09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower, but it's my turn to clean up afterwards - damn! That's a workout in itself. And to add to my physical discomfort, today Connor, my NHS physiotherapist, has scheduled a "walk day". As I often say to Lois, the good think about "walk days" is that I don't have to do Connor's exercises; and the good thing about "exercise days" is that I don't have to do the walk - well, it makes sense to me haha!
11:00 We go on our walk, our usual one on the local football field, but we're just following Boris's instruction to "take exercise locally wherever possible". Afterwards we give the car its exercise by driving round the town - it's good to see something different for once in a while: we've started to forget the routes and "rat-runs" that we used to know so well, having lived in this town more or less continuously since 1972 - my god!!!!
Boris likes Cheltenham. Later in the day he mentions Cheltenham in his press conference, commending the town for being among half a dozen English towns that have already vaccinated over 90% of their over-80's. It's nice to be appreciated, isn't it, although the only part Lois and I have played in this achievement is through not being 80 yet: but we can't do more than that haha!
it's one of my "walk days" so we go for a walk on the local football field.
There's a real chill in the air, so we don't meet many people, which is nice!
When we meet somebody coming the other way we step onto the grass
to make sure we're at least 10 feet away - that's near enough to yell a "Good morning",
so fair enough!
16:00 We have a cup of Extra Strong Earl Grey Tea with a slice of bread and butter with Lois's delicious home-made gooseberry jam, made from our own gooseberries - yum yum!
We listen to the radio, an interesting programme called "Last Word". We try and hear this programme every week to see if anybody has died in the last couple of weeks or not. Usually it's only 4 or 5 people so not too bad!
Katherine Whitehorn, the journalist, has sadly died at the age of 92 - she is a particular heroine of Lois's because in the 1960's Whitehorn revolutionised the subjects that women could both write and read about - before her regular column in the liberal "Observer" Sunday newspaper, women journalists were only expected to write about fashion and cooking - what madness! Both Lois and I used to read Whitehorn's column every Sunday growing up in the 1960's, as both our sets of parents took the paper.
She was a rebel from her early childhood and she got expelled from 5 different schools: and she is well-known for having made her escape from the prestigious Rodean girls' boarding-school on what was called "a fast bike". She came from a long line of rebels - her grandfather was the last person to be charged with "heresy" by the Church of Scotland - my god!! At least they'd stopped burning heretics at the stake by that date, which was lucky!
She tried her hand at an incredible series of different jobs before she started in journalism. She was an academic for a while at Cornell University in the US. She travelled widely in the States and happened to see an old typewriter in a charity shop, which she bought for $20, and it was this typewriter that made her mind up to become a journalist.
She became the first woman in the British national press to write a proper regular column "like the blokes did". She quickly put out the message to women that they didn't need to be perfect. Women's pages at the time were all about "how to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect girl-friend" etc. Her message to women was "You don't have to be perfect".
There was a famous article she wrote about so-called "sluts" in the sense of "slatterns" - so-called "lazy women" or "lazy housewives". The article started, "Have you ever taken anything out of the dirty clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleanest example of the garment that you could quickly get hold of?", to which women everywhere apparently answered, "Oh yes, that's me!".
She was never a tub-thumping feminist - she combined being a mother with being a journalist working from home. But she did think that women were not born just to "bake and breed", and if they wanted a career, they should do it.
Reginald Foster has also died, sadly, aged 81 - or aged "LXXXI" as he would have said: he was the Vatican's foremost Latinist, possibly the world's foremost. He was said to dream in Latin, to bank in Latin, and to tweet in Latin - my god!
Reginald Foster, the Vatican's foremost Latinist, has died, aged 81
He was born in Wisconsin USA and his first job was as a plumber's apprentice. But, even then, all he ever really wanted was to become a priest or a monk.
Since 1962, he had been one of the Vatican's most colourful monks. He didn't dress like a monk, however, and people said he looked more like a workman: they called him "il benzinaio" - the petrol pump attendant. And he wouldn't sleep in a bed - he slept on a blanket on the floor.
He was the Catholic Church's official oracle when it came to translating modern words into Latin, words like "credit crunch": (creditorum compressio), for example; or "microchip" (assula minutula electrica - literally a tiny amber wood chip). Rock'n'roll he translated das "musica titubantium" (literally the music of those who sway). What madness !!!!
All ATMs or cash machines in Vatican City had to have instructions in Latin, and it was Foster who devised these. What a man!
The ATM in the Vatican gives instructions in Latin - what else !!!!!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, an enjoyable first programme in a new series by Fergal Keane, on "How the Irish Shaped Britain".
Fergal gives us a bit of a gallop through British history, starting with the Roman period, when the Romans, annoyed by constant raids from Irish pirates against the west coast of the Roman province of Britannia, deliberately installed more amenable Irish settlers along the coast to keep the pirates at bay and fight them off if necessary.
Then, after the Romans left, we have the Dark Ages when Ireland was the "School of the West" in Samuel Johnson's words, keeping learning alive and cradling the Christianity which they then exported to the rest of Britain, via such saints as Columba and Aidan, and encouraged in other parts of Europe too. As a result, when the Anglo-Saxons began to write, they very much wrote with "an Irish hand", in the calligraphy that the Irish saints and monks had taught them.
The cosy relationship between Britain and Ireland went sour after the Normans conquered England and decided to invade the suddenly seen as "barbarous" Ireland, in the 12th century. Relations became even worse in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the Protestant Reformation, when Catholic Ireland began to be seen as "the enemy within".
It's interesting that the Irish have, understandably perhaps, made bogeymen out of Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), who dissolved England's monasteries, and then later Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), who rampaged in, and occupied, Ireland. But as Fergal points out, both men were themselves of Irish stock - Thomas had an Irish father, and Oliver was Thomas's nephew. What madness!!!
From the 18th century on, Irish immigrants flooded into Britain, at times causing alarm and riots due to fears that the country was being "swamped". But it was largely Irish immigrant labourers who built Britain's canals and later Britain's railways.
And Irish of all social classes came: the middle classes and the elite, and not just labourers. Thomas Moore (1779-1852), the poet and composer, who wrote "The Minstrel Boy", trained as a lawyer in London, and was a friend of Lord Byron. It was said that London buzzed with Irish intellectual energy. Thackeray described this Irish cultural diaspora in his novel Pendennis (1848-1850).There was also a bunch of Irish playwrights: Congreve, Goldsmith, and Sheridan, not to mention Oscar Wilde.
The Irish played a full part in the British Armed Forces. Sheridan was Treasurer of the Navy. And thirty per cent of the Duke of Wellington's army at the Battle of Waterloo (1815) were Irishmen - and of course that figure included Wellington himself, himself as Irish as one of their famous stews haha!
Fascinating stuff!
And it's nice to hear Dermot McCullough being dusted off and brought out to discuss with Fergal the effects of the Protestant Reformation on Britain's relations with Ireland. Dermot is very much "Mr Reformation" in media circles, and Lois used to meet him from time to time when she worked as a kitchen assistant at the nearby Capel Court retirement home for Church of England vicars and church workers. Dermot's parents lived at the home, and Dermot was naturally a frequent visitor. Happy times!!!
Flashback to 1995: Lois (far right) and the other kitchen assistants at the local Church of England retirement home: dressed as schoolgirls on the occasion of Red Nose Day, a charity event.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment