Sunday November 29th 2020

Today is my late sister Kathy's birthday - she would have been 73, which is hard to imagine, to put it mildly!

This is one of my favourite photos of her, taken in or around January 1969, in the Oxford suburb of Littlemore. I took it as she was about to get into our father's car to go down to Oxford Railway Station. I imagine she was travelling back to her place in Bristol. When our parents and 2 other siblings moved to Oxford from Bristol in the summer of 1968, she chose to stay in Bristol, and I guess she visited us in Oxford, maybe for the first time, around Christmas/New Year.

She turns towards me as I take the picture - conscious that she had fully "flown the nest" and looking supremely self-confident with her long dark-red hair swirling around, like a late 60's version of Christine Keeler almost! She had turned 21 about a month earlier. Our little sister Gill is about to get in the car too. And you can just make out the shadowy figure of our father in the driving seat. 

flashback to January 1969: my two sisters Kathy(21) and Gill (10),

en route to Oxford Railway Station

Happy days!!!!

09:30 Lois and I speak on whatsapp to our younger daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia, together with Francis and their 7-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie. Sarah has not been well this last week, but seems to be on the mend. She's going back to work tomorrow (Monday). She takes after Lois and me - we both hated to take time off work unless we really felt we had no alternative. What madness!!!

The twins are bouncing around as usual. They had been to a Christmas Craft Workshop earlier today (Perth time) and were excited to show us what they had made: elaborately decorated Christmas baubles, Christmas stockings, a Santa and an elf. How cute they are!!!

We ask how school is going (there is no coronavirus in Western Australia). Lily says it's going fine, although there's "a situation" there at the moment, she said. Some child had thrown some sort of adhesive toy up in the air and it had stuck to the ceiling - at "press time" this "situation" is still unresolved: what madness!!!! It must be a pretty strong adhesive, that's all I can say - my god!!!!

Jessie (left) and Lily, our twin grandchildren in Perth, Australia

10:30 Lois sits down on the sofa to take part in the first of her sect's two worship services on zoom today. I disappear into the dining-room to send the first of 2 replies to long emails that I've got on my conscience. I've been putting them off too long - oh dear!

But I start to enjoy writing my reply as soon as I get going with it. It's to the other Kathy in my life, an American student that I first got to know when we were both spending a year in Japan in 1970-1971, an experience which we both found extremely odd, to put it mildly.

We both loved the Japanese people we met, but from time to time I think we were both feeling all "Japan'd out", living with Japanese families and going each day to a Japanese university, and it was a great comfort to me to get to know somebody else living nearby who spoke English as their mother tongue, and with whom I shared so many cultural references.

flashback to 1971: me and Kathy (extreme left) in Japan

A couple of years later, in 1973, Kathy visited Lois and me, now married, in Cheltenham, with her sister Amy.

flashback to 1973: (form left to right) Kathy, her sister Amy, and Lois

Kathy was due to visit us again this last summer, from her home in Washington State, together with her family, but that was before Coronavirus hit - oh dear!

16:00 I have decided to get a new mobile phone after all, and all the paperwork is flooding in by email, although the phone is not coming till tomorrow. I hope I've done the right thing, and I hope it doesn't take me ages to set the new phone up. My god - what a crazy world we live in !!!!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, one of David Attenborough's nature documentaries, for a change, all about the crazy world of wood ants.

It turns out that there are two sorts of wood ant colonies.

The first sort are limited to one mound per colony, and each mound has only one queen, their "mother", so they're all very closely related to each other. And they don't like any similar such mounds, to put it mildly. If they find another one too close to their own, it's a fight to the death involving all the ants of each mound - many thousands die in a day. My god!

But there's a second type of colony, what David calls a "super-colony". These consist of a network of several mounds, but all the mounds each have hundreds of queens, so the ants in them aren't closely related. And in this case, the ants in each individual mound don't feel hostile to the ants of the other mounds in the super-colony.

Lois and I speculate that if you grow up in a mound where you only hobnob with your own siblings, you're going to feel a bit scared and aggressive if you're out in the meadow and meet an ant that smells different. Whereas if you grown up in a mound of ants that aren't necessarily your relatives you don't get so worked up about meeting strangers, say. But we're not really sure - so the jury's still out on that one.

David draws a parallel with the human race, to show that cooperation is potentially more productive than competition. But we feel he leaves a lot of questions unanswered - perhaps scientists don't fully understand the reason why there these two types of ant civilisations have developed. But I think we should be told! More work needed here, David!

22:00 And that's enough creepy-crawlies for one evening. We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!