08:00 Lois and I are in bed drinking our tea when I look at my smartphone. The teacher who teaches our 7-year-old twin granddaughters, Lily and Jessie, in a Catholic school just outside Perth, Australia, has put a charming picture up on the web showing some of the class members creating "animal habitats" out of cardboard and other materials.
I take a copy of the picture as a record of the twins, who are sitting together at the same table, which is nice. They are incredibly close to each other emotionally, even though they are not identical twins. Six weeks ago, the twins were due to move to a different school nearer the coast, but our daughter Sarah and husband Francis dropped this plan because the new school wanted to split the twins up into different classes. What madness!!!!
I want to keep the picture but I also want to see if I can successfully "blur" the faces of the other children so as to protect their identity - luckily it seems to be really easy with the picture editor I use, which is nice. The downside is that it makes it appear the twins are going to school with a bunch of zombies, but you can't have everything can you !
our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessie working on creating "animal habitats"
our of cardboard and other materials - how cute !!!!
09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower, and order next week's groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village. Then we go for a walk over the local football field - as it's Friday we decide to spoil ourselves with a cup of coffee and a chocolate muffin from the new "Whiskers Coffee" stand being operated by the Royal Oak pub in the village.
Lois and I go for a walk on the local football field - the temperature is mild,
but there's a strong breeze from the west, making us feel pretty cold - brrrr!!!!
I reserve a couple of seats on the "Buddy bench" while Lois gets the drinks and muffins
hot chocolate for Lois and flat white coffee for me,
with a chocolate muffin each - yum yum!!
This is continental-style, cosmopolitan living at its best - and it's come to a football field near us, unbelievably. How sophisticated!
Pity about the weather haha!!!
15:00 Alison, our daughter in Haslemere Surrey and her family are moving today to their new house in Headley Common, Hampshire. Alison says the first delivery of furniture and belongings is now complete. The second delivery will arrive tomorrow - what a lot of stuff they've got - my god!
16:00 I speak on the telephone with my sister Gill in Cambridge. Gill had her first vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine a couple of weeks ago. Her husband Peter and their youngest daughter Lucy were each vaccinated way back in January, because they are both disabled, and hence vulnerable.
The family are feeling a bit more secure now, but are waiting to see what happens with the pandemic in their area in the next few weeks. A big area of uncertainty is what exactly will happen when the students start arriving at the University, which is due to be permitted soon under the gradual relaxation of the lockdown measures.
One of the couple's other daughters, Maria, the youngest, surprisingly caught COVID a couple of weeks ago - surprising because she never goes out and has been working from home for about a year now. Her partner Tom goes into local shops occasionally, so he perhaps could have been infected but asymptomatically, and then given it to Maria. Or Maria could have caught it from some delivery to the house. At the moment it's a mystery. But she took about 10 days off work, and seems to be fine now, which is a relief.
flashback to May 2015: Gill and Peter's 30th wedding anniversary:
(from left to right) Tom and Maria, Chris and Zoe (Maria's sister), Lucy,
Gill, Gill's best friend Jill, Jill's husband, and Peter (foreground)
Tom and Maria were due to marry in April 2020 - terrible timing as it turned out, but who was expecting a pandemic at the time when the couple started planning the event at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020? The new plan is to get married with a small, close-family-only ceremony in June 2021, and have the reception in August 2022.
As for the planned honeymoon in New Zealand, all bets are off for that one. When will New Zealand be happy to accept visitors from the UK? Not any time soon, that's for sure - oh dear!
19:00 After evening meal, we settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, this week's edition of Last Word. We try and catch this programme every Friday to see if anybody has died in the last couple of weeks or not. There's no mention of us, so we must be still alive, which is reassuring!
Prof John Mallard has died, sadly, aged 94. He was the physicist who led the team at Aberdeen University which developed the world's first full body MRI scanner. The magnitude of this breakthrough for diagnostic medicine can be gauged by the fact that it's sometimes compared to the first use of X-ray photographs in 1895.
Prof John Mallard
Mallard's father was a grocer in Northampton, and the young John, who was deaf from an early age, became fascinated by watching his father slice up bacon in the bacon-slicer, revealing slice by slice what was inside the meat. He said that this was when he first realised how helpful it might be if you could slice up a person in the same way (but without killing them haha!) to see what was going on internally. And this was what originally inspired him to develop scanners which would effectively do the same thing - what madness!!!
His first job was at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in the early 1960's, where he discovered that the signals you could get by magnetic resonance from diseased (cancerous) tissue samples were different from those you would get from normal tissue samples. He published his results in the journal "Nature" in 1964, but the article was largely ignored by the research community at the time. Oh dear!
He moved to Aberdeen University in 1965 gaining a professorship. In 1975 he produced the first image by MRI scan - this was the image of a dead mouse. It had to be dead because this early experiment took so long - at least an hour.
Poor mouse!
The work was done on a shoestring - funding was difficult to acquire. So Mallard made the decision to go straight from working on mice to working on people, to save money: what a good idea!
Eventually he was awarded a very modest sum - £35,000, and this enabled the Aberdeen team to build a prototype human-scale scanner. They had to get the components on the cheap: they got the magnet from the fledgling Oxford Instruments Co. The rest of the machine was cobbled together from what sources they could find. The piping was old central heating piping. And in a children's play park they found an old plastic tube which they used for the tube the patient lies in - it just happened to be the right size, which was lucky - my god!
Initially the research team tried the scanner out on themselves, and when they had satisfied themselves that there were no ill effects, the equipment was tried out on a real patient for the first time, in 1980, which revealed the full extent of the patient's disease: this was the first clinical diagnostic scan ever made. It's now standard (although expensive) equipment the world over, and completely safe, however many times you receive a scan.
Hail to thee, John Mallard - you kept us out of war haha!
21:00 We switch off the radio and watch a bit of TV, a programme about the late comedian Les Dawson.
Les Dawson was known for the high-flown, literary-style comic monologues that he created, so it was good to be reminded tonight that Les himself came from a very poor background in the Collyhurst area of Manchester, and that he was largely self-educated.
Some of his dialogues demanded a high standard of vocabulary to appreciate, and sometimes even a quasi-grasp of cod Latin, as in his famous "When you went to Blackpool on your honeymoon, were you [pause] 'virgo intacta' ? " dialogue.
It may have been partly because of Les's thirst for knowledge and self-education that he achieved such a rapport and mutual respect between himself and the Cambridge-educated John Cleese. We're reminded tonight that Cleese's only television work between Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, was his regular collaboration with Les on the Les Dawson Show in the 1970's.
Some of Les's best-remembered dialogues were between the two typically Northern working-class women, Cissy and Ada, played by Les and Roy Barraclough.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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