Friday, April 12 2019

10:00 Lois and I go into the village and swing by Waghorne’s butcher shop to buy bread, meat and cheese. We come back and relax with a cup of coffee on the couch.

Waghornes, the village's local butcher shop on High Street

Afterwards I go out into the garden and mow two of our 6 lawns, the one in front of the house, and one immediately behind the house. After lunch and a short afternoon nap in bed, I go out again and mow the remaining 4 lawns, which lie behind the house and  spread down towards the bottom of the garden, while Lois meanwhile does a little weeding  in the flower beds.

one of our freshly mown lawns

We are both exhausted, and have back-ache and pain in the joints - damn! We come back into the house and, to recharge our batteries, we relax with a cup of tea and a piece of bread with homemade greengage jam - yum yum!

It's a bit of a shame that Michelle Obama, the former American first lady, who worked on dozens of local backyards during her recent visit to England (source: Onion News), unfortunately did not visit Lois and me - but it may be that our garden gate was locked, I have to admit.

Sources within the Cafferty family confirmed that at about 8 o'clock this morning, they woke up, looked out of their kitchen window, and saw what was unmistakably the former US first-lady on her knees in their backyard humming softly as she worked on a row of winter potatoes.

"Look, she's got her gardening hat on, and I think she's planting winter kale or something," whispered Adam Cafferty, 43, who for a moment had enjoyed prolonged eye contact with Michelle Obama, before she smiled broadly and returned to pulling up weeds . "That winter asparagus plant was certainly not there before. How long has she been out there?”, added Cafferty.

After getting up and inspecting her work, Obama reportedly gave a friendly wave, and quietly walked round to the neighbours' house and began working on the next backyard.

A wasted opportunity for Lois' and me – that’s for sure. It's a bit of a shame that our garden gate was locked, but we usually lock it at night for safety. My late mother used to say that especially during race festivals, there were thousands of visitors from EU countries looking for a cheap place to sleep - including local residents' backyards.  My goodness, in November too, for crying out loud – what  madness !!!

Flashback to November, and Michelle Obama's Book Tour in England:

16:00 We listen a little to the radio, an interesting programme in the series "The Last Word". Lois and I have got into the habit of hearing this program every week because we want to find out if anyone in the past 1-4 weeks has died or not (I have noticed that most weeks there are only 4- 5 deaths, which is slightly comforting, to put it mildly). The host of the program is the charming Matthew Bannister.

Sadly, Ian McDonald has died recently, at 82 years of age. He was the defence ministry's spokesman during the Falkland War, and he became very famous at that time as our main source of news about the war. Everyone got to immediately recognise the slow, lugubrious voice he used, regardless of whether he was announcing good news or bad.

Ian McDonald, defence ministry spokesman during the Falkland War

I recall that many Brits used to hold their breath when the television channels announced that they were interrupting programmes to go over to the Ministry of Defence, to see one of McDonald's hastily arranged short press conferences. It was impossible to guess from McDonald's tone or facial expression whether another ship had been sunk by a missile or whether we had won the war. Yikes - scary !!!!

He wore big glasses, something like the comedian Eric Morecambe. He had dark curly hair, and was always immaculately dressed in suit and tie, just like a typical civil servant during that period. Journalist Keith Waterhouse called him "the Speaking Clock," and  “the first man ever to speak in Braille”.

Lookalike: McDonald, giving one of his lugubrious press conferences

Eric Morecambe, the comedian - I wonder if they could be

perhaps related?

McDonald often included references to quotes from Hamlet in his statements, without giving Shakespeare's actual words: for example, his famous aside  "Hamlet act 3 scene 4, lines 53 and 54. so if I can leave that quotation with you ... ..", which was responded to with laughter by the journalists, none of whom of course, had the faintest idea of ​​what the quote was. His favourite quote was to give the line reference to the famous Hamlet quote "Answer came there none" because he had a personal aversion to saying the words "No comment".

McDonald attracted an army of fans, and he received tons of fan letters, and there was even a female stalker who took to following him around everywhere on the London Underground.

My goodness, what a man !!!!!

