Tuesday, 25 August 2020

Tuesday August 25th 2020


It’s our 48th wedding anniversary, and we spend an unproductive, and very self-indulgent day, to put it mildly.


Included for comparison: flashback to 2013: our 41st anniversary:
Note: no lockdown in those days !!!!

We exchange our home-made anniversary cards at breakfast, and then lounge about and watch while Mark comes to help spruce up our garden: our daughter Alison, plus Ed and their 3 children, will be camping on our back lawn on Sunday night, so we want it to be looking tidy.

our back garden

We’ll give the family access to the utility room at the back of our house, so that they can use the toilet and sink etc. They’ve never done this before, so it’s a bit of an experiment, and an adventure for the children: Josie (14 next week), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10).

13:00 We have a  “naughty” lunch of sausages, scrambled egg, grilled tomato and chips – but we earned the right to a naughty meal by having a low calorie vegan meal for lunch  yesterday – Thai vegetable curry. So that’s all right then!

14:00 Then we spend three hours in bed in the afternoon: my god, we’re becoming lazy, no doubt about that! Storm Francis and his 45 mph winds hammers at the window as we lie there – yikes!

Storm Francis

It’ll be nice to see Alison and her family at the weekend – they’ll be arriving on Sunday afternoon, because Rosalind wants to play in a unisex football match in Alton, Hampshire, on Sunday morning. 

It’s a 3 day weekend, so they’ll stay over until Bank Holiday Monday, and then drive home to Haslemere, Surrey.

The children will be starting back at school the week beginning Monday September 7th, after an introductory day on Thursday/Friday the previous week. This will be quite an adventure for them too after months of lockdown; the girls prefer working at home, but Isaac misses his friends, and he’s anxious to get back to real school so he can see more of them.

17:00 We stumble out of bed and have our second CookShop meal in as many days: lamb moussaka – yum yum! Followed by a very rich chocolate dessert.


lamb moussaka from CookShop – yum yum!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa and watch a bit of TV, the second part of a new series on “The African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power”, with this episode concentrating on Senegal.


What Lois and I knew about Senegal you could write under a postage stamp, but tonight we’re very impressed by it.  A politically stable country with miles and miles of sandy beaches, laughing, smiling faces everywhere, colourful clothes, street festivals, exuberant art scene with fantastic street murals, fashion scene, music scene including hip-hop, and dance scene.

What’s not to like? Although I dare say it’s a bit hot there for the likes of Lois and me, also we don’t particularly care for hip-hop or street festivals:  call us old fuddy-duddies if you like!

No wonder, though, that charming presenter Afua Hirsch bumps into a number of African-Americans in Dakar, who went to vacation there to find their roots, but then decided to make it their home. 

They said how surprised they were when they got there: Western media tends to broadcast mainly negative images of Africa, they say, images which don't represent the total reality of life in African countries today.










 22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!!


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