09:00 I look at my smartphone, and I see that today is World Press Freedom Day. And I see from the Daily News Hungary website that Hungary is not doing very well under this heading - no surprise there. Hungary's repeated attempts in recent years to lean on, or to silence, news outlets critical of Viktor Orbán's government, are well-known.
Hungary is no.92 in the international table, which I'm not surprised at. And the Scandinavian countries are at the top: my goodness, they always do well in most of these international surveys, don't they. I wonder what the criteria are, exactly.
But I notice that the UK itself is only at no. 33, and the US is at no. 44. What are we doing wrong, I wonder ???!!!! (https://rsf.org/en/ranking# ).
I don't know the answer, but I think maybe we should be told.
New Zealand is at no.8, Ireland at no.12, Canada at no.14 and Australia at no. 25, so all these are doing better than us - what's the meaning of all this - I'd like to know!!!! Maybe the differences from one position to the next are all very minute and not statistically significant, but I'd still like to know haha!!!!
10:30 Oh dear - what a day this is going to be weather-wise.
Luckily the wind and the rain will eventually moderate this evening, which is good. We hate lying in bed hearing the wind and rain battering our window-panes. And our window faces the direction of the prevailing wind, unfortunately, i.e. south-west.
Lois and I cancel our planned walk and concentrate instead on battening down the hatches in the garden in preparation for the coming storm: heavy rain this afternoon and evening, with winds up to 40 mph - yikes!
As the rain and wind slowly begin to gather strength, we venture out and start to protect the vulnerable points.
Lois showcases our less vulnerable "raised bed" planters:
luckily they're fairly stout, which is good,
but we take off the panes of glass and stack them in the greenhouse
to be on the safe side - oh dear!
the poor little potatoes that have begun to pop their heads up -
how sweet they look haha !!!!
...and the dear little turnips !!!!
What a baptism of water and wind for them haha!
lastly, snug'n'warm in the greenhouse we have
the cabbages, lettuces, tomatoes and courgettes:
the lucky buggers haha !!!!!
Later we find out that Ed, our son-in-law, who lives in Headley, Hampshire with our daughter Alison and their 3 children, is having a much busier day off than we are.
This was a post that sparked many a ribald comment from Ed's Facebook friends, impressed that he seems to know at least one professional lumberjack term, "cake", that nobody else knew.
our son-in-law Ed - a recent picture
It's interesting that Ed also had to rescue a cat from a tree. When a couple of years ago the family returned from 6 years in Denmark, bringing with them 2 Copenhagen alley-cats, Ali and Ed brought in a policy of not letting their cats out of their previous house in Surrey because of the busy road outside. Now that they've moved to a more peaceful environment in Hampshire they've been getting their cats used to going outside again, taking them out on a lead to begin with. Perhaps now the cats are allowed to roam free in the garden, but of course they haven't had much experience of trees - until now.
Poor cats !!!!!!
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the last part in an interesting series on the life of Winston Churchill.
It's obvious from this last programme in the series that while Churchill was exactly the leader that Britain needed in 1940, when it stood alone against Hitler (and Stalin), it's good to be reminded that, like the rest of us, he wasn't perfect: and he didn't really shine when he wasn't in the centre of things and dealing with some sort of crisis.
After he left politics at the highest level in the mid-1950's until his death in 1965, he spent most of his time in the South of France, indulging in his life-long obsession for gambling at the casinos, and hobnobbing with rich friends like Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate.
His wife Clementine, who didn't accompany him much to the South of France, because she didn't like it there, was concerned to make sure that both his elaborate and moving funeral in 1965, and also the exhibits later put on display at the family's home Chartwell, kept the focus on his record in the war years, and this seems to have been successful.
Lois and I both well remember the day of Churchill's extraordinary funeral, with the military pageantry that seemed almost to come from another era, and a massive contrast to the relaxed atmosphere of the "Swinging London" of the 1960's. However we were unaware, or had forgotten, that he had spent so many of his final years in casinos on the Med.
Churchill's funeral in 1965
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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