09:30 It's a rare morning when we can afford to stay in bed till 9:30 am, so we make the most of it. Tomorrow is a public holiday in Western Australia, for Labour Day - what madness!!!! But our daughter Sarah, who lives over there just outside Perth with Francis and their 7-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie, wants to do another zoom call with us: the best time for her is 5:30 pm their time of 8:30 am over here, which is brutally early - oh dear! So we decide to luxuriate in bed today to gear ourselves up for it.
the Labour Day holiday in Western Australia
I look at my smartphone, and I see that daily numbers of coronavirus cases are down at their lowest level for several months, which is good news. Also over 20 million people have had their first jab - they've progressed now down to people in their 40's, so our two daughters' generation. Let's hope that schools starting up on March 8th doesn't upset the apple-cart - yikes!
What a pity that not all the people at "The Independent" news website have yet learnt how to spell the word "receive", but I'm going to let that one slide: I'm feeling generous today, and - let's face it - it's a small point in comparison to the story itself!
11:00 A lazy day for me.
I look at the quora discussion website and look at a thread talking about the extraordinarily different types of law there are the world over. I look at the wikipedia article on the subject.
the world's legal systems - what a crazy mixture !!!!
I try to read the key to the different colours, but it's too small to read - what madness! Wikipedia is supposed to be the authoritative guide to life, the universe and everything! How do the lawyers manage to read the colours off if they have an important case coming up, and they can't remember what jurisdiction they're in ???!!!
The blue countries seem to have something called "civil law", where I suppose everything is laid down, the reddish-brown ones (including England) have the familiar (to us) "common law" where lawyers can appeal to previous cases and previous judgments, the green ones have "religious law" - yikes, thank goodness we're not in with that lot !!!!!
The other colours are mixtures: for instance purple means a mixture of common law and civil law: most of Canada has common law, with just Quebec following French practice and going with Napoleonic civil law. Likewise in the US, it's all common law apart from Louisiana, where again things are a bit Frenchified, as far as I can tell. I think South Africa is a mixture of common law and the Afrikaner civil law. Et cetera.
But who knew that Scotland has a mixture of common law and "Roman and continental" law (which is a form of civil law) ? [I expect a lot of people knew that - Ed].
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Lois and I have heard that juries in Scotland can bring in a "not proven" verdict, which isn't possible in England - here, it has to be "guilty" or "not guilty". We believe that majority verdicts are okay in Scotland, provided there are at least 8 jurors in agreement. We also think that the right to challenge jurors doesn't exist there, which seems strange, but it must save a lot of time, that's for sure! My god!!!!
I should imagine that if you get a "not proven" verdict you leave the court with a certain amount of "stains" on your character, which doesn't sound very nice, to put it mildly !!!!
16:00 Lois and I get on the computer and look at houses we might want to "downsize" to, if we go with selling our present house to our daughter Sarah and Francis, that is, if they decide to move back to the UK. We have lots of problems with this at the moment - I don't think we've decided how many bedrooms we want, and that kind of thing, and other quite basic issues, which we haven't resolved between us. Oh dear, this is going to be hard work!!!
A member of the public brings in a picture by WS Lowry to be valued, not a very nice one, Lois and I think, because it's just a man on his own. We like Lowry's pictures of street scenes, where there are lots of matchstick-style, Lowry-type people walking about, but this one seems very dull - just a man on his own.
The owner bought it for £1,300, but it turns out to be worth between £60,000 and £80,000. What madness, truly!!!
It's still nostalgic for us to see the painting, however, because our minds go back to the pre-lockdown times, when we used to frequent Lowry's Café in Bishops Cleeve, where many of the walls are covered with Lowry reproductions - happy days !!!!!
flashback to January 2020, just before the pandemic arrived -
at Lowry's Café, where many walls are covered with
WS Lowry reproductions (not shown)
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment