East Hampshire - it's not always the sunniest of places, is it, to put it mildly. And the dawning of yet another misty day here this Sunday is making some of "the natives" restless, no doubt about that!
....like that Molly Fulton from nearby Nether Wallop, the woman who's making all the waves in this morning's local papers [source: Onion News]
Honestly! Poor Molly !!!! And her family, trust them to sign up for Sandy Balls again this year!! Last of the big spenders, eh?!!!!
And I can only guess how Molly must be feeling this Sunday morning - and it's certainly a chilly, damp one again, here in East Hampshire no surprise there! Luckily my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I can forget the British weather here in quiet, semi-rural Liphook and just "veg out" at home, which is nice.
"Where's Liphook?" - well, that's the question Lois and I tend to get asked
whenever we say we live in this quiet, semi-rural town in Hampshire!
09:00 Somewhere where you can wear a hat with pride is certainly Australia, and Lois and I can "drift away" and imagine the sunshine "down under" as we start our day with a video whatsapp call to our daughter Sarah in Perth, Western Australia this morning. Sarah's husband Francis has taken the couple's 11-year-old twin daughters Lily and Jessica out "to the lagoon" (!) this morning, if you please - or should I say "this afternoon" !!!! - because it's already 5pm over there, and their day is almost over.
What a crazy planet we live on !!!!
(left) our daughter Sarah, reduced to a flickering image on Lois's
Huawei's tiny 4" x 2" screen, propped up on our coffee-table between a DVD and
a dictionary (!) and (right) the Perth suburb where she now lives - sob sob!!!
And local mum Molly, who's making the headlines here in East Hampshire this morning (see above), would love the hats that the kids wear with their uniforms, that's for sure!
Sarah herself, a chartered accountant, is meanwhile working all the hours God sends, almost literally, doing a job for a local accountancy agency in Perth while at the same time still working online for her old workplace in Evesham, England. What madness, isn't it! But she seems to thrive on the stress, which is comforting. The family can certainly use the extra money at the moment - they'll be moving into their first house over there, "only 5 minutes walk from the ocean", in a couple of weeks, so there'll be the mortgage to start paying off, not to mention the school fees.
Lois and I are hoping very much that Sarah's twin daughters will be accepted by the school. They're bright kids (well, we're their grandparents, we would say that, wouldn't we?), but when we remember the enthusiasm with which the twins used to show us their school projects in England, it's sad to see how they haven't been challenged so far at the local primary school in Perth where they've been attending since last September.
flashback to September 2023: the twins at our house with mum Sarah,
working enthusiastically on illustrating one of their challenging
school projects, set them by their charismatic teacher Mr Palmer,
at their last school in England, in Alcester, Warwickshire
Poor Sarah !!!!!
11:00 Lois logs in to her church's Sunday Morning Meeting. I normally drive her the 11 miles to the village hall in Petersfield, where services are held, but Lois has noticed me looking "a bit tired" this week, so she's insisting that she'll be content to just take part online today, bless her!
flashback to a Sunday earlier this month: (left) church members
taking their seats ahead of the start of the meeting, and (right) Lois and me
sitting at the back, next to Ruth Somebody
After the meeting she gives me a rundown of proceedings. It was an unusual session, it seems.
Today's visiting preacher said that he started preparations for his remarks, known as the 'exhortation', with an experiment in AI (artificial intelligence). The usual practice at Sunday morning meetings is for the preacher to take the day's designated Bible readings, usually one from the Old Testament and one from the New, and comment on one or the other, in this case Proverbs Chapter 1 and Luke chapter 16 about the parable of the prodigal son.
The preacher decided to see what sort of a lecture AI tools would produce if asked to compare the two chapters, and he said that the result "wasn't at all bad", although he still decided to write something himself in the end.
Nevertheless, could AI perhaps be the future, for hard-pressed preachers, vicars, ministers etc trying to come up with something fresh every Sunday?
I wonder.....!
Lois says it's a constant pressure for these people to somehow come up with something new every Sunday, something which her own father, Dennis, a lay preacher, had to wrestle with, and he sometimes used some (possibly musty!) old sermons by Methodist preacher G Campbell Morgan, for his inspiration.
No AI in those days, that's for sure!
The problem is also highlighted in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, where the hard-pressed local vicar used to make liberal use of published sermons, especially those of Fordyce. And he used Fordyce's "Sermons to Young Women", in an attempt to keep local girls on the straight and narrow, not always an easy task, to put it mildly!
Poor Miss Bennet !!!!!
20:00 An interesting night on the couch for us tonight, first of all watching the second programme in Professor Alice Roberts' new series, "Ancient Greece by Train".
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The "vexed" stones at issue, now known as "the Elgin Marbles", were "nicked" or "half-inched" back in the 19th century by British aristocrat Lord Elgin, who claimed he'd got a piece of paper, signed by a Turkish government 'bigwig', authorising him to take the stones back to England - an episode described at the time by another British aristocrat, Lord Byron, as "shabby".
Here's the minister's reply:
Alice is a fervent supporter of the idea of returning the Marbles to Greece, and she wrote an article about it in this week's Radio Times.
According to the article, Jenkins, in her book Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums… and Why They Should Stay There, Jenkins examined the influences behind the high-profile battle to return museum artefacts in an attempt to repair historical wrongs.
It's fascinating for Lois and me to see chat show host Terry Wogan interviewing Rubik back in 1986, when the Cold War was still the defining borderline in Europe:
Another era, wasn't it. And so strange to recall that the fall of the Berlin Wall, and everything that followed that, was only 3 years away at the time of this interview.
Tonight Alice broaches the question of a possible return of the stones, with the Greek Minister Dr Lina Mandoni,.
Not everybody in Britain agrees with Alice on this issue, however. Steve, our American brother-in-law, in a recent email, has drawn our attention to an article in the Guardian publicising the contrary views of new British Museum trustee's Tiffany Jenkins.
In his email, Steve teases that even the mighty Elon Musk may be about to "weigh in" on the issue [Shome mishtake shurely! - Ed], although I have to say I've googled it without result so far - but watch this space!
Elon Musk, seen here with long-time collaborator
Donald Trump: could Elon be about to weigh in on the vexed
subject of the Return of the Elgin Marbles?
I wonder....!
Lois and I say, "Send the originals back and just keep a plaster cast in London." They've got lots of other plaster casts in the Museum. It's not exactly rocket science is it.
Be fair!!!
21:00 We go to bed on an old Terry Wogan chat-show on BBC3, where Rubik's Cube inventor Erno Rubik is "on the couch".
In his reply Rubik says, "the Hungarians know me, they like me, and I'm proud of this. Nobody says that this man has so much money and that it is wrong. Because they like what I did."
Fascinating stuff, isn't it!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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