08:00 Lois and I have to dash out of bed to be ready for our daughter Sarah's zoom call at 9:30 am (5:30 pm Perth time). It's the hottest day of the year so far for us (top temperature will be 80F or 27C) - at last our temperature here is higher than the one in Perth - the weeks have been slipping by!
09:30 Our weekly zoom call with Sarah, our younger daughter, who lives just outside Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 7-year-old twin daughters, Lily and Jessie.
Francis is out playing golf, so we don't see him this morning, but Sarah says they went down to their sailing club, Nedlands, down on the Swan River last weekend, and chatted to staff and members about the best sort of engine to buy for their second-hand 20 foot boat "Bluebird", that they bought at the club recently.
At the yacht club they also found out the name of the best dealer to use, a guy who hangs out somewhere in central Perth. They ordered an engine from this guy, and they are now waiting for it to be delivered: it has to come from the East side of Australia, like most things it seems - oh dear! But it should arrive in the next week or two, Sarah thinks.
The twins are full of energy as usual, keen to show us some of the sea-creature shapes they've been making out of dough today.
Lily showcases her dough starfish - how sweet she is !!!!
10:30 The zoom call ends - Sarah has to get the girls some tea. And Lois has to take part in the first of her sect's 2 worship services today on zoom.
12:00 Time for a quick lunch on the sofa and then it's time for Lois to disappear again to take part in the second service. I go to bed. I read on SciTech about the fascinating broad-horned flour beetle, and find out that sexual selection and natural selection can sometimes pull in different directions, which is a bit surprising to put it mildly.
Male flour beetles with the biggest mandibles and the smallest abdomens win more fights and mate with more females, which is nice for them. However smaller abdomens don't work well for female flour beetles, because they can't store as many eggs. Also any bigger-mandible specimens make the best meal for predators, the assassin bug for example (see above), so these tend not to prosper in the long run, according to a new study by Exeter and Okayama Universities.
What a complicated life flour beetles lead !!!!
Which selection process decides the flour beetles' long-term welfare. Is it selection by "sex" or is it selection by "nature"? I think it turns out to be a compromise between the two - a bit like hips in people. Narrow hips suit men (for walking) and broad hips suit women (for childbirth), so the human race is stuck with medium-width hips, whatever sex we are.
What a crazy planet we live on !!!!
15:00 Lois joins me in bed and I'm afraid we stay there for a full 2 hours - my god, how lazy we've become!
18:00 Steve, our American brother-in-law has emailed me with the traffic news from Cornwall.
“Marazion, Cornwall ’s oldest town, was brought to a
standstill by Jill Biden and her motorcade taking in the picturesque St.
Michael’s Mount. Less ideal for the locals were the Men in Black and their
convoy of 15 massive SUVs struggling to squeeze down the tiny Cornish lanes,
causing havoc for tractors and vans having to reverse up the winding roads.”
My god, we can just imagine it - there's nothing worse than driving down one of those narrow Cornish lanes and meeting just one vehicle coming the other way, let alone fifteen plus - my god (again) !!!!!
It was probably worth the trip anyway, for Jill - it's a beautiful spot.
Lois and I were on holiday in St Ives and went to Marazion in 1979, with our daughters Alison (then 4 years old) and Sarah (2). We took a trip in a small boat from Marazion across the bay to the old castle of St. Michael's Mount.
Flashback to 1979: Lois (33) with Alison (4)
on the quay at St Michael's Mount Island
Lois looking out towards the mainland from the battlements
of St Michael's Mount Castle
Lois and Alison sitting on an old canon on the battlements
Happy days !!!!!
20:30 A phone call with Alison our elder daughter, who lives in Headley, Hampshire with Ed and their 3 children: Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10). They recently moved a few miles down the road to Headley from Haslemere, Surrey, and they now live in a rambling Victorian mansion and have to pay a massive mortgage - oh dear!
(left to right) Rosalind, Isaac, Josie, Alison, Lois, and Sika, the family's
Danish dog, in the family's "rambling Victorian mansion"
Alison's job as a part-time teaching assistant in Haslemere is coming to an end in the summer, but last week she was accepted for a similar job at the little Surrey village of Tilford.
It was an extraordinarily tough selection process: she was "let loose" on a class of youngsters with a brief to take them through a few pages of activities and learning, and this "ordeal by fire" was followed by an interview with the headteacher. My god, the jobs market is tough-going these days, that's for sure, you'd think she was applying to be Boris's special adviser! But she got the job anyway against some stiff competition, which Lois and I are very pleased to hear.
It's a nice little country school, the one at Tilford, and it's only about 7 miles away from the family's new home, which is nice.
21:00 We watch another edition of Springwatch, the programme that reports on wildlife around the UK through a team of presenters and a network of hidden cameras.
This is the programme Lois and I started watching last night, but decided we'd rather be in bed - oh dear!
One of the programme's hidden cameras is trained on a red kite nest, a beautiful species that sadly became extinct in the UK some decades ago, but which has now been successfully reintroduced.
Apparently red kites like to make their nests not just out of natural material but also out of stuff they steal from humans, like this bit of material here in the Springwatch red kite nest that looks like part of somebody's comfort blanket - my god!
The fascinating thing is that this behaviour by kites, of stealing things from humans to help make their nests, has been known about for centuries. Shakespeare wrote, in "A Winter's Tale",
When the kite builds,
look to lesser linen!
"Lesser linen" in those far-off days was a euphemism for underwear. In Tudor times people used to dry their knickers on the tops of hedges, as washing-lines and dryers hadn't been invented yet. And the kites used to steal the underwear straight from the hedges - very convenient for the birds, but my god!
An extraordinary range of human belongings has been found in red kite nests over the years, including tennis balls, England flags, handbags, magazines, tea towels, lottery tickets, sponges, handkerchiefs, crisp packets, socks, gloves, and frilly knickers.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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