Journalist Edda Tasiemka also died recently, at 96 years of age. She became famous for her extensive library of newspaper and magazine cuttings, which were used by a generation of British journalists and writers. Some of her cuttings dated from the 19th century or earlier.

Edda Tasiemka in her house in London,

seen here with part of her personal cuttings library

She and her husband, Hans (a.k.a. "Tassie"), originally refugees from Nazi Germany, owned a large house in North London (in Golders Green), where she accommodated her "library" - in recent years she became better known as "the human Google ".

Their cuttings library gradually took over every room in the house - she collected her cuttings over many decades in collaboration with her husband Tassie - they were both journalists. And though all newspapers and television and radio news agencies had their own cuttings libraries, many journalists had the habit of contacting Edda with questions about her collection, because of its range and its international dimension, and its value as a historical source.

Her friend, journalist and writer Robert Lacey, says that in the beginning she and Tassie kept up a kind of a living room that could still be used as a living room, but when Edda opened a drawer, it turned out to hold dozens of cuttings about, for example, the Franco-Prussian War, or the like. or  cuttings about "Crawfie", Queen Elizabeth's governess, perhaps. But gradually it became harder and harder to move around the house - there were cuttings everywhere in the end.

In the dining room of the house, for example, she had a large cupboard, which was completely filled with cuttings about Charles de Gaulle.

She also collected cuttings from foreign magazines, such as, for example, the German "Stern" magazine or "Paris Match", which at that time had a more microscopic interest in the British royal family than the British press did itself.

Medical clippings lived in the kitchen, but she confined her collection of soccer-related cuttings to the toilet, Lacey says, because football players mostly didn't interest her much, although there were rumours that she was stashing her David Beckham cuttings away in the bedroom. for some reason - good grief, what madness !!!!

Edda always used to dress fashionably, says Lacey. She was an attractive little woman with a sexy voice. And her Christmas card gave more than a few clues to her eccentric personality: she posed each year in some cheeky pose with some Santa or other, picked up from some local department store.

And even as an elderly woman in her 70’s and 80’s, she was still looking attractive and lithe on the front of her Christmas card, flashing her stocking'ed legs up in front of some Santa's face, Lacey says.

My goodness, what a woman !!!!!

Dan Robbins, the American artist, also died recently, at 93 years of age. It was Robbins who reinvented the concept of painting by numbers, though he used to say he actually stole the concept from Leonardo da Vinci. Unfortunately, Leonardo did not think of patenting the idea, or start manufacturing painting by numbers sets on anything like an industrial scale, which was a bit of a shame to put it mildly.

Poor Leonardo !!!!!

Dan Robbins

18:00 We have  dinner and spend the rest of the evening watching a bit of television. An old episode of Top of the Pops is on, from August 1987.

The BBC4 channel usually airs as many old episodes of this programme as they can, mostly twice a week, on Thursday nights and Friday nights, and currently the channel is showing us episodes from the year 1987.

However, the channel has a bit of a problem - there are a lot of old episodes of this now 50-year-old programme that they can't use because some of their old DJs and presenters have become persona non grata because of later scandals involving charges of sexual assaults, molestations or the like: and the worst case is all those many episodes where the disgraced dead DJ Jimmy Saville was the host of the programme.

But there are also a few singers who have become disgraced, for example, Australian entertainer Rolf Harris, and also, more recently, Michael Jackson.

In this show from August 1987, Jackson happened to have just hit the top of the charts, but he had done so so unexpectedly and suddenly that the BBC did not even have a video of the song yet, so therfore as the show's finale, they had to show another hit song, which was lucky in this case. Otherwise, this  repeat would have been banned just like dozens of others.

no video available, which was lucky as it turned out, to put it mildly !!!!

My goodness, what a crazy world we live in !!!!!

flashback to august 1987: we say goodbye at the bus stop to our 2 daughters,

Alison (12) and Sarah (10) who were about to be spending a week of camping and youth-activities,

organized by PGL (named after the company’s founder Peter Gordon Lawrence,

but unofficially known as “PGL - Parents Get Lost" ha ha ha !!!!)

