Most Australian states and territories celebrated it on June 8th, but Norfolk Island and Christmas Island celebrated it on June 15th, and Queensland will celebrate it on October 5th. What a crazy country they live in – but we love it !!!!!
The Queen is still the head of state over there in Australia – which is nice, because Lois tells me that one more ex-colony, Barbados, is about to become a republic, and go over to having a President in place of the Queen. This comes after 50 years or so of being independent, although the island is going to stay in the Commonwealth.
Fair enough if that’s what the Barbadians want – far be it from me to criticize. The only thing is, I’ve always thought that Presidents are quite a dull institution compared to having a royal. On the other hand I can understand that it must feel a bit old-fashioned nowadays, and perhaps a bit demeaning , to have a head-of-state from another country, no doubt about that!
I’ve put together a pretty good summary of the issues there, I think, with some pros and cons for good measure. No wonder I’m such a respected political columnist [No you aren’t – Ed].
11:30 Lois finishes listening to her sect’s first worship service on mixlr, and I rush into the kitchen to make lunch for two: two lightly poached eggs on toast with water-cress, another of my signature dishes – yum yum!
Whilst having our lunch we see our neighbour Frances drive off on her way to Eastbourne to visit her
daughter Elizabeth and the two grandchildren. Elizabeth will be away from home
for a few days, and she’s asked Frances to come over and look after the two children, and see that they get to school etc. It’s a bit of a nightmare
for Frances because one of the children, who’s about 12, really doesn’t
like school, and tries to avoid going if at all possible. My god!
Lois and I will be looking after Frances’s garden and greenhouse again while she’s away. This will give us a chance to see how the builders are getting on with the six horrible new houses they’re building right next door to her.
12:30 Lois’s second worship service begins, and I go to bed and have a nap. I get up at 3 pm and we have a cup of Earl Grey tea and a slice of bread with Lois’s home-made gooseberry jam – yum yum!
Lois is reading her copy of “The Week”, which summarizes the news of the last week, from home and abroad.
She tells me that, surprisingly, the English language often still dominates the EU despite the imminence of Brexit.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union speech in the European Parliament last week was 81% in English, with a short interlude in German and a burst of French at the beginning.
This heavy use of English was strange, because nobody these days in the Parliament strictly needs to speak anything other than their mother tongue, because of the availability of simultaneous translations.
The reason why English often still displays this kind of prominence is apparently the desire of speakers to reach a wider audience on social media, writes “Politico”. It’s all very well for the Parliamentarians to make use of the simultaneous translation services, but if they don’t deliver their speeches in English then they drive away online audiences, who don’t have those translation services available – so it just becomes irritating for people trying to listen to speeches on Facebook or Twitter, YouTube and the like, to find that they are in some language they don’t understand.
What madness! Fewer than 20 MEPs have English as their mother tongue now, compared with 116 German speakers, for instance. What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the third and final part of Simon Schama’s series “The Romantics and Us”.
An enjoyable 60 minutes but Simon is now on territory much more
familiar to us. He runs through some of the major losses of national sovereignty
over the last 300 years or so, and the “romantic reaction” against the
disappearance of national traditions in favour of a more “rational” or “European”
approach, usually forced on the conquered people by the conquering power.
We see the Scottish poet Robert Burns’s reaction to the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, the reaction of the various German states to being absorbed into Napoleon’s empire in the early years of the 19th century, and the amazing swallowing-up of the previously massive kingdom of Poland by a combination of Austria, Prussia and Russia, which drove Chopin into an exile in Paris, an exile from which he never returned.
Lois and I learnt quite a few things. We didn’t realize, for instance, that the
Brothers Grimm’s investigation into traditional German folk-tales and the
publication of these often violent tales in a huge volume was part of this ‘Romantic’
reaction: an attempt to reinstate the German ‘soul’, that lay buried in its
massive dark forests. It was in part a response to the rationalization and standardization
process launched by Napoleon’s empire.
We feel that England has missed out on all this excitement, which is a pity. We were not conquered by a foreign power after the Norman invasion of 1066.
But it’s true you can see some of the national resentment that the Norman conquest caused at the time in the stories of Robin Hood. I’m afraid to say that Lois and I still watch the old 30-minute TV episodes of “The Adventures of Robin Hood” from the 1950’s, to remind us of our youth – oh dear, it’s our second childhood arriving at last!
And perhaps Brexit is our version of a “Romantic” Revolution, arriving 150 years after everybody else’s – as usual we’re always a bit too late – damn! Well, Brexit is certainly more "romantic" than "rational", to put it mildly!!!! My god !!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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