09:30 Lois and I sit in front of the laptop waiting for our scheduled weekly zoom chat with Sarah, our younger daughter who lives out in the sticks, just outside Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie.
No result! Sarah is evidently not there, but she phones us on whatsapp an hour later, just on audio - she had not noticed the time marching on: it's 4:30 pm Western Australia time, and the family are getting ready to move out to their new house closer into the city, at Tapping. They got the key to the new place on Wednesday and they have a week to move all their stuff.
what will be the family's new house in Tapping
There's no doubt what the main attraction will be for the twins: the swimming pool and also the outdoor hammock (not shown!).
the 24-mile move to Tapping, which is much
closer in to the city
They're trying to move the little things first, emptying the cupboards one by one. They have booked a rental van for Monday, which is when they'll move the furniture. The idea of moving a whole house's contents seems like a total nightmare to Lois and me, but Sarah and Francis have done it several times since they moved to Australia in December 2015, so I guess they must be getting used to it!
Poor them !!!!
14:00 A nap in bed as the rain pours down outside. Then a cup of tea and a scone on the couch. Our 49th wedding anniversary is coming up next Wednesday, so we want to get a nice lunch delivered for the big day, preferably the day before.
flashback to August 25th 1972, the day Lois and I got married.
(left to right) my sister Gill, Lois, me, my father Ken,
my mother Nan, and my brother Steve
We get on the CookShop website to order our anniversary meal. We've decided we fancy a bit of Thai. In the end we go for spring rolls, followed by Thai Basil Chicken with Coconut and Lime Leaf Rice - yum yum! We've already got a stack of sweet sticky desserts to follow that with, which is nice.
17:00 After that, Lois looks online for our "new cousin" and, specifically his father, Peter. My sister Gill and I recently discovered we had a cousin we didn't know about. Gill got given a DNA test kit for her birthday in May, and when she sent her details into a big DNA database she discovered that we had a cousin, David, a BBC online journalist, who we didn't know about.
David was the son of one of our aunts, Aunty Joan, who was not married when she gave birth to David in 1957, and so she gave him up for adoption.
David has discovered that his father's name was Peter, and he was in the hotel business. David's mother, mine and Gill's Aunty Joan, had a life-long career as a hotel receptionist. Cosy haha!!!!
This afternoon Lois finds a number of online local newspaper articles about Peter. In the early 1960's he was the manager of a local inn, the New Inn at Gloucester, a historic inn where the accession to the throne of Lady Jane Grey was announced in 1553.
After Peter's stint in Gloucester, in 1965, he became the owner of Gupshill Manor at Tewkesbury; this is the inn where, by coincidence, Lois had lunch yesterday, in the company of some of her church friends.
Gupshill Manor, formerly owned by Peter, the father of our "new" cousin David, the inn where, by coincidence, Lois had lunch yesterday - spooky !!!!
Peter must have had money, no doubt about that, if he was the owner of the Gupshill. He was also, according to the newspaper articles, one of the leading forces involved in the foundation of the famous chain of the Berni Inns, of which there are several hundred in the UK.
Peter even sent his son to Gordonstoun, the public school in Scotland that Prince Charles went to.
My god !!!!!!
Prince Charles at Gordonstoun School in the early 1960's
No surprise, then, that our cousin David's father Peter, if he was a man as rich as that, could well have afforded to send Joan to some expensive clinic in London to have their secret babies, a clinic patronised by some famous (unnamed) celebrities, apparently.
My god (again) !!!!!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
17:30 I check out the Hungarian news media (Daily News Hungary), and I see that Budapest is one of the best cities in Europe for singles.
Budapest isn't actually in the Top Ten, as it turns out, but it's just bubbling under at around position 12, I'm guessing.
The ratings in the Top Ten are based on a number of factors.
And it turns out that Budapest, and Hungary as a whole, records the 12th highest usage of the dating app Tinder. Who would have guessed that?
It's also surprising that the UK has two cities in the Top Ten, London and Oxford. Surprising, especially when you think that foreigners are always describing us as "unromantic".
What madness !!!!!!
20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, the first in a new series of "Undercover Big Boss".
In this programme, we see the undercover experiences of Mark Taylor, the MD of Britain's market leader removal company, Pickfords, which has been going for 400 years and operates 150 trucks nationwide.
The firm's employees have a fund of cheeky anecdotes to regale us with, which is nice.
But when Managing Director Mark Taylor goes undercover, disguised as a rookie removal man, he seems genuinely shocked at the rates of pay, £8.92 an hour, and also the conditions - men have to sleep on mats in the back of the van if it's a 2-day job.
And at the end of the show he makes up for all this, by awarding pay rises, bonuses, etc and he promises to improve the appalling conditions at one of the offices at the firm's depots, for example.
But how genuine is all this? Would the MD be completely unaware of the rates of pay that his employees get, for instance? Or is the programme partly a publicity stunt, and an attempt to raise Pickford's profile at a time when they're facing increasing competition from small, independent local operators?
I don't know, but I think we should be told !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment