07:00 A cruelly early start - I get out of bed and make the tea. Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, will be calling us on zoom at 8:30 and we have to get washed, dressed, breakfasted etc before then - also comb our hair: damn!
08:30 We speak to Sarah and our 7-year-old twin grandchildren Lily and Jessie on zoom. Francis, our son-in-law is out playing golf.
It's a joy to speak to them, as always. It's been really hot down there, but the twins are bouncing about as always, showing us their designs for dresses etc - will this become a vocation perhaps?
Sarah, with Lily (centre) and Jessie (right)
one of the dresses that the girls have designed
a card that Lily has been drawing for Lois and me
On Friday evening the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) or the P&F as they call it in Australia (Parents and Friends) - a Catholic thing I think - organised an outdoor movie presentation of the children's film "Combat Wombat".
the film put on by the school PTA
Despite the fact that it's a children's film Sarah says it was mainly the parents who sat and watched, while a lot of the children ran about making their own fun. She was happy to say that the twins were not among them - they know how to concentrate on a good story, which is nice to hear! But what madness!!!
Tomorrow is "Harmony Day" in Australia - a day which celebrates the country's multi-cultural heritage, diversity or something on those lines. All the children at the school have been asked to wear something orange if they can. Lois and I are hoping the teacher will put some pictures on the parents-teachers website, so fingers crossed for tomorrow.
09:45 The call ends, and Lois and I relax with a cup of coffee. We have an hour to relax before Lois has to sign on to zoom for her sect's two worship services.
I look at my smartphone, and I see that more or more areas of our county, including our own area, are now COVID-free, which is nice to hear.
Later we hear that for the third day running, the UK has broken the record for number of vaccinations carried out in a day.
Lois says that the problem on the continent is that the EU populations turned against the astrazeneca vaccine in particular, after some ill-judged reactions by, for example, the French president, Macron, who made the baseless suggestion that it didn't work for older people. Later somebody else over there said it didn't work for younger people - what madness!
The result was a big drop in confidence among the population - in Veneto in northern Italy 50% of those invited to an astrazeneca jab had cancelled their appointments. In France take-up of the Pfizer vaccine has been over 82%, but only 24% for astrazeneca - what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
16:00 We have a cup of tea and a hot cross bun on the sofa. Lois has been reading her copy of "The Week", which gives a digest of the past week's news at home and abroad.
She says that apparently translators now have to have had a similar life-experience to the author they're translating - otherwise they are told to go elsewhere. There's been a row over who should translate poems by Amanda Gorman, who performed at Joe Biden's inauguration. Gorman was delighted when her Dutch publisher picked novelist and poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld to translate Gorman's collection "The Hill We Climb".
Amanda Gorman speaking at Joe Biden's inauguration
Unfortunately it was discovered that Rijneveld was white, and there were calls for a black spoken-word poet to be chosen instead, someone closer to Gorman's "world of experience". To avoid trouble, Gorman's German publisher chose a team of 3 people to do the work, with the team to include a black political scientist - {Say what?!!!! - Ed].
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Who are the racists here, Lois asks - the publishers, or the people who think that skin colour is a decisive characteristic that trumps all other considerations, such as a facility with languages and words, etc?
What madness !!!! [Warning - That's your last "madness" for today! - Ed]
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, an interesting documentary on the First World War writer and artist David Jones and his epic work "In Parenthesis", part poem and part novel. The programme is part of the BBC's contribution to World Poetry Day.
Neither Lois or I have ever heard of Jones or "In Parenthesis" - oh dear!
An interesting programme, but it tells us far more about Jones's life than about his poetry. Lois thinks that TV is afraid of poetry, in contrast to BBC Radio, which puts on a lot of good programmes about poetry and broadcasts extensive readings of poems also.
This is a pity, because as far as we can judge, Jones's possibly unique selling-point was that he wrote of the horrors of WWI trench warfare in terms of everyday detail, and from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, in this case in a Welsh regiment. The better known works, by poets such as Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, or playwrights such as RC Sherriff etc were all officers, we think, who were bound to have had a different perspective.
There's a key passage in the middle of the book, a sort of "Universal Soldier" piece, known as "Dai's Boast", given by a private known as "Dai Greatcoat":
"My fathers were with the Black Prince of Wales,
At the passion of the blind Bohemian king,
They served in these fields,
I was with Abel, when his brother found him under the green tree,
I built a shit-house for Artaxerxes,
I was the spear in Balin's hand
That laid waste King Pellam's land,
I was in Michael's trench
When Lucifer bulged his primal salient out,
That caused it,
That upset the joy-cart.
And three parts waste.
You ought to ask:
Why,
What is this,
What is the meaning of this."
Jones died in 1974 aged 75, but he suffered from mental breakdowns and traumas throughout the rest of his post-war life. He didn't rush to put pen to paper - after his initial mental breakdowns he finally started on his epic work "In Parenthesis" in about 1931.
Fascinating stuff!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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