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Monday

The week starts with Penelope Keith, sad news of whose death on Monday sends everyone over the age of 40 screeching back to her greatest hits – and they really were great, weren’t they? There are those sitcom characters from the late 1970s who have more or less faded from view – if I try really hard, I can just about summon the image of Wendy Craig and Geoffrey Palmer in Butterflies – but the Good Life never waned, remaining as stubbornly embedded in the national memory as Fawlty Towers, Dad’s Army and the Winter of Discontent.

If Tom and Barbara were the beating heart of the show, the real star was Keith as Margo Leadbetter. We loved Margo for her wardrobe and her innocence, for her giraffe-like frame forever curling itself into slapstick contortions while Jerry rolled his eyes in the background. Margo was as emphatically a creature of her time as the women of Motherland are today, airily disdainful, endlessly perplexed and as English as they come. In the tradition of Joyce Grenfell, there was a guilelessness about Keith that, even at her most imperious, somehow hurt one’s heart.

Some things I’ve discovered after reading about her this week: that she was RSC trained and played Beatrice (opposite Michael York as Benedick) in a 1978 TV movie of Much Ado About Nothing. That much of Margo’s wardrobe in the Good Life came from Harrods or the 1970s designer Frank Usher, he of the flowy outlines and big shapes. And that Keith’s follow-up sitcom, To the Manor Born, which faded more quickly from view than the Good Life, was Schitt’s Creek but in Somerset.

Keith communicated a gentleness that I think Paul Eddington, her co-star from the Good Life, put very well in his final TV interview, a piece of television so affecting I remember it clearly, although it was broadcast over 30 years ago. Knowing he hadn’t long to live, and on being asked what he would like his epitaph to be, Eddington said, carefully, “I think I would like it to be ‘he did very little harm.’” The modesty of this statement, and the joy he and Keith put into the world, make the pair of them rarer than rubies.

Tuesday

Serena Williams, back on Centre Court after an absence of four years, was defeated in three sets by the 20-year-old Aussie Maya Joint on Tuesday, while the seven-time Wimbledon champion’s eight-year-old daughter, Olympia, occasionally yawned from the box. For the rest of us, it was a nail-biting exercise in trying not to think too hard about the fact that Joint wasn’t even born when Williams first played at Wimbledon.

And yet here Williams was, playing a great match with a lot of the old magic still there. I watched from the sofa while ploughing my way through a pile of leftover fish fingers and a stack of puck-like hash browns and pondering the only question for those of us who remember the former world No 1 in her prime: “She’s 44 and has had two kids, how is that form even possible?”

The answer, of course, is that these women aren’t normal. I once found myself at a WTA event in a restaurant on Central Park South with the then titans of the women’s game – Ana Ivanovic, the Serb who’d just won the French Open, Kim Clijsters, and Venus Williams, 6ft 1in stocking feet and incalculable in heels – all circulating the room while the sports hacks stared, open mouthed, and tried not to get in their way. It was like being in a room with a superior branch of evolution, a status I guess you can’t really reach when you mostly eat leftovers off your children’s plates and enjoy the big matches from the L-shaped bend in your sofa.

Wednesday

I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the Bayeux tapestry. I mean, the word “tapestry” makes me a bit antsy, but it’s of great historical importance and, as these things go, there are surely worse ways to spend an afternoon.

As it turns out, a lot of people feel more strongly about the 1,000-year-old piece of embroidery than I do and on Wednesday, 80,000 of them waited online to buy tickets for the forthcoming exhibition at the British Museum. On Thursday morning, when a further 40,000 people jumped online in the queue, the museum informed them every ticket had gone.

What’s going on here? We all learned about the Norman conquest at school and I imagine many of us haven’t given it another thought since, unless it’s come up on one of those podcasts we listen to in a vain effort to actually know things. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I guess, since the tapestry has only left Normandy twice, and moving it remains risky; the tapestry has been insured for £800m – which will be quite the claim if it gets snagged going through the machine at the Gare du Nord.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to imagine how thrilled my kids would be were I to tell them, “hey, you know how we tried and failed to get Katseye tickets for September? Well guess what after nine hours on the phone I managed to score an even bigger ticket to see a 1,000-year-old bit of cloth with this really exciting battle embroidered on it and which in 1072 blew people’s minds more emphatically than the Apple Vision Pro.”

Thursday

It’s induction day at secondary school and parents half divide between anxiously hovering over their soon-to-be year 7s, and fighting off memories of their own transitions to high school, approximately 300 years ago. It’s a different world now, of course. For most of Thursday morning, I find myself glancing every few moments at the two icons on my phone, locating my kids in their soon-to-be-high school, then on their slow journey home on the bus, then in the three shops they go into between the stop and our house, where each time they use their kid debit cards I get a ping on my phone.

Smartphone bans for rising year 7s this year seek to retrain parents to unclench and let their kids find their way home without tracking them online, but once you’ve done it once, it’s a hard thing to give up and the kids are already conditioned to expect it. It remains one of the quickest ways to shock my two – up there with no seatbelts in the back and candy cigarettes – to remind them that, when I was their age, I left the house and my mum had no idea where I was, who I was with or what I was spending until I came back.

Friday

Fibre is the new protein, have you heard? Good news for everyone staggering about on GLP-1s looking like versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and subsisting on modest portions of fruit. A big piece in the New Yorker this week explains “fibremaxxing” and contains this excellent line: “Gastroenterologists and influencers alike are eager to explain that fibre affects health beyond ‘gut motility’, formerly known as shitting.”

This quietly hilarious piece goes on to explain the implications of eating to optimise digestion and features a food entrepreneur who spent the pandemic gobbling pints of blueberries at a single sitting, which, Carrie Bradshaw-style, lead to various epiphanies: “At first, she wondered if she was overdoing it –wasn’t fruit high in sugar? – but after a few months she’d lost weight and felt better than she had in years, a transformation that also helped her realise that she wanted a divorce.”