09:00 We get up early enough to prepare a list for Mark the Gardener - he's coming at 10:45 to do some gardening jobs for us [so that's what he's going to do - well, surprise, surprise! - Ed]
11:00 We have our morning coffee while Mark toils outside - we love garden work - we would watch it all day, as the man said.
Employing servants allows the ordinary person to spend more time on cultivating hobbies, but having a gardener can also be a captivating hobby in itself.
I remember reading many years ago an article on the influential American news website, Onion Local News, about Susan Tager, an area woman with a brand new hobby that she wanted to tell the site's readers about.
"If you had asked me three years ago, if I would ever have a gardener, I would probably have thought you were out of your mind," Susan told local reporters.
"Well, I loved the idea of lush green and fresh vegetables, but in my head it simply did not seem worth finding the time and effort to deal with a gardener every day from spring to autumn: too much trouble. Nothing seemed more tiring than to work out what my gardener should plant and where I would order him to plant it - all the countless problems of getting someone to take care of the garden seemed overwhelming. Not to mention anything about the hours and hours I would have to spend under the deck umbrella observing his every move and making sure every detail was exactly as I wanted it. All of that just screamed out "thanks but no thanks! "
"But my mother and sister and my servants kept insisting that I had to get outside and be more active. "Well now, Susan," they said. "Look at you! You hardly have the energy to get out of bed after breakfast every morning!" They kept telling me how rewarding it was to have a gardener, what miracles an outdoor hobby would do to refresh my sensitive constitution. So I finally gave in and decided to give "gardenering" a shot. And you know what? They were right! And now I can't imagine life without a gardener, any more than I could without stables, or my wine buyer, or my kitchen staff!
"I recommend starting slowly. Initially I only got the gardener to come once a week. It was difficult at first: gardeners speak a quite different language than we do, so you have to communicate through pointing and using short commands like with a dog - but when I got out in the sun and fresh air, I really began to enjoy myself. In less than a month I found myself looking forward to little Paulo's arrival more and more. Now it's a rare day that I do not get him to come over and do some gardening everyday, even if just for a few hours because of the heavy rain. "
It is sadly rare nowadays to meet women with Susan’s way of immersing oneself in a healthy new hobby, we think. I remind Lois about Susan's viewpoint about "gardeners as a hobby" and about the fact that we first employed a gardener the last time we stayed in Australia with our daughter Sarah and her family, but with the unfortunate result that we could not watch him and thereby enjoy our garden to the max. By the time we arrived home, the garden had already begun to turn into a real jungle again, damn it!
11:30 Before lunch, we look at the BBC News. There's a story today about a new book, "Behind the Enigma" by Prof. John Ferris of the University of Calgary. In the book he suggests that although the Bletchley Park code-breakers definitely made an important contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany, this contribution has at times been exaggerated. After all, you can't win a war just with intelligence, as he says.
Lois and I agree with this. We visited Bletchley Park many years ago, and I have to say that the guides there thankfully didn't fall into the trap of saying that reading Nazi Enigma-encoded messages was enough on its own to ensure the Allied victory, which is the exaggerated impression you sometimes get from documentaries.
Ferris thinks, however, that code-breaking played a much more significant role in many more recent conflicts, such as the Falklands War of 1982, which he thinks the UK could not have won without this kind of input.
Flashback to 1998: we sign up for a tour of Bletchley Park, which had recently opened up to tourists
I always remember reading that, in medieval times, the city of Venice had one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching intelligence networks in the whole of Europe. As a result the city government were in receipt of the most detailed information about the plans and intentions of all the other states in Europe, both friendly and hostile. However, the city of Florence at the same time totally lacked the means to do anything about the information it received, so they were presumably reduced to saying "Really? How interesting!", every time they got a hot tip about something or other being planned by somebody somewhere. What madness!!!!
14:00 Lois gets a call from Hilary, a member of her sect. Sect members have not been able to do much meeting with each other since the lockdown began in March, other than zoom meetings on the computer screen, and some are getting restless about this, she says. She plans to arrange a meal one evening in a room inside the Shutter Arms in Gotherington - the managements say they can make some 12-person tables available, each set for 6 diners, to ensure distancing.
The Shutter Arms in happier times - sob sob!!!!
But Lois and I are not keen - we'd rather just eat with each other to be on the safe side, thank you very much! It's obviously too cold outside now as we progress through October, and we don't want to take the risk of being inside with all those people talking loudly and breathing all over us - call us cowards if you want!!! [You little cowards! - Ed]
This kind of approach does mean the we "don't get out a lot", however, there's no doubt about that! Steve, our brother-in-law in Pennsylvania USA recently sent us an apposite comment on this: it suggests to us that we're not the only people who are taking this stay-at-home approach.
What a crazy year we're living in !!!!!!
We make the double bed up in our daughter Sarah's old room for occasional use in our afternoon naps. We stripped our own bed earlier today, washed the mattress protector and hung it up outside to dry. Unfortunately an downpour of rain that wasn't in the weather forecast drenches it again when it was almost dry - damn! So we have to bring it in the house and put it over a radiator - we'll want it for tonight.
21:00 We watch some TV, the third and final episode of comedian Frank Skinner and author Denise Mina's retracing of the journey undertaken by Dr Johnson and Boswell in the 1770's.
Lois and I had no idea what Iona looks like, one of the cradles of Christianity in the British Isles since the 6th century. It certainly looks dramatic on the approach from the sea.
Iona's partially restored abbey and ruined nunnery as they appear when approached from the sea
Frank and Denise have a bit of trouble getting to the island - on the scheduled day all boat trips to the island are cancelled due to rough seas, so they have to wait till the following day.
The journey must have been terrifying to Dr Johnson when he and Boswell attempted it in 1773. Johnson was famously nervous of leaving dry land - he once compared travelling on a boat to "being in jail, except with the chance of being drowned".
My god, poor Johnson !!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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