Sunday May 11th 2025 "Mothers Day today - did you forget haha!!!"

Well, it's Mothers Day today, isn't it - did you forget it? 

Relax, haha! I'm just playing a rather cruel joke on you, that is, if you live in Nigeria, the UK or any of the UK's "dependencies" like the Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands in the South Pacific, where it emphatically isn't Mothers Day (!), so just relax!!!!

If you've heard of them, those HD&O islands are completely uninhabited, of course, but unlike the uninhabited Australian "dependency" of the Heard and McDonald Islands, the US fortunately hasn't slapped one of those new tariffs on these British islands, which is good news for the birds there and other wild life!

{Marvellous opening 'paras' today, Colin, if I may say so, and I loved the tongue-in-cheek "sideswipe" at today's labyrinthine, and often fraught, world of politics and economics. Keep it up, won't you! - Ed]

a rare visit by tourists to the uninhabited UK

dependency of the Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands in

the faraway South Pacific

And although it isn't Mothers Day here in the UK or the HD&O Islands, it certainly is  Mothers Day in Australia, and luckily my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I didn't forget to organise a suitable Mothers Day card to be delivered by the Australian Post Office to our dear daughter Sarah, now living in Perth, Western Australia with husband Francis and their 11-year-old twins Lily and Jessica. 

We also do a video call today with Sarah and the twins this morning, as per usual for a Sunday morning, which is nice. It's late afternoon over there, however, but Sarah says Francis made them all a nice Mothers Day breakfast, with pancakes, I think - or something of the sort. I forget the details !!!

Awwww!!! our whatsapp video call this morning with our dear daughter Sarah

and our lovely 11-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica, here

showcasing a couple of their beloved stuffed toys - dogs of some sort probably!

  

flashback to yesterday: Sarah opens the Mothers Day card Lois and I sent her

You'll notice that there isn't much furniture behind Sarah in that last photo, by the way. That's because they've mortgaged or sold almost everything they had to buy their first house down under, with Sarah simultaneously doing two accountancy jobs and all, one over there in Perth (since September 2024), as well as her earlier job in Evesham, Worcestershire UK, which she's still doing, through the magic of the internet.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

our little "Two jobs" Sarah, (1)  (2nd from right) with colleagues 

in Evesham, Worcestershire UK and (2) leaving her then office in Australia

when Lois and I picked her up there at 5pm on our 2018 trip down under

Luckily we'll see the whole family in July when they visit the UK - with Sarah writing the trip off for tax purposes - well she is an accountant, so up to all the latest "tax dodges" - only joking by the way, it's all 100% "perfectly legal", she assures me!!!

And they'll be here for the twins' 12th birthday, which will be nice. And the twins are planning to bring some of their latest stuffed toys. They possess about, like, a billion stuffed toys, many of them in our house here in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, so it will be nice for the two groups, their Australian toys and their UK toys, to meet up in July too - there won't be a dry eye in the house, that's for sure!!!!

flashback to 2024: I showcase two of our twin granddaughters'

favourite stuffed toys in their so-called "UK collection" - awwww!!!

It's a bit disappointing to Lois and me, when we ask the twins about what they've been doing at their new (since January) Australian school, because they never seem to be able to think of anything noteworthy. They're bright kids, and we suspect they're not being challenged much at their current school. We contrast this with when they were at their UK school near Evesham for the last two year, and they were always bursting to tell us about the latest exciting projects that Mr Palmer, their inspirational teacher, had given them to do.

flashback to July 2024 at a county primary school near Alcester,

Warwickshire: Lily (top right) and Jessica (bottom left) get the

chance to hold their school's time capsule before it gets

buried for posterity by their inspirational teacher, Mr Palmer 

However, the twins should be all right hopefully when they move to their secondary school next February, the local private Anglican grammar school, where all the reports say that the teaching is excellent. 

10:30 Awww!!! But no time to speculate l too much about the twins or about "Buckles" and "Rover" today. because I've got to drive Lois to her church's Sunday Morning Meeting about 10 miles south of here, in leafy, semi-urban Petersfield, which is what passes for a "country town" in these here parts (!). 

When we arrive, they're just "setting up", but several online participants have started magically appearing on the big screen behind the platform in this little village hall.

they're just setting up at this village hall outside Petersfield, where 

Lois's church holds its Sunday Morning Meetings: 

(1) the big screen where online participants are starting to appear, 

(2) me sitting on my own as Lois chats to fellow-church-member

Myrtle (left), and (3) us, after the meeting begins

And gosh it's a bit of a rude awakening this morning, because this week's preacher has opted to talk, at length, about a chapter of the Bible that many prefer to downplay or avoid dwelling on - the one where God warns the Israelites that everything bad imaginable is going to happen to them if they disobey his word. 

