09:00 One job less to do today. On Tuesdays I usually devise a Hungarian vocabulary test for my friend, "Magyar" Mike, whom I've been studying the language with on and off since the early 1990's. Mike rang me yesterday to say that the computer he's been using "since longer than I cared to remember" (as Mike put it) has finally broken down irretrievably. He's getting a new one later this week, but in the meantime he can't communicate with me by email. So we're both having a week off on this one.
10:00 Lois and I concentrate today on doing a bit of family history. My sister Gill told me yesterday that she had a DNA test done, which has put her in touch with David, a journalist working for the BBC, who according to the DNA is a reasonably close relative of ours, and of roughly the same age as Gill herself. The strange thing was that David doesn't show up on our family tree, so what's going on here? What's the connection? After all, DNA doesn't lie, does it haha!
It's also odd that Gill and I know that a lot of our Welsh ancestors were also in the newspaper business: mainly in South Wales, but one of our great-uncles went to South Africa around the turn of the 20th century to report on the Boer War against the Afrikaners.
14:00 After lunch I look through all my family history papers but I can't find anything relevant, so I look through the diaries I used to keep: these date from the time when Lois and I were going round to my mother's house almost every day to see if she was okay, and to ask if we could do anything for her in the house or on the telephone etc. I'm checking these diary entries in case my mother ever talked of anything in the family that could be linked with this "David".
I draw a blank on that source: there's no mention in the diaries of anything that could help with the David issue and related issues - but it's quite a nightmare reading the diary in other respects. I'd forgotten just how difficult our visits were to my poor mother - on every visit she presented us with so many problems to sort out: physical (health) ones, money problems, problems with her household appliances, and last but not least, problems with her carers, who could be described as "saints" one day and "sackable" the next. Oh dear - we often didn't know how best to help.
Lois has more luck doing research on the computer, because there's a connection here with her sect, and her sect has produced a CD with records going back for decades on events such as marriages, baptisms, moves to different towns etc. Although her results are tentative, she's got a list of 5 names of people, one of whom could be a half-brother or a half-sister of David. But it could be all a red herring - we'll just have to see. Still, it's a start!
19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's online yoga course. Lois tells me later that there was only her and about 3 others taking part tonight. Molly says too many people are either watching the England Germany Euro-football match on TV, or celebrating England's win: one of the two - what madness!!!!
19:30 Lois stays on in the dining-room to take part in her sect's Tuesday Bible-reading Group.
There's a text in from Alison, our elder daughter, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children Josie (14), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (10).
Little Isaac, who's in his final year of primary school - Year 6 in today's parlance - has heard he's got a place next school year at a secondary school in Liphook in their CLIL scheme for Mandarin Chinese. "CLIL" is new to me, so I google it. It stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning, which means that he'll not just be learning Chinese but also studying some non-core subjects actually in Chinese. My god!
Isaac is his school's "head boy", and he's also a bit of a showman: he loves to sing and perform on stage. Later this week he'll be taking one of the lead roles in his primary school's performance of the musical "Big Bad Wolf", and singing a solo song - he's playing the wolf - yikes!
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