08:00 Lois and I get up and have breakfast together, in honour of Father's Day - boiled egg, plus toast and marmalade, made by myself. I need to open my presents and cards to see if there's anything from Sarah, our daughter, who lies in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 7-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie. We're zooming with her at 9:30 am, so I need to be able to say thanks etc!
However there's nothing from Oz, and later I google it and find out that Father's Day in Australia is not till September. Still, Lois and I decide not to mention Father's Day anyway during the zoom, just in case it makes Sarah feel bad - we're so kind-hearted haha!
It's nice to hear that both Sarah and Francis are going to have their first Pfizer coronavirus vaccinations next month.
A couple of days ago we received an Easter card from the twins - no, it wasn't late arriving, they only posted it in June, long after Easter: what madness!!!! But how sweet at the same time !!!!
Is it not worth all the money in the world, just to have two 7-year-old granddaughters who send cards like this to us, even if they are 9,000 miles away? [You're going to have to stop saying that at some point! - Ed]
10:30 I get some nice presents for Father's Day from Lois and our other daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire.
A book, "The Viking Great Army and the Making of England", by Julian Richards and Dawn Hadley, whom we saw giving a talk on the subject on zoom a few days ago as part of this year's York Festival of Ideas.
Also, some treats: two bars of Fry's Turkish Delight chocolate, a pack of Tea Pig teabags, salted caramel brownies, and all butter flapjacks - yum yum! Also a black-and-white so-called "e-mug", i.e. a reusable plastic coffee mug - I've been jealous of Lois for some time, since she got an e-mug for her birthday earlier this month. Now I can relax - I have achieved parity at last!
13:00 We have lunch: roast lamb, roast potatoes, carrots and peas in a red-wine gravy: followed by a dessert of strawberries and vanilla ice-cream.
14:30 After lunch we relax in the living-room. Lois is reading her copy of this week's "The Week" magazine, in an attempt to keep up with last week's news and in particular with changes in the English language, but it's a losing battle haha!
One of our favourite "pundits", the Financial Times newspaper's Janan Ganesh (crazy name, crazy guy), has been sounding off about all the bizarre new words that keep cropping up.
Of the words Janesh quotes as being incomprehensible to him, Lois and I understand only one, and that's the term "gaslighting", which refers to emotional abuse, and manipulation of, women by men: we're old enough to have seen the original film "Gaslight". But we don't know any of the other new words Janesh lists, so we google them.
The term "benching" means that you tell somebody you're dating that you want to stop seeing them, but you continue to text them or communicate with them by social media. This is so that you can take up with them again if your other options go belly-up.
"Mirroring" means copying the hand gestures of the person you're talking to. While Lois and I are discussing this word, I suddenly realise that I'm already subconsciously doing this with Lois - stretching out my right hand to emphasise a point, and she's doing the same. Lois says that one of her favourite authors, Barbara Pym, who also used this gesture, had a boyfriend who would, at this point, always put some object or other into her outstretched hand - just for fun, Lois thinks. What's the word for what the boyfriend is doing? Lois and I can only come up with "being-irritating" haha!
"Sealioning" is quite a difficult concept. It's used if you're debating an issue with somebody, and you start to question their views politely but very persistently, in an effort to annoy them and make them explode and thus to seem unreasonable.
"Allyship" apparently refers to people from a relatively "privileged" group, let's say, straight middle-class white men, who try and stand up for the rights of "underprivileged groups".
There's one word that Janesh obviously does understand, because he used it himself: "protean". Lois and I have to look this one up as well, and it means "changeable" or "versatile". Who knew that ? [I expect a lot of people do -Ed]
What a crazy language we speak!!!!
19:30 We settle down in front of the laptop to see the last zoom talk in this year's York University Festival of Ideas, a presentation by William Dalrymple on the history of the East India Company.
we wait for the session to begin - it's a few minutes late already: oh dear!
The zoom session from York University is a few minutes late starting, which is unfortunate, and even when it starts, there's a lot of time taken up by a series of people each saying their little piece: a guy from the Indian University that collaborated on the project, then the head of York University's History Department, then the chairperson of tonight's session, and finally we get to see the speaker: historian William Dalrymple. And even then Dalrymple spends quite a bit of time talking about the linguist guy who translated all the source material that was in Classical Persian.
What madness !!!!!
...then the head of York University's History Department...
.. then the chairperson for tonight's session....
... then at last we see the speaker, William Dalrymple..
... but William spends quite a bit of time
talking about his Persian translator - oh dear!!!!
What madness !!!!! [You've said that already - Ed]
Eventually Dalrymple gets down to detailing the history of the East India Company, which he describes as the world's first multi-national corporation, one which ruled and (mostly) misruled India, using its own army and police, mostly consisting of native Indians, from around 1599 to 1858, so for 259 years.
the start of the East India Company in 1599, the year of Shakespeare's "Hamlet":
Sir Thomas Smythe, the company's first governor - he was also treasurer
of the Virginia Company - that was how they did colonialism in those days!
cartoon expressing the critical mood in London that led to Parliament's
shutting down of the company in the 1850's
Dalrymple finishes his talk at about 8:20 pm, and questions are then taken from the virtual audience.
It's a pity in a way that Dalrymple doesn't just stick to the history of it, but unfortunately he concentrates the end of his talk on the question of whether Britain should apologise to India for some of the things the East India Company did all those years ago, and the first few questioners do the same. "Woke" and "anti-woke" people can argue about that till the cows come home, but it doesn't really matter now, does it. We all know that was how people and countries behaved in those days, and not just the East India Company!
20:35 The session is already overrunning, so we switch off at this point. We sit down to watch some TV, but Lois's friend Mari-Ann rings her and by the time the call is over it's 9:30 pm. We've just got time to watch the first 20 minutes of an old Doc Martin episode.
Nice to see that Martin Clunes as Doc Martin keeps up his astonishing record of never smiling throughout about 9 whole series of this long-running saga! What madness!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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