Our elder daughter, Alison, has her 45th birthday
today. She, Ed and the family are staying in an AirBnB in Norfolk. She has posted
on the web these pictures of the 3 children, Josie (14 in 3 weeks’ time),
Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10).
Rosalind and Isaac, with Sika, the family's Danish dog,
last night in the AirBnB
Josie today at Castle Acre, Norfolk
One of the best memories of my life is of this day 45 years ago, in
the old St Paul’s Maternity Hospital, when Ali was born, at 14:14 - I still remember the exact time, which was posted up on a board.
I couldn’t watch the
birth because it was a forceps job, but the nurse brought Ali out to me when
she was just 20 minutes old, so I could hold her for a few minutes. “She’s a
nice-looking one,” said the nurse, I remember.
There are various photos of Ali's birthdays that I remember
particularly.
1983 – Ali’s 8th birthday, her
first of her two in the US, during
our 3 year residence there – 1982-85 –
at a Chuck-E-Cheese restaurant in Columbia, Md
1985 – Ali’s 10th birthday, on the
high seas –
on board the QE2 as we steamed back to England
1986 – Ali’s 11th birthday in our
back garden:
her first since we came back to England the
previous year.
Lois stands behind her.
“Time it was, and what a time it was, I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories – they’re all that’s left you” – copyright Paul Simon
haha!
11:00 News comes in of yet another blow to the conventional wisdom
about Shakespeare and his authorship of key seminal works – source: the influential American news web site, The Onion.
Oh dear – I wonder if this will be hot topic at this year’s Cheltenham
Literature Festival? It’s being held online this year, like the Hay-on-Wye
festival was a couple of months ago.
I remember we heard a very good talk during the Hay-on-Wye festival this year about Shakespeare’s
son Hamnet and his tragically short life, given by author Maggie O’Farrell – Lois has
just finished reading Maggie’s novel about the boy.
19:30 We hear an interesting radio programme about the Spanish flu
outbreak in 1918, and its 2 subsequent “waves” – of which the second was the
first. This flu was only called “Spanish” because news of it first broke in
Spain – one of the few European countries that wasn’t censoring its news, simply
because Spain wasn’t a combatant in the war.
Lois and I heard a lot we did not know in this programme. Much is
often said about how World War I changed the world for good, but not so much
about the longer-term effects of the Spanish flu pandemic.
In a lot of cases the two events combined to produce a
larger-scale result – e.g. greater equality in society: in the case of the flu, people realised that
the poor were suffering much more than the rich from the pandemic, and this led
to the creation of Health Ministries and forerunners of the WHO.
Epidemiology also took off for the first time as an academic
subject capable of leading to profound practical consequences. And efforts of
research labs to find antidotes and vaccines led to the accidental discovery of
penicillin by Fleming in the 1920s.
The Spanish flu pandemic particularly affected the 20-40 year old
age range, but it had the effect of killing off the weakest members of this age
group. The survivors, by contrat, were the healthiest and most fertile members
of this age group, so lots of healthy couples, which laid the foundation for the baby boom of the 1920’s, historians say.
Historians believe the pandemic also hastened the end of the World
War – combatant countries and their populations were becoming exhausted.
The pandemic also affected the Peace Treaty that was signed at
Versailles in 1919. Many historians believe that Woodrow Wilson, the US
president, who became ill with the flu for 10 days at the peace conference, was
afterwards left without the same energy when it came to negotiating with the
French, who wanted to lay extraordinarily punitive obligations on Germany – the
French got their way on many aspects of the treaty, and this is thought to have
led indirectly to World War II twenty years later.
Wilson’s energy was thought to have remained impaired later on after he went back home, when he had
to try to persuade the US Congress to let the US join the newly established
League of Nations: he failed, and the
absence of the US from the League weakened the influence of this body from the very
start.
Another result of the pandemic was that It radicalised opinion in India
and strengthened the independence movement led by Gandhi. India suffered
inordinately from the pandemic – 18 million died there, a number equal to the
total of men from all nations that were killed in the war.
But when this current COVID-19 pandemic subsides, will we find we have
changed a lot of our ways for good? Not on the evidence of the Spanish flu – people quickly
went back to their old ways of doing things, it seems - oh dear! What a crazy world we live in! 22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!
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