Lois and I enjoy a week without kids in central Wales - happy times !!!!

21:00 We continue to watch a bit of television, the latest episode of Goggle Box, a fun programme where various TV viewers watch some of the week's programmes and comment on them from their sofas and armchairs etc.

For our part, the only disadvantage with this programme is that the programme’s commentators do not usually look at the kind of programmes that Lois and I typically see, but I’m going to let that one slide.

However, the show is always worth looking at because of its occasional philosophical or anthropological insights. Tonight, there is a typical such breakthrough when Giles, Mary's husband, suddenly realises why women are better than men at finding objects that have been gone missing,. It all stems from prehistoric times, Giles suspects.

Such unexpected insights are their weight in gold, no doubt about that.

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

Danish translation

10:00 Lois og jeg går hen ind i landsbyen og smutter ind i Waghornes-slagterforretningen for at købe brød, kød og ost. Vi kommer tilbage og slapper af med en kop kaffe i sofaen.

Waghornes, landsbyens lokale slagterforretning på Højgade

Bagefter går jeg ud i haven og slår to af vores 6 græsplæner, den, der ligger foran huset, og en der ligger umiddelbart bag huset. Efter frokost og en kort eftermiddagslur inde i sengen, går jeg ud igen og slår de resterende  4 græsplæner, som ligger bag huset, og som breder sig mod bunden af haven, mens Lois går i gang med at luge lidt i blomsterbedene.

en af vores nyslåede græsplæner

Vi er begge to udmattede, og har ondt i ryggen og ledene – pokkers! Vi kommer tilbage ind i huset og for at genopleade vores batterier slapper vi af med en kop te og et stykke brød med hjemmelavet reineclaudemarmelade – yum yum!

Det er lidt af en skam, at Michelle Obama, USAs tidligere første dame, der arbejdede på dusinvis af lokale baghaver under sit nylige besøg til England, desværre ikke besøgte Lois og mig –men det kan være, at vores havelåge var låst , det må jeg indrømme.

Kilder inden for Cafferty-familien, bekræftede, at de omkring klokken 8 om morgenen vågnede, kiggede ud af deres køkkenvindue og så, hvad umiskendeligt var den USAs tidligere første dame på knæ i deres baghave i gang med at nynne sagte for sig selv, som hun arbejdede på en række vinterkartofler.

”Se, hun har en stor havehætte på, og jeg tror, hun planterer vintergrønkål eller noget,” hviskede Adam Cafferty, 43, som på et tidspunkt havde langvarig øjenkontakt med Michelle Obama, før hun smilede bredt og vendte tilbage for at trække ukrudt ud.

”At den der aspargesplante var bestemt ikke der før. Hvor lang tid har hun været derude?”

Efter at have rejst sig op og inspekterede sit arbejde, løftede Obama angiveligt hånden til en venlig vinken, gik rolig rundt til naboernes hus og begyndte at arbejde på den næste baghave.

En spildt mulighed for Lois’ og mit vedkommende – det ved jeg med sikkerhed. Det er lidt af en skam, at vores havelåge var låst, men vi plejer at låse det om natten for sikkerheds skyld. Min afdøde mor plejede at sige, at i sær under væddeløbsfestivaler, var der tusindvis af besøgere fra EU-lande, der ledte efter et billigt sted at sove – herunder lokale indbyggeres baghaver. Du godeste, i november for pokker – sikke et vanvid!!!

Tilbageblik til november, og Michelle Obamas bogturné i England:

16:00 Vi lytter lidt til radio, et interessant program i serien ”Det sidste ord”. Lois og jeg er kommet i vane med at høre dette program hver uge, fordi vi ønsker at finde ud af, om nogen i de seneste 1-4 uger døde eller ej (jeg har bemærket, at der i de fleste uger kun sker 4-5 dødsfald, hvilket er lidt trøstende, for at sige mildt). Programmets vært er den charmerende Matthew Bannister.

Ian McDonald døde desværre for nylig, på 82 år. Han var forsvarministerets talsmand under Falklandskrigen, så blev han dengang meget meget berømt, som vores eneste kilde til nyheder om krigen. Alle genkendte umiddelbart den langsomme, sorgfuld stemme, han brugte, uanset han annoncerede gode nyheder eller dårlige.

Ian McDonald, forsvarsministeriets talemand under Falklandskrigen

Jeg mindes om, at mange briter plejede at holde vejret, når tv-kanalerne annoncerede, at de afbrød programmer for at vende til forsvarsministeriet for at se en af McDonalds hastigt arrangerede korte presskonferencer. Det var umuligt at gætte fra McDonalds tone eller ansigtsudtryk, om endnu et skib var blevet synket, eller vi havde vundet krigen. Yikes – skræmmende!!!!

Han bar store briller, noget i stil med komikeren Eric Morecambe. Han havde mørkt krøllet hår, og var altid ulasteligt klædt i jakkesæt og slips, ligesom en typisk embedsmand i den periode. Journalisten Keith Waterhouse kaldte ham ”Telfonuret”, også den første mand til at taler på Braille.

Lookalike: McDonald

Morecambe

McDonald inkluderede ofte referencer til citater fra Shakespeare i sine udmeldinger, uden at give den præcise ord: for eksempel sine berømte ord ”Hamlet act 3 scene 4, lines 53 and 54. so if I can leave that quotation with you…..”, hvilket blev reageret til med latter af de samlede journalister, deraf ingen selvfølgelig, havde den fjerneste anelse om hvad citaten var. Hans yndlingscitat var at give linereferencen til det berømte Hamlet-citat ”Answer came there none”,  fordi han havde en personlig aversion mod at sige ordene ”No comment”.

McDonald tiltrækkede en hær af fans, og han modtog tonsvis af fan-breve, og en kvindelig stalker havde for vane et følge efter ham alle vegne på London-metroen.

Du godeste, sikke en mand !!!!!

Journalisten Edda Tasiemka døde også for nylig, på 96 år. Hun blev berømt for sin omfattende bibliotek af avis- og tidsskriftudklip, som blev brugt af en generation af britiske journalister og forfattere. Nogle af hendes udklip daterede fra det 19. århundrede eller tidligere.

Edda Tasiemka i sit hus i London,

set her med en del af hendes personlige udklipsbibliotek

Hun og hendes mand, Hans (aka ”Tassie”), oprindeligt flygtninge fra nazistiske Tyskland,  ejede et stort hus i Nord-London (Golders Green), hvor hun rummede  sit ”bibliotek” – i senere år var hendes øgenavn”den menneskelige Google”.

Biblioteket overtog efterhånden hvert rum i huset – hun samlede sine udklip over mange årtier i samarbejde med Tassie – de var begge to journalister. Og selvom alle aviser og tv- og radio nyhedsbureauer havde deres egne udklipsbiblioteker, havde mange journalister imidlertid for vane at kontakte Edda med spørgsmål om hendes samling, på grund af dens vifte og internationale dimension, og dens værd som en historisk kilde.

Hendes ven, journalisted og forfatteren Robert Lacey, fortæller, at i begyndelsen beholdte hun og Tassie en slags stue, der stadig kunne bruges som stue, men når Edda åbnede en skuffe, viste den sig at rumme dusinvis af udklip, som eksempel handlede om den fransk-preussiske krig, eller lignende. eller nogle udklip om ”Crawfie”, dronning Elizabeths governess. Men efterhånden blev det sværere og sværere at bevæge sig rundt omkring i huset – der var bunkevis af udklip alle vegne.

I husets spisestue havde hun for eksempel en stor skabe, der totalt var fyldt med Charles de Gaulle-udklip.

Hun samlede også udklip fra udenlandske tidsskrift, som for eksempel, det tyske ”Stern” eller ”Paris Match”, der dengang havde en mere mikroskopisk interesse for den britiske kongehus, end selve britiske presse.

Medicinske udklip boede i køkkenet, men hun begrænsede sin samling af fodbold-udklip til toilettet, siger Lacey, fordi fodboldspillere for det meste  interesserede hende ikke særlig meget, selvom der var rygter, at hun gemte sine David Beckham-udklip i soveværelset, af en eller anden grund – du godeste, sikke et vanvid!!!!

