Sunday November 22nd 2020

 08:00 Lois and I tumble out of bed so as to be ready for our daughter Sarah's whatsapp call. Sarah lives near Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 7-year-old twins, Lily and Jessica. 

The family are spending a long weekend in the Margaret River Region - Sarah is taking tomorrow (Monday) off work. This is the area that Lois and I visited with them in 2018, and it will be nostalgic for us to hear about the tourist sites that we saw with them 2 years ago.

09:30 The whatsapp call begins. The family are camping near one of the beaches we all visited in 2018.

Lily in one of her trademark hats, seen here on our tiny phone's screen

Sarah with Lily

Jessie

Francis 

Lily close-up

Jessie - close-up

It's a lot of fun this morning to talk to them about the places we visited with them before, many of which the family has been visiting again this weekend. And the weather is better there this time, Sarah says, and the twins are excited - they want to tell us about today's shock event: a kookaburra that swooped down and carried off Daddy's Danish pastry. What madness!!!!

Flashback to April 2018: Sarah with the twins

me with Sarah

Lily with Lois

Lois with the whole family

Lois with Jessie

Happy days!!!! But not the best weather for the 2018 World Surf League Margaret River Pro event, that's for sure. Remember the dire warnings we were all reading on Onion News at the time? Warnings that many surfers ignored, I'm sorry to say!

Warning that Hurricane Joaquin was expected to produce powerful winds, violent swells, and dangerous rip currents, the National Weather Service strongly advised surfers today not to go surfing unless they could really crush that crap.

“As Joaquin gains strength and begins to approach the Western Seaboard, we would like to remind the public that they should not attempt to enter the surf if they are unprepared to carve up these bitchin’ tubes,” said NWS director Louis Uccellini, sternly warning that those not aggro enough to charge these gnar gnar waves are going to be getting seriously cranked all day.

“All of our predictive models and real-time data suggest that the waves produced by this system will be beyond mondo, and we cannot stress enough that you should remain out of the water if you’re a weak little kook or chrubee. The NWS director confirmed that inexperienced boarders who try to ride the barrel put themselves and emergency responders at risk of ending up at the hack shack."

What a pity that everybody thinks they know better than the real experts, isn't it! It's the same old story all over again. What madness!!!!

10:00 The call ends, because Sarah and family need to get back to their camp-site now. Would you believe it, it's already 6 pm over there - what a crazy planet we live on !!!!

Lois has to take part in her sect's two worship services today on zoom, but we have a bit of extra time in hand before the first one starts, which is at 10:45. We decide to take a short walk on the local football field. There are a few more people about today, as it's the weekend, which is nice. But there is only one dog on the field at the moment, for some reason: perhaps all the others have been kidnapped by dog thieves (?), but we're not sure about that. 

we take a short walk over the local football field

10:45 After the walk, Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her first worship service on zoom. I hurry into the kitchen and make lunch: wholemeal rolls with apple cheddar cheese and cucumber, plus mini-tomatoes, and a banana for dessert - one of my signature lunches. Lois often only has a 30-minute break between the 2 services, so speed of lunching is of the essence. What madness!!!!

15:00 After her second worship service, Lois hurries into the kitchen and bakes about 14 date rock cakes. Later she poses in the kitchen to showcase what she's made - by this stage, though, we've already eaten 4 of them, so the tray looks somewhat depleted - damn!

flash forward to 5 pm: and we've already eaten 4 of the cakes, sadly - oh dear!

17:30 I look at my smartphone. Our other daughter Alison, together with Ed and their 3 children, Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10) took their Danish dog Sika to the Farnham area today for his daily dog-walk.

To their surprise they stumbled across something called "the Atlantic Wall", which was built in 1943 during the Second World War by Canadian troops as a replica of the German anti-tank defences on the northern French coast. Prior to the D-Day landings the Wall was used as a major training aid to develop and practise techniques to breach it with explosives. Who knew that? Certainly Lois and I didn't, that's for sure!

Ed with Rosalind

"The Atlantic Wall", built by the Canadian army in 1943, in preparation for D-Day

21:00 We watch a bit of TV, the 3rd and final part in Lucy Worsley's new series about "Royal History's Biggest Fibs".

This programme is a bit of a cheat by Lucy Worsley, because like the previous episode about the French Revolution the programme isn't really about Royal fibs so much as about "Revolutionary Fibs" - lies told by the people who ousted the Royals, but I'm going to let that one slide (again) !

I'm beginning to think Lois and I watch too many documentaries - certainly a lot of what's in this programme tonight we've heard about before: for instance that it was women that started the unrest in St Petersburg early in 1917, and that the Bolsheviks opposed them and finally airbrushed them out of history altogether. 

But it's enjoyable to be reminded about all the fabrications: Eistenstein's dramatic film about the Bolsheviks supposedly storming the Winter Palace = nothing very much happened in reality, apparently, nothing more than a few skirmishes, because by that stage it was like pushing an open door. 

Stalin's succession to the leadership after the death of Lenin in 1924 was another murky story. Stalin pretended he was Lenin's chosen "heir", but Lenin had warned senior party leaders to reject Stalin in fact, as being unsuitable. The documentary evidence for Lenin's last letters was hidden away for decades.

Stalin later cemented the myths by doctoring various photos - for example, airbrushing Trotsky and Kamenev out of a picture showing Lenin addressing troops departing for the front in the Civil War.

Lenin addressing Red Army troops: Trotsky and Kamenev are immediately to the right

of the rostrum in the original photo, waiting their turn to speak, 

but they have vanished in the later version, produced in the Stalin era.

"Large crowds" were even added to photos where it was thought tactically advantageous. What madness! Trump could maybe have done that for his inauguration perhaps?

Twenty years after the event a painting was created showing Lenin arriving at the Finland Station to kickstart the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, with his iconic cap in his hand, and Stalin standing behind him, as if to symbolise his position as "heir apparent". This joint-arrival never happened, of course. And Stalin was eventually depicted at being present at almost every single significant moment of the Revolution. 

Tonight's programme goes right up to the Putin era, when suddenly the Revolution became a bad thing, not to be celebrated any more. I must admit I didn't realise, or had forgotten, the extent to which Putin has embraced Russia's Tsarist past, seeing himself as their heir in many ways, and rehabilitating the Orthodox Church, but Lois knows all about this, needless to say: what a woman!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!