08:00 Lois and I are in bed drinking our morning cup of tea, when Alison, our daughter in Haslemere, Surrey, sends us pictures
of her youngest, Isaac, who has already begun celebrating his 10th
birthday today.
birthday breakfast
training session in the family's back garden
pictures of Isaac from earlier this morning,
including one here where he showcases the football game Lois and I bought him
Lois and I got him the football computer game PES 2020, which by 9 am he has already started playing. Isaac is very obsessed with football and even has his own football blog on the internet:
footballwiki.co.uk . What a “wunderkind”, or “wonderkid” as Isaac calls it
!!!!!
11:00 We talk to Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, and her
twin daughters Lily and Jessica, who are celebrating their 7th
birthday today – and wow how they know how to celebrate birthdays – all their
soft toys also have birthdays, all marked on the calendar: good gracious!
The twins’ other passion is baking, and watching Masterchef Australia on TV. And tomorrow they’ll be making
cup-cakes to take into school on Tuesday when the new term starts, after two
weeks so-called “winter holiday”.
They are so excited today, that they are bouncing all round the
room as we try to talk on them on our phone – good grief! We watch Sarah dim
the room lights (it’s 6 pm and pitch dark over there – the folly of it!!!), and then we see her light the 7
candles on their calorie-heavy cake, decorated with M&Ms / Smarties.
Finally
we watch the girls sit down to eat, wearing their illuminated unicorn-style hats - another birthday gift.
the cake
sitting down to eat
showing off geographical knowledge on their shiny new illuminated globe
Later the twins show off their geographical knowledge by pointing out
various countries on their shiny new illuminated globe: they have already
noticed how small Britain is compared to Australia: perceptive or what?!!!
Playing can also be learning – no doubt about that!!!!
It's seven years since the twins were born - we were celebrating Isaac's 3rd birthday on our patio, when the news came through from Gloucester.
flashback to this day in 2013: we celebrate Isaac's 3rd birthday on our patio...
... when a call comes in - Sarah has given birth to twins in Gloucester Royal Hospital
first pictures of the newborn twins
Oh to be seven again - and if not, I'd even settle for 10: that's still quite young, especially nowadays !!!!
flashback to May 1953: me at school, aged 7,
second row, second from left - ringed
In between communications with our two daughters, Lois takes part in her sect's online services via zoom. One of the congregation, Mike, works for a pest control firm, which does a lot of work for county and borough animal control departments. Mike is known locally, and among sect members, as the "Ratbuster". He says that during the lockdown, rats have switched from restaurants (all closed) to private homes, and he has been getting a lot of business, working 12 hours a day.
A lively discussion ensues. Lois comments that there's an island in the Atlantic, a British colony that nobody we know has ever heard of, called Gough Island. Everybody knows about St Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha, as well as the Falklands and all the extra places like South Georgia, that the "Argies" wanted to grab for some unknown reason. But who's ever heard of Gough Island?
On Gough Island, a bunch of house-mice that escaped from a passing ship have evolved into gigantic supermice, which have been eating all the cute baby birds' eggs and the cute baby birds. The British Government now has to mount an expensive air operation to (humanely) annihilate these mice.
Killing off one species to save another!
Survival of the cutest!!!!!
Oh, the folly of it !!!!
20:00 We spend the evening watching TV, the third and final part of the Channel 5 series on the Battle of Britain.
This episode concentrates on the massive German aerial attacks of September 15th 1940, when the Luftwaffe sent nearly a thousand bombers and fighters over towards London, with the aim of wiping out the RAF and clearing the way for a seaborne invasion of Britain.
Fortunately the RAF, for their part, threw everything they had into the defence of London. This was the day that Churchill famously asked the RAF High Command how many planes they had in reserve, and the famous answer came back "None".
The German plans for the day failed and although they continued to send attack planes over for another month or so, the decision to abandon the plans for a seaborne invasion were made a couple of days after the September 15th operation. The RAF lost 26 planes on September 15th, but the Luftwaffe lost 56, and it was realised in Berlin that they were not getting anywhere with the plans to neutralise the RAF.
It's interesting to see German film of their pilots relaxing in northern France and Belgium between sorties, sitting around in deck-chairs and on loungers, just like we've seen RAF pilots doing a million times before on old newsreels. For the pilots and crew on both sides, day to day life was pretty much the same, evidently.
Many RAF pilots wore themselves out during the Battle of Britain, flying sortie after sortie, often several times a day over weeks and months, and on top of the heavy death toll there was a psychological price paid by the pilots and crews who survived. But in those days there was no such concept as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) - anyone suffering mental problems was quite likely to be marked down as "lacking in moral fibre", for example. Tough times.
A big part in the RAF's success was again played by the contingent of battle-hardened Polish pilots and air crew, who had already seen plenty of action in Poland and later in France, before they finally arrived in England. This was despite the fact that the RAF for a long time didn't fully trust them, and insisted on Polish squadrons being led by British officers. The Poles tended to brand these British commanders as "incompetent", but a representative from the Polish air museum in London commented that this was the kind of thing Poles love doing more than anything - criticizing the boss!
What madness!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
Killing off one species to save another!
Survival of the cutest!!!!!
Oh, the folly of it !!!!
20:00 We spend the evening watching TV, the third and final part of the Channel 5 series on the Battle of Britain.
Fortunately the RAF, for their part, threw everything they had into the defence of London. This was the day that Churchill famously asked the RAF High Command how many planes they had in reserve, and the famous answer came back "None".
The German plans for the day failed and although they continued to send attack planes over for another month or so, the decision to abandon the plans for a seaborne invasion were made a couple of days after the September 15th operation. The RAF lost 26 planes on September 15th, but the Luftwaffe lost 56, and it was realised in Berlin that they were not getting anywhere with the plans to neutralise the RAF.
It's interesting to see German film of their pilots relaxing in northern France and Belgium between sorties, sitting around in deck-chairs and on loungers, just like we've seen RAF pilots doing a million times before on old newsreels. For the pilots and crew on both sides, day to day life was pretty much the same, evidently.
German pilots and crew relax in northern France, waiting for the next call
to scramble and fly over the channel to England
Many RAF pilots wore themselves out during the Battle of Britain, flying sortie after sortie, often several times a day over weeks and months, and on top of the heavy death toll there was a psychological price paid by the pilots and crews who survived. But in those days there was no such concept as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) - anyone suffering mental problems was quite likely to be marked down as "lacking in moral fibre", for example. Tough times.
A big part in the RAF's success was again played by the contingent of battle-hardened Polish pilots and air crew, who had already seen plenty of action in Poland and later in France, before they finally arrived in England. This was despite the fact that the RAF for a long time didn't fully trust them, and insisted on Polish squadrons being led by British officers. The Poles tended to brand these British commanders as "incompetent", but a representative from the Polish air museum in London commented that this was the kind of thing Poles love doing more than anything - criticizing the boss!
What madness!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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