Danskcolin: Saturday January 16th 2021

Today is January 16th - the very day of the year that Lois and I and our two daughters moved into our current house in 1986, so we have now been here 34 years: it's official !!! We had come back from living in a large house in the USA for 3 years (1982-1985): and when we came back our existing English house seemed incredibly small - that was the factor that mostly prompted us to move house in January 1986, and we've stayed here ever since: sign of a good purchase haha!

Lois (40) in summer 1986

Alison (11) and Sarah (9) in front of our house in September 1986.

They had lost their American accents and can be seen here rocking their school uniforms,

having spent 3 years at a US school wearing anything they wanted (within reason haha)

Here's a page from our photo album with some memories of the girls' time in a US school:

top: Alison's last US class picture: she is back row, 3rd from left

bottom left: our last Thanksgiving Dinner in 1984: (left to right) Sarah (7), Me (38),

Lois (38), Alison (9) and my late sister Kathy (36)

bottom right: Sarah's last school photo from the US.

Otherwise it's been a normal quiet lockdown sort of a day today, which is nice. After all, Pooh knows what to do in a lockdown haha!

Lois goes for a walk on her own this morning, and manages to get her walk completed on the local football field before the crazy sports-joggers start turning up around 11 am.

Lois always tries to keep 10 feet away from anybody she sees, as Boris is now recommending. But these sports-jogging maniacs always refuse to give way on the tarmacked circuit, so as not to add any precious nanoseconds to their run time - what madness! We had a lot of rain overnight, so the grassy areas of the field are completely waterlogged. Lois doesn't fancy stepping aside on to the grass when the joggers fly by - and I don't blame her!!!! What a crazy world we live in!!!

the local football field, with running track circuit marked in red

Meanwhile I stay at home and run through my stay-at-home exercise programme, which I aim to do 4 days out of every 7.

16:00 A phone call from our friend Jen in Kennington, Oxford. Bill hasn't been well over Christmas and New Year, to put it mildly. Jen has to help him to do pretty much everything except sitting in a chair or lying in bed - oh dear! Poor Bill and poor Jen! Bill's got a range of problems including a broken vertebra, sepsis, possible blood clot, you name it - oh dear! But we often think how well-placed Jen and Bill are compared to us, when it comes to getting family support: two sons and a daughter all living fairly locally, and the daughter is a GP. That's the way you do it!!!

20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch a bit of TV: the first part of an interesting series on the PBS America channel, called "Australia in Colour".

A fascinating first programme, showing some of the earliest film sequences ever shot in Australia, newly colourized. Lois and I had forgotten that Australia didn't exist as a country until 1901, when the 6 separate colonies agreed to form a federation. The combined territories were 32 times the size of Britain, but only had a population of 3.5 million.

For many decades thereafter, however, there was no such thing as Australian citizenship: all Australians were simply categorized as British subjects, and their flag was the British flag.

It's gratifying that the programme doesn't shrink from describing how badly the Aborigines were treated during the country's early decades. They weren't even counted in censuses, and the general view was that as a race the Aborigines were dying out: many had succumbed to European diseases, especially smallpox. Aboriginal children in many areas were taken from their families and brought up in so-called "missions". My god!

There was an aggressive White Australia policy. Non-white workers were accepted from China and other parts of Asia, specifically to do the hard work of jobs like building railways, but they were quite likely to be deported once the work was done.

Until more recent decades Australian men have had a reputation in Britain for a tendency to be male chauvinists, so it's nice tonight to see the other side of the coin: Australia was the second country in the world to legislate for female suffrage, and the first in the world to allow women to stand for Parliament (1902).

And it's interesting to see film of an early Australian feminist icon, Sydney-born Annette Kellerman, one of the first women ever to swim the English Channel. She was arrested in Boston, USA, for wearing a so-called "indecent" swimming costume (1907) - a one-piece costume she had made herself. And she performed apparently naked, apart from a large head of hair, in a Hollywood film from 1916.

Annette Kellerman in her self-made "indecent" one-piece swimming costume (1907)

Kellerman performing apparently nude in a Hollywood film from 1916

We see the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand troops) sailing off in 1914 to help Britain in World War I. It's interesting that although the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 against the Turks is the operation most British people associate with the ANZACs, in fact far more Australians died on the western front in France and Belgium: as many died every 6 weeks in Europe than in all the 8 months of the fighting at Gallipoli.

And it's interesting to see the Duke of York (later George VI) open the first session of the Australian Parliament in the newly built capital of Canberra in 1927. Also enjoyable to see opera singer Dame Nelly Melba (of "peach melba" fame - the delicious dessert yum yum!) singing God Save the King, before the session began.