June 27th - my father's birthday today: he would have been 107 if he'd lived: my god, that would have been a great age to be!
flashback to 1979: (left to right) my mother (59), Sarah (2),
my father (65), Alison (4) and Lois (33) at St Ives, Cornwall
- happy days !!!!
They have a 3-day mini-lockdown starting in Western Australia today thanks to a woman returnee from Sydney who tested positive. A narrow escape, Sarah says, because the woman shops in the same supermarket as Sarah does - yikes! I bet that woman's popular locally - not !!!!!
The mini-lockdown means that the our 7-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessie will not now be able to go on a school excursion tomorrow. To compensate for the disappointment the school is organising a "pyjama party" for all the pupils on Friday, the last day of term. The children can go to school on Friday in their pyjamas, and Sarah and husband Francis have bought them a new pair of pyjamas just for the occasion, which is nice!
Jessie showcase some of her recent artwork for us
Francis says he's hoping to pick up a motor this week for the 20 foot boat that family bought a few weeks ago. In the meantime he's been doing little repair jobs and cleaning jobs on the boat - and working on the sails.
We've just had our summer solstice here, of course, and it's still light outside after 10 pm when Lois and I go to bed. The length of days doesn't alter much in Perth, because they're so much nearer the Equator. It's been pretty cold lately they say, and one night this week the temperature at night went down to zero - shock horror!
12:00 We have lunch in the short interval between Lois's two worship services on zoom. After that, I go to bed and Lois joins me at 3 pm. We get up at 4 pm and have a cup of tea and a currant bun on the sofa.
Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent us the address of a Canadian website (Globe and Mail) that says that Lois and I don't have to keep swabbing down our groceries and "quarantining" the letters and parcels that get delivered to our door (the webpage article doesn't name us specifically - I think it's a general piece of advice haha). Apparently the risk of an infection being passed on in this way is more or less negligible.
Gosh, that'll be a relief - but have we got the courage to stop doing it? Well, I'm going to have a try next weekend - wish me luck!
I've had a long, interesting email from Tünde, my Hungarian pen-friend. She has at last, after 1 year, been able to see her son Gábor and his family, who visited her a day or two ago. They live in Germany, so it was just a flying visit to see both Tünde and also Rita's parents.
Tünde has been watching an interesting TV documentary about the history of the Hungarian language. I must find a book about this subject for myself! She says that, although Hungarians today can't easily pronounce the English letter 'w', the sound existed in Hungarian also until about 1200 AD.
I thought of the English 'th' sound, which many foreigners have trouble with, especially the French. It's odd, but that sound also existed at one time in France: when we borrowed the word 'faith' from the Norman French in the 12th century, we copied their pronunciation too: the way that we say the word even today in English is pretty much exactly how the Normans said it.
What madness !!!!!
My Hungarian is very poor these days. I'm okay with the written language but I can't really speak it any more with any degree of fluency, although 15 years ago I was chatting merrily away on Skype with Tünde in Budapest, and with my other Hungarian friend Ildiko in Debrecen. It's a pity, because this week I was asked if I could be an interpreter for a Hungarian family in Cheltenham, who wanted to get their child baptized at the local United Reformed Church. Damn!!!! But it's too late now - for nearly 10 years I've been concentrating on my Danish studies, and this is the result !!!!!
the local United Reformed Church,
where a Hungarian family want to get their child baptized -
Lois and I used to take Sarah's twins here every Monday morning
for their toddler session, before Sarah and family moved to Australia
- sob, sob !!!!!
flashback to 2010: me and my Hungarian Skype-friend Ildiko
in an Asda superstore just outside Bristol
Note for connoisseurs of Hungarian given names:- "Ildiko is the Hungarian form of 'Hilda'", surprisingly enough.
with Lois and me in the Pump Room at Bath
20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch some TV, an interesting documentary about Princess Diana, who would have turned 60 on Thursday last week, if she'd lived.
It's nostalgic to see the old film clips again, but I don't think we're any further forward in really understanding what went wrong with Charles and Diana's marriage. It's interesting that Martin Bashir's 1995 interview, which would probably have been a centrepiece of this look-back, is not, in fact, included at all in the programme, and gets referred to only as "Martin Bashir's now discredited interview".
Did the marital problems start with Charles's continuing hankering after Camilla? Or was that in itself a reaction to problems that Diana herself was already causing? She had had a disturbed childhood, with a mother who was labelled "unfit to be a mother" and who walked out on the family. Diana had disturbing bouts of bulimia, and once tried to throw herself down some stairs, even though she was pregnant at the time - yikes !!!!
We'll probably never know now what really went on between them.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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