08:00 Lois and I are in bed. She has had a disturbed night with a tummy bug, however, so I leave her to wake up gracefully while I go downstairs and make a cup of tea for us both, even though it's not strictly my turn - I'm all heart haha!
10:00 My sister Gill texts me. She and I are trying to find out more information about 2 "lost cousins", both adopted as babies, that we knew nothing about until a few weeks ago, when Gill sent her DNA to a database and got her results back.
One of these "lost cousins" of ours, David, is a BBC journalist, and he's going to be ringing Gill on Wednesday for a preliminary chat. Up to now they've only corresponded by text or email. But Gill and I are going to have to have a chat ourselves before that phone-call, because although David obviously wants to know all about his "real family", there are some things that Gill and I are not allowed to tell him at the moment, to protect some of our other relatives' "sensibilities" - oh dear, yes, it's soap-opera land all right haha!!!
Gill and I have also identified the other "lost cousin", Jonathan, who we think is either a brother or half-brother of David, the journalist. But we can't get in touch with Jonathan at the moment because of those self-same "sensibilities" - what madness !!!! Jonathan has lived in Spain for at least 10 years: we know he was born in 1949, although mysteriously we can't find a birth record for him.
Jonathan was adopted as a baby by a couple who couldn't have children, and so, over the years, they decided to adopt not only Jonathan but also 6 other children. We can't find a birth record for Jonathan, but Gill wondered if he was given a different name at birth, and then renamed by his foster-parents. And Gill has today found a possible candidate born in 1949 in Bristol, the city where his foster-parents were living at the time. His mother's name fits the bill and his first name was the same as that of mine and Gill's maternal grandfather, so it could all fit. The plot thickens haha!
10:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to log in to "zoom" and take part in the first of her sect's 2 worship services today. Today is a big day for the sect, because they're inaugurating a return to in-person religious services, in a rented hall just outside Tewkesbury. The majority of members, however, are, this Sunday, still going to take part remotely using the zoom software: this includes all the 4 anti-vax couples, who will all be taking part remotely, which will be nice for everybody present in the hall, to put it mildly haha!!!!
Some members are going to be there, however, and the visiting speaker is going to be there also. Lois tells me later than on the laptop she can see the platform in the meeting-room, with the speaker and the president, and also the screen used for slide presentations, but she doesn't see the audience in the hall. She can, however, see the other zoom participants, including herself, around the sides of the screen, which is nice.
The sect's local elders have been putting a lot of time in during the past week getting the hall ready, with tables arranged at good social distances from each other, lots of hand gel etc. Members will sit with their partners or with buddies in their "bubble", without wearing masks, but they will have to put ona masks if they leave their tables to walk around and socialise.
"The wheel is actually fairly complicated, a series of inventions rather
than one. First, you need to make something round and sturdy but not too heavy,
which is harder than it looks. The first pottery wheels, which appeared several
thousand years before wheels for transportation, were made of stone or ceramic,
which would be terrible for use on a vehicle. They turned slowly on pivots
rather than quickly in a bearing, making them useful for making symmetrical
pottery but not obviously good for much else.
"To turn that wheel into something useful for carrying loads, you then need to get at least two of them and put them on an axle, then put that axle in some kind of bearing which allows it to rotate more or less freely, and then attach some kind of framework to that bearing to carry loads. And on top of that, you need hard, level ground for your vehicle to travel on. Mesopotamia and other regions of southwestern and central Asia had that, but many other places (notably Egypt) didn’t.
"And even then, wheeled vehicles are poor transportation compared to
transport by water. Historically, carrying things over land by cart costs four
or five times as much as transporting by river (and twenty or so times as much
as transporting them by sea). So if you’re Egyptian, where everywhere you’d
ever want to go is right there on the Nile, there’s little point in investing
in clumsy, difficult, expensive early wheels.
"What seems to have happened, then, is that wheels were developed by people who could have a use for them. Central Asia and the parts of Mesopotamia not directly on the Tigris and Euphrates are fairly free of convenient rivers and streams and have the kind of ground wheels are good on. They also had good beast of burden (horses and oxen) available to provide labour for pulling them. Only once those early, not-very-good-wheeled vehicles had developed into better versions like war chariots did that technology start to spread elsewhere, like eventually into Egypt and China. And that’s why the civilizations of the New World in mountainous Peru and moist, hilly Yucatan and southern Mexico never bothered with wheels."
No wonder, however, that although the wheel, strictly speaking, was only invented once and patented once, it had, as we know, to be constantly "re-invented" because people lost the plans for it, and had to start again. Although I think that the original inventor still got paid sixpence (2.5p in new money) every time somebody used his idea, which seems fair!
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
18:00 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent us a news quiz from the Guardian newspaper. One of the 15 questions is about Peppa Pig TV-cartoons.
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