If they obey God's word, they'll get many blessings, but it they don't, then they'll be cursed. Their crops will go bad, their wives will be slept with by other men etc etc, and worst of all they'll be forced to resort to cannibalism through sheer hunger. 

Yes, and there'll be cannibalism too, but this is not shown in the above "summary", which omits some of the nastiest bits of the "curses", like the cannibalism, and also the incurable 'boils' etc that the Israelites risk being infected with. 

Most preachers often prefer to concentrate on the 'blessings' side, and you can see why, to put it mildly!

And I'll pass over the "cannibalism" forecast in case it's too upsetting for my readers. Let's leave that one out altogether, shall we!

Later, browsing the quora forum website on the internet, I see that the website's pundit on biblical matters, Australian Dick Harfield, comments that Jewish religious leaders at the time, unlike the "hellfire preachers" of more recent times, didn't have anything like the visions of hell to scare their congregations with, if they disobeyed God's word.

a typical 18th century "hellfire preacher"

Heaven and hell as the binary 'good' and 'bad' places to spend your afterlife simply hadn't been developed at the time these words were probably written, says Harfield. This was probably around the time when the Jews were exiled in Babylon, says Harfield, because of the references to them being doomed to be scattered into foreign places where they will worship strange gods. However, these 'blessings and curses'  did a similar sort of job to the later 'hellfire', when it came to a preacher "scaring the living daylights" out of their little 'flocks', that's for sure. 

It's a difficult chapter for preachers, generally, because it also says God 'rejoiced', both in laying on the blessings, but also in laying on the curses on his people Israel. 

And this rejoicing wasn't any 'casual' rejoicing either, on God's part, whether it were during the giving of the blessings or the curses. 

Pundit Eric Ellison of the Andrews University Theological Seminary comments that the Hebrew word for 'rejoice' here was also used in the Old Testament to describe the joy of the bridegroom on seeing his wife on their wedding night, or an occasion when somebody stumbled unexpectedly on some 'booty' that had been forgotten about. He comments that this is "much more than the sort of figurative language", that might have been used for "a [strictly] unemotional arbitration of justice". 

Yikes - this is real pleasure being indicated here !!!

So, to sum up, all in all a difficult Sunday morning meeting, for Yours Truly at any rate !

14:00 At least when we get home from Petersfield, Lois and I can get into bed for statutory afternoon nap-time, which is nice! 

I knew it was going to be a difficult day today, anyway, because today would have been the 73rd birthday of my dear late brother Steve, if he had lived - he died back in 2013. 

flashback to December 1965: my dear late brother Steve, aged 13,

clowning around as usual (!), in a carefully-staged, light-hearted, comic photo 

taken in the back garden of our parents' house in Redland, Bristol

flashback to Christmas 2008, the last time he was well enough to

visit us for Christmas, we think: seen here with mine and Steve's dear late

mother, Nan, plus Lois and our future son-in-law, Francis

How best should Lois and I most fittingly celebrate Steve's "73rd heavenly birthday" however? 

It's a bit of a puzzler, until, in bed this afternoon, a text comes in from Pennsylvania, and it's from "our other Steve", our American brother-in-law with his plan for the day. Remembering brother Steve's passion for pool and snooker and his love of a "tipple", American Steve says he plans to watch a pool tournament on TV with a glass of cider before going for his own nap-time.

This is why later today, when we struggle out of bed at least (!), Lois and I watch a bit of the fittingly named Snooker World Seniors Championship - something for the older players, at last, bless, and get them out of their houses and their armchairs, which will do them some good anyway health-wise, if nothing else !!!

The only downside of it is that Brother Steve's hero, Jimmy White - now 63, so quite a "youngster" still (!) - has already been eliminated, which is a pity, to put it mildly!

So, no Jimmy White, but a bit of a surprise for Lois and me to see that modern snooker has at least one female referee now of all things! Wouldn't have happened in Steve's day haha!

So happy birthday, Our Steve, and rest in peace - we'll never forget you.

21:00 So, all in all, a difficult day, but at least Lois and I can go to bed on a typical 1970's style evening entertainment, courtesy of the Wheeltappers and Shunters' Social Club, the series which re-created the smoky, boozy atmosphere of a working men's club on a pre-smoking-ban Saturday night, somewhere in the north of England, which is nice!

Nice also, as always, to see Club Chairman and 'turn-manager', the charismatic Colin Crompton, sitting at his stage-side table, reading out some of this week's "club notices for members", which always make us smile, whether they're intended to or not (!).

This one's an announcement about the club's male "stripper of the week".

Good old Colin! As chairman and 'turn-manager' he's as efficient as ever, but still seemingly unaware of most of the unfortunate "double entendres" we hear in many of his "announcement". Maybe one day we'll see him crack a smile, but I'm not holding my breath !!!!

Poor Colin !!!!!

Will this do?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

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