Edda plejede at klæde sig moderigtigt, siger Lacey. Hun var en attraktiv lille kvinde med en sexet stemme.  Og hendes julekort gav et par clues om hendes ekcentriske personlighed: hun poserede hvert år i en eller anden fræk positur sammen med en eller anden julemand fra et eller andet lokalt stormagasin.

Og endde som ældre kvinde i 70’erne og 80’erne var hun stadig attraktiv og smidig på sit julekorts forside,da hun flashede sine strømpeklædte ben foran julemandens ansigt, siger Lacey.

Du godeste, sikke et kvinde !!!!!

Dan Robbins, den amerikanske kunster, døde også for nylig, på 93 år. Det var Robbins, der opfandt konceptet om maling efter tal, selvom han plejede at sige, at han faktisk stjal konceptet fra Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo kom desværre ikke til at patentere idéen, eller gå i gang med at fremstille maling efter tal sæt i industriel skala, hvilket var lidt af en skam, for at sige mildt.

Stakkels Leonardo !!!!!

Dan Robbins

18:00 Vi spiser aftensmad og bruger resten af aftenen på at se lidt fjernsyn. De viser et gamle afsnit af Top of the Pops fra august 1987.

BBC4-kanalen plejer at genudsende så mange gamle afsnit af dette program som de kan, for det meste 2 gange om ugen, om torsdagaftener og fredagafterner, og for tiden er kanalen i gang med at vise os afsnit fra året 1987.

Kanalen har imidlertid lidt af et problem - der er en masse gamle afsnit af dette 50-årige program, som de ikke kan bruge, fordi nogle af deres gamle dj’er og værter er blevet til persona non grata på grund af senere skandaler, der handlede om sigtelser for seksuel krænkelser eller lignende: og det værste tilfælde er alle de afsnit, hvor den vanæret afdøde dj Jimmy Saville var programmets vært.

Men der er også sangere, der er blevet vanæret, for eksempel, den australske entertainer Rolf Harris, også for nylig Michael Jackson.

I dette show havde Jackson tilfældigvis lige skudt til tops på hitlisterne, men han havde så pludseligt og uforventet toppet hitlisten, at BBC ikke havde en video af sangen, så som showets finale, blev de nødt til at fremvise en anden hitsang, hvilket var heldigt i dette tilfælde. Ellers ville denne gendudsendelse være blevet forbudt, som dusinvis af andre.

ingen video til rådighed, hvilket var heldigt, for at sige mildt !!!!

Du godeste, sikke en skør verden vi lever i !!!!!

tilbageblik til august 1987: vi siger farvel på busstoppestedet til vores 2 døtre,

Alison (12) og Sarah (10), som var ved at tilbringe en uges camping-og-aktiviter,

organiseret af PGL (nævnet efterselskabets grundlager Peter Gordon Lawrence,

men uofficielt kendt som ”Parents Get Lost” !!!!)

Lois og jeg nyder en uge uden børn i det centrale Wales – lykkelige tider!!!!

21:00 Vi fortsætter med at se lidt fjernsyn, det seneste afsnit af Goggle Box, et morsomt program, hvor forskellige tv-seerne ser på nogle af ugens programmer og kommenterer dem i deres sofaer og lænestole osv.

For vores vedkommende er den eneste ulempe ved dette program, at programmets deltagere sædvanligt ikke de slags programmer, som Lois og jeg typisk ser, men det springer jeg over.

Showet er imidlertid altid værdt at se på på grund af dets lejlighedsvise filosofiske eller antropologiske indsigter. I aften er der et typisk sådant gennembrud, da Giles, Marys mand, indser, hvorfor kvinder er bedre til at finde genstander, der har forputtet sig, end mænd. Det stammer fra forhistoriske tider, mistænker Giles.

Sådanne nogle indsigter er deres vægt værde i guld, ingen tvivl om det.

22:00 Vi går i seng – zzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!