09:00 Lois and I roll out of bed. It's our morning for waiting in for deliveries from local shops so we can swab the items down with disinfectant and put them away.
The local shops are both on the High Street in our little village: the Budgens convenience store and Waghorne's, the local butcher. We like to help keep the little local stores going, and we have promised not to forget about them when all the pandemic kerfuffle dies down - we're just all heart haha!
Budgens convenience store (on left)
Waghorne's, the local butcher (on the left)
We haven't been inside a real shop for a year or more, so we've got out of the habit of doing it anyway now.
I got an email last night from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend. She is wary of going into her local Tesco Express mini-supermarket in her suburb of Budapest because of its narrow aisles, and we don't blame her. Who wants to breathe in other people's air these days!
Luckily the Tesco delivers orders submitted online. But what's sad is that she had a parcel to send her grandchildren in Germany for Easter, but she didn't dare go in the local post office to post it to them.
Lois and I haven't been in a post office here either, for over a year, and we have 7-year-old twin grandchildren in Australia that we like to send things. We are lucky, however, in that the Royal Mail website lets you calculate the postage for parcels if you tell them the weight: they then sell you the postage label and a customs declaration form - you can print these out on your own home printer, and stick them on the parcel with sellotape and/or with "duck tape". As long as the parcel fits into one of their post-boxes we can then post the parcels in a post-box that's about 200 yards from our house.
Recently we had a large book of photos we wanted to send the twins - some of the pictures we took in Australia in 2016 and 2018, but mostly pictures of the days before the family moved to Australia, when Lois and I used to look after the twins two days a week. Happy times, but all in the past now - sob, sob!
Unfortunately this book of photos for the twins was quite big: about 12 x 8 inches (30 x 20 cm): and it was too big to go through the slot in the local Royal Mail post-box. But luckily in the last few months, a new scheme has been operating where you can arrange for a parcel to be collected by your local postman - it's a free service at the moment, but we think that's just an introductory offer. Anyway, for now the price is right haha!!!
the photo-book we sent the twins in Australia: showcased here
are some photos of them from 2015 when Lois and I
were looking after them 2 days every week - happy times!!!
some of the photos we took in 2016 when we visited our daughter Sarah
and son-in-law Francis and the twins in Australia for the first time
The good news for Tünde is that the end of her isolation may hopefully be in sight - she has now had 2 jabs of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine: Lois and I were very pleased to hear that, to put it mildly.
15:00 Lois is busy again this afternoon - sowing dwarf bean seeds, and cooking some of our homegrown rhubarb, also preparing a blackberry marinade for the pan-fried pheasant breasts we're going to be having for dinner tonight - the pheasant given us by our neighbour Bob. We have to assume, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, that the pheasant's death was legal haha! But the main thing is we don't want the pheasant to have died in vain, the poor thing.
the pheasant Bob gave us - poor pheasant !!!!!
Some corners will have to be cut with the recipe - I somehow don't think there'll be any question of parkin for instance, still less juniper haha!!!! I think some of these so-called "top chefs" are just trying to steal a march on their fellow top chefs - it's a crowded field, no doubt about that, and the competition is fierce.
Poor top chefs haha !!!!
18:00 We have the pheasant breasts - small but delightful, especially with the added blackberry and thyme flavour!
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, the 4th part in an interesting documentary series on the life of Winston Churchill.
An interesting programme, and after it Lois and I understand much better why Churchill, the national hero on VE Day in May 1945, came to lose a general election so heavily a month or so later.
Telegram from Eden to Churchill on VE Day
For a start, Churchill was physically exhausted by May 1945 at the end of the war in Europe, and he was unable to climb the stairs in Downing Street after cabinet meetings - a bunch of marines had to carry him: my god!
a weary Churchill with Attlee and Eden at a garden party
in Downing Street May 1945
Churchill wanted the all-party parliamentary coalition that he had presided over during the war to continue for the time being: there had been a great mutual respect between Churchill and Attlee, the Labour Party leader. So it came as a shock to Churchill when the Labour Party annual conference decided to pull out of the coalition, and Churchill was forced to call a General Election in June.
During the campaign Churchill quickly found himself out of tune with the mood of the electorate. He tried to scare voters by painting Attlee as a dangerous totalitarian leftist, a view which people simply didn't believe. The last straw was when Churchill gave a very poorly received speech, which included this passage:
[If Labour win the election] they would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. This would nip [unfavourable] opinion in the bud as it formed. It would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme Party and the Party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants.
believed would go down as one of his greatest ever - oops!!!
The Daily Herald headline the day after the speech read, "Churchill's Crazy Broadcast" - oh dear!
Churchill began to be looked on as a great war leader, but not the right person to lead the country in peacetime. After his poorly received speech, he went on the campaign trail to try and repair the damage. He was warmly welcomed in the Midlands, but next day the local papers said, "Cheers for Churchill but not for the Tories".
Labour were promising better state-funded healthcare, education and housing. Churchill was not necessarily against all of this - he himself had initiated the work of planning a National Health Service. He simply thought the country couldn't afford all these schemes at present, partly because he saw the war against Japan continuing possibly for several years.
Churchill's love of the British Empire perhaps encouraged him to lay undue stress on victory against Japan, but ordinary people were more focused on the victory that had been won in Europe, where the biggest danger for Britain had resided - after 6 years of war and deprivation they wanted a better life, and they wanted it now. And there was a lot of youthful optimism around.
Churchill made a further grim speech in which he called for "a final struggle": "in spite of all our victories, a rough road lies ahead", he said. This was not what people wanted to hear!
So they voted the Tories out - it was a Labour landslide, and the rest is history haha!
Fascinating stuff! And it would be nice to be told whether Churchill was right about Britain's finances. The country wasn't in a good state after the ravages of the war, that's for sure - and we owed huge sums because of all the loans we had had from the US during the war, sums which took decades and decades to pay back.
And if Churchill was right, how did Labour pay for their welfare state - would higher taxes have been enough? Perhaps we'll find out in the next episode of the series.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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