09:00 Lois and I are lying in bed. Lois didn’t sleep well last night, but we don’t have to rush to get up today: Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, wants to postpone our weekly zoom chat with her and the twins from 9:30 am to 2 pm, although the downside is that the twins, being only 7 years old, will be in bed by then, so we won’t be able to see them and chat to them till next Sunday (October 11th).
I look at my smartphone and see that CookShop are opening up their Christmas delivery slots today, so we get right onto it. It may be that we’ll be away for Christmas but we’re not banking on it – so we book a slot for the Friday before Christmas (December 18th), and order a Christmas meal for two, and also a Christmas cake.
The Christmas dinner blurb says…
The perfect Christmas dinner for 2: turkey breast with handmade
stuffing, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots, sprouts, pigs in blankets, and
gravy.
·
COOK
turkeys are raised to the highest welfare standards on small farms in East
Anglia and have been recognised with a Good Turkey Award by Compassion
In World Farming. They are reared outdoors with freedom to roam 24hrs a
day
·
The
stuffing is made from scratch at the COOK Kitchen
·
The
potatoes have been roasted in our local Great Taste Award-winning rapeseed oil,
which gives them a golden colour and a lovely crunch
·
Included
are all the traditional Christmas extras you’ll need, from Roast Parsnips to Pigs in Blankets... and even our famous Turkey Gravy!
Yum yum!!!!That’s good enough for us – so we put in the order, while still lying in bed.
Blimey this is our earliest Christmas order yet, to put it mildly!
We also order a Christmas cake to bring the order up to the minimum threshold – yum yum again!
14:00 We have our delayed zoom call with Sarah,
our daughter in Australia. All seems to be well, and the twins, Lily and
Jessie, are really enjoying reading the
books, some of which Lois and I have sent them, including some that Sarah
herself used to like when she was their age.
Sarah says the twins enjoy reading signs and signposts aloud when the family are out driving. This teaches them some new words and they are also becoming much more aware of place-names in their locality. How cute they are! And Jessie is looking forward to showing us the medal she won after finishing first in their school’s spelling bee a couple of weeks ago.
15:00 The zoom call ends, and Lois and I go to bed. We’ve signed up for another session at the Cheltenham Literary Festival starting at 4 pm today, entitled “What Next for America?”, but we decide to listen to it another day on the “Festival Player” – this will give us a bit longer in bed – my god, we are getting to be so lazy!!!!
I expect the session will in any case have been thrown
into a bit of confusion by the President’s illness, announced a couple of days ago: his coronavirus infection, plus the forthcoming election,
means there are an even greater number of different ways America could go, to put it mildly! My
god, what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
The blurb to the session says:
All I can say is “Yikes with a capital Y!!!!!!!!”
20:00 We watch a talk online from the Cheltenham Literary Festival , Tim Harford, the BBC’s “numbers guy”, speaking on “How To Make The World Add Up”, an introduction to his latest book on the subject.
Lois and I like Tim, and every week we enjoy his amusing comments in his radio programme “More or Less”, where he castigates the misuse of statistics by politicians and others in the media, and gives us the true picture of things.
He has an interesting thesis tonight – that human beings tend to believe the stats they want to believe and to brush aside the ones they don’t want to believe, a trait of human nature that a number of research studies have confirmed time and time again. He urges us to think of this every time we hear some stats – i.e. “Are they a result we want to hear or not?”, and he tries to persuade us to replace this partiality with a better trait, that of curiosity to know the real truth about things, whether it’s a pleasant truth or not.
He has some examples of people believing what they want to believe, and ignoring or brushing aside evidence to the contrary.
We hear for example about one of the world’s top experts on Dutch artists, Dr Abraham Bredius, who got carried away when he thought he’d discovered a lost “Vermeer” painting, which was actually painted by the forger Han van Meegeren. There was a certain amount of evidence that the painting was by Vermeer, and another bunch of signs that it wasn’t. But Bredius was so thrilled by the prospect of the discovery of a hitherto unknown Vermeer work, that he couldn’t stop himself from declaring its authenticity. Shortly afterwards, other van Meegeren forgeries, all painted in the 1930s, came to light, and these also were declared genuine Vermeers.
It later became known that, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, Han van Meegeren had sold one of his forgeries to Hermann Goering. After the war he was tried for treason, for selling a piece of Dutch cultural heritage, and this charge carried the death penalty. To escape this punishment he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of forgery.
And he actually became a hero in Holland, after people thought he had “duped”
Goering into parting with money for a painting that was completely worthless, a version of the truth that, again, everybody wanted to believe. One
piece of the story didn’t come out at the trial, however: that van Meegeren was actually a Nazi sympathizer, and had sent Hitler a copy of one of his art books, inscribed
with a fawning dedication to the Fuehrer, written on the flyleaf.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzz!!!!!
I read a book when I was young: A van Meegeren-dosszié by Lord Kilbracken. It was published in Hungary in 1973.It was very interesting. The original title is:Van Meegeren ( A case History)Published in 1967. (Nowadays they haven't written the date and the original edition of a book.)
ReplyDeletethat's interesting! It really is an odd little story though isn't it....
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