08:00 Lois didn't sleep well last night, and sometime between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. she crept out and crawled into our grown-up daughter Sarah's old bed, so she could read her book without disturbing me. She gets us 2 cups of tea at 7.30 a.m. and brings them up to bed for us.
Lois has been reading through Jan Karon's "Mitford" series about an Episcopalian minister in the fictional town of Mitford, in one of the Carolinas, I forget which. I think there are about 15 or so books in the series, and Lois is getting towards the end of the series now. She keeps me up to date with events in the book - it's quite interesting to see how the backwoods people in the Carolinas often resemble backwoods people in England, even in their dialect speech sometimes, and, for instance, in the centuries-old children's rhymes they still come out with. Fascinating!
08:30 I look at my smartphone. Our daughter Alison in Haslemere, Surrey has posted a picture of her eldest daughter, Josie (14), who has just gained a distinction in her Grade VI piano exam, which was conducted online because of the coronavirus pandemic. Well done Josie - wow, she's such a star! We're so proud of her.
09:00 We get out of bed. Today's big event is that we actually have to go out of the house, drive into town, and go into another building, to talk to people and interact with them there - yikes!
Yes, it's time for our annual pre-winter flu jab. We have to wear a mask and plastic disposable gloves, of course, which we're not used to, as we don't normally go anywhere. As always our glasses immediately start to steam up, which is a nuisance.
I am quite nervous. Last time we went to the doctor, in September - for my blood test - we had to somehow squeeze our car into the surgery's tiny car park, where we unfortunately got "boxed in". I had to squeeze myself out of the car through about a 9-12 inch space, and walk up to a special new window at the front of the building to check in. Then I had to go back to the car till a nurse came out and escorted me into the building, where I got given the blood test. Not a good experience.
Today things are much better organised - cars are banned from entering the surgery's car park, but it's okay - we find there are plenty of empty spaces on the street outside. It's weekend and it's lockdown, so I suppose that's fair enough.
A nurse directs us to a side/rear entrance where we troop through a long corridor keeping about 6 feet away from the person in front and from the theoretical person behind us (there actually isn't anybody behind us), but it isn't very busy anyway. I think Lois and I are two of the last people to be "done" this year for some reason. The flu jab itself only takes about 30 seconds, which is nice.
12:30 We come back and have a celebration lunch: bacon and eggs, a grilled tomato and the "blueleg"/ "bluet/blewit" (?) mushrooms that our neighbour Bob brought round for us the other day.
14:00 Nobody actually told us today to take it easy after the flu injection, but we've decided to do that anyway, just to be on the safe side: we go to bed for a couple of hours. [But you generally do that anyway, there's nothing special about that! - Ed]
16:00 We get up and relax on the sofa with a cup of Earl Grey tea and a piece of Sainsbury's delicious coffee-and-walnut cake: yum yum!
We switch on the TV and see the latest news on the US Election: we've been interested to see whether the Republican Party and Fox News etc start to distance themselves from Donald Trump, and whether the US media will declare Biden the winner, and it does seem to be happening to greater or lesser extent. We feel a big sense of relief suddenly - phew! Can it be that the Trump Era is at last over? For some reason it makes us feel strangely sleepy.
My Hungarian penfriend, Tünde, has emailed me, to point out that Scaramucchi, Trump's former communications director, whom Trump fired after 10 days, said on CBS this week, on the day after the election, that in the next 2-3-4 years, a very dangerous situation could have developed: Trump was trying to take the country towards an Hungarian-type authoritarian system, he said.
Meanwhile, Trump's friend in Hungary, Viktor Orbán, is, like Trump, not doing very well with his own local pandemic compared to other European countries, Tünde says. "The situation is very bad here. Only Belgium and the Czech Republic are worse".
She says that almost all the media are in Orbán's hands, and he makes out that the situation there is better than it is, by averaging the spring numbers with the autumn numbers - my god! And Orbán hasn't stopped a Hungary-Iceland football match taking place next week: they have sold all the tickets. He doesn't listen to doctors and says that everything is ok. He doesn't want a lockdown because of the economy, but football matches aren't important for the economy. You can go to the cinema or theatre where there may be 500 people, or to other sport events (without limit) too here. How can sick people go to work, she asks?
Oh dear, that doesn't sound good, to put it mildly.
Orban, when he came to power many years ago, actually proved to be the first of a new wave of autocratically-minded leaders of the type we thought we'd seen the last of with the fall of communism. Go away Victor all is not forgiven haha!
20:00 Hurrah - Channel Four has saved Saturday nights by putting on a couple of new documentaries series. First, "Surviving the Stone Age", in which an Anglo-American group of 8 male/female experts in primitive skills try and survive with Stone Age tools in a forested mountain area of Bulgaria, to try and experience the problems our ancestors faced after they first ventured into Europe 50,000 years ago.
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