pipes were leaking. I mopped up the water and put a bucket and a pan underneath. I scooped and sopped up all the water from the sinks and the dripping stopped but I couldn’t run the water until it was fixed. It was 0:15 and so I’d have to wait until much later in the morning to call my landlord.