10:00 Alison, our daughter who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, together with Ed and their three children, Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10) has been accepted provisionally to be a teaching assistant at a local primary school, where she's been detailed to help a young child with learning difficulties.
She has asked us if we can locate, or remember anything about, the certificates she got for the exams she took when she was at school - ie. 30 years ago - yikes! Every parent's nightmare! We have no idea where to start looking for any certificates, and we aren't sure whether they were among things we jettisoned during our spasmodic efforts to downsize. Let's hope Ali took the certificates with her when she left home.
This is a big step for Ali, because she hasn't had a job since she became a mother 14 years ago. But Lois and I think she would be very good at this job, because we could imagine her being very patient, which is what the job needs most, we suspect.
flashback to 2015: Lois (left) and Alison in Copenhagen,
bathing the family's Danish dog, Sika
16:00 Christmas cards have started to come in, and we are sticking them up high up, on bits of cord along the picture rail, although we have also had a record number of electronic cards this year - for obvious reasons: it's not exactly rocket science!
as usual, we are sticking our Christmas cards high up, along the picture rail.
Today we had an electronic card from Susan, my cousin in Monument, Colorado. She has one daughter, Magda, a psychologist, but Susan has only seen her once this year, and the meeting had to be "contactless" and outside the house of course - oh dear!
Susan says there have been some good things in 2020, most of all, the news that Trump is finally going. She adds that she is lucky to live in a beautiful area with lots of sunshine - she can take the dog out for walks in the early morning sunshine and avoid the crazy mask-haters - my god!!!
Susan was born, and brought up, in Oxford, England, but she met an American, Barry, and they married and settled in Denver, Colorado. I met Barry for the first time in Oxford 1968, when Susan would have been about 21 years old.
Barry and Susan, my cousin, in Susan's parents' house in Oxford, in 1968
flashback to 1983: we fly to Denver to stay a couple of weeks with Susan:
(left to right) Sarah (6), Alison (8) and Lois (37)
we visit a "ghost-town" in Colorado:
(left to right) Susan, Magda (6), Alison (8), and Sarah (6) -
happy days!!!!
Magda today (43)
flashback to October 2018: we meet up again in Oxfordshire -
(left to right) John (Susan's brother), me, and Susan
flashback to June 2019: John (right) at a meeting of cousins
after the funeral of Susan and John's mother
Susan (left) with Maria at the meeting of cousins after the funeral
17:00 Our elder daughter Alison may be feeling relatively lucky to escape being in a Tier 3 part of her county, but our other daughter Sarah is the real lucky one, living in Western Australia, where they have zero or near zero COVID cases.
The family left Perth yesterday, and will have arrived today at their camping-site near Albany, where famously kangaroos sunbathe on the beach.
Albany, where kangaroos famously sunbathe on the beach.....
17:30 We open yesterday's post after its 36 hour "quarantine" - what madness! There are half a dozen more Christmas cards, but lurking at the bottom of the pile or post is a letter to me from the local hospital.
They are inviting me to an appointment on January 19th for an "angiogram". But I'm not keen, having read the description, which sounds unpleasant. I think I'll pass - I'm certainly not going to go to the hospital before I'm vaccinated, that's for sure! Sorry!!! Thanks but no thanks haha!!!!
20:00 We settle down on the sofa to watch a bit of TV, an interesting documentary on the luxury cruise industry, which of course has been seeing hard times this past year.
Lois and I didn't know that going on a cruise was considered a rich person's preserve until the late 1970's, when prices started to come down and the US TV series "Love Boat", which we never watched, popularized the idea. What a crazy world we live in!
By 2019 there were 300 cruise ships in business, a lot of them absolutely massive in size, and 300 million holiday-makers took cruises every year. My god! And a high percentage of these cruise-takers seem to be totally addicted.
Three companies take 70% of the business: Carnival, Roya Caribbean and Norwegian. The ships are mainly registered in countries where the companies don't have to pay tax, and where regulation of the industry is "light", to put it mildly - oh dear!!!
Every time tonight's programme shows a shot of one of these massive cruise-ships, our stomachs turn over - I think Lois and I don't have the right personalities for this kind of holiday. Our only experience of a cruise ship was when we chose to come home by ship from the US in 1985 - on the QE2, a ship which would have been dwarfed by today's "monsters of the ocean". Yikes !!!!
Images of "battery hens" comes to our minds - what a nightmare !!!
How much nicer the lovely QE2 was in 1985, during our 5-day sail across the Atlantic from New York to Southampton, with only TV's Bert Weedon (the guitarist) for entertainment.
we board in New York, our 3-year adventure in the US now over
our daughter Alison's 10th birthday on board the QE2
Lois in our cabin, on the last night of the journey, having
collected most of our daughters' Cabbage Patch dolls
the next morning, with the Hampshire coast in view out of the porthole
Alison, in one of the passenger lounges, where we were all waiting to disembark - happy days!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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