Danskcolin: Saturday August 28th 2021

10:00 Lois and I start 30 minutes late with our weekly zoom call to our younger daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie.

we start our zoom call to Australia at 10am (5pm Western Australia time),

our new regular time, which is nice. Another half hour

in bed for Lois and me, which will be a relief, to put it mildly!

The family have been moving into their new home in Perth's northern suburb of Tapping this week, and Sarah and Francis look tired but, I have to say, happy too - the twins are just happy and not tired at all, needless to say. They are buzzing with excitement at getting to know their new home with its swimming pool and fish tanks. They tell us they have 6 fish altogether to "look after" - but I'm not sure if they've quite named them all yet.

What madness!!!!

Tapping, Perth's northern suburb, that the family have moved to, can be seen top right

The house looks inwards to a courtyard with the swimming pool, and so there are virtually no windows out on to the street, which seems odd to us "poms", but it must feel really private. Sarah has told the twins that orange trees and lemon trees are unheard of in the UK so they've collected some sample fruit to show us. They also show us a chilli that they found in the yard.

How cute they are!!!!

Sarah says she feels absolutely exhausted. She spent a total of 10 hours cleaning the old house, including all the shelves in all the cupboards, and also the floors which were the last job. In the new place they're living more in the city now, so they won't be seeing kangaroos in the yard, but it's still Australia so caterpillars, spiders, cockroaches, maybe even scorpions, and all the rest of the crowd are to be expected to surface at some point - oh dear!

Francis has had his 2nd Pfizer coronavirus jab, and Sarah is getting her second on on Tuesday, so they're very happy about that. The twins will have to start a new school in October, leaving their current Catholic private school, but Sarah and Francis aren't talking too much about that, so as not to stress them out too much. At least the twins always have each other, and one of their best friends, Samara, lives round the corner, and will be a friendly face on their first day, that's for sure.

I know what it's like - I was on my fifth school by the time I was their age (8) - what madness !!!!!

the twins' new primary school, where they are due to start in October

Poor twins !!!!!

flashback to 1954: me (right), just about to start

my 5th primary school at age 8, here with

my brother Steve (2) and sister Kathy (6)

with my brother and parents - happy times !!!!!

my 5th primary school, Oliver Goldsmiths Primary School, London,

as it looked in 1938, 16 years before I started attending there

12:00 Lois comes in from the garden with a bucket of the latest crop of our own dear potatoes, which is nice. Yes it is worth growing vegetables after all, it seems!

16:00 We have a cup of tea and a Chelsea bun on the couch.

I look at my smartphone and surf the Ancient Origins website. I see that a couple of 1600-year-old skeletons have been found in a grave in China, in a lovers' embrace, which is nice.

Apparently this is the first pair of skeletons found in this position in North China, and it's apparently a rare thing in general for couples to be buried like this, which I didn't know. But how sweet!

It's all rather touching I think. It reminds me of Philip Larkin's poem, An Arundel Tomb, about the sculpture of a medieval couple lying in stone on top of their tomb, holding hands, in Chichester Cathedral. The poem ends on his famous line, "What will survive of us is love".

Lois and I visited the cathedral in 2012, and took this picture of the tomb, on which, after hundreds of years, the couple are still holding hands:

We also visited the exhibition of modern sculptures in the cathedral grounds.

Let's just hope that that 1600-year-old couple in North China died at the same time, though, perhaps in a chariot accident, or eaten by bears. I wouldn't like to think that the woman had been killed gratuitously at the request of the man, in the hope that she would go with him into the next life, and wash all his underwear etc for him. My god !!!!!

Yikes !!!!!

19:00 We speak on the phone to our other daughter Alison, who lives in a crumbling Victorian villa in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children, Josie (14), Rosalind (13), and Isaac (11).

flashback to earlier this month: Ali's 46th birthday brunch:

(left to right) Ed, Rosalind, Ali, Isaac and Josie

The family are gearing up for the big "back-to-school" process this coming week and the next. The house they live in is currently being repaired and refurbished. When Lois and I visited them a couple of weeks ago we learnt to live with the constant sounds of hammering and other builder-noises. The disruption is twice as bad, now, says Ali, because the house's whole heating system is being changed, with floorboards being taken up and new piping installed, in preparation for the new boiler and new radiators to be installed.

flashback to mine and Lois's visit there a couple of weeks ago -

chaos inside and chaos outside: what madness !!!!!

20:00 We get on the couch and watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in the series "Undercover Big Boss", where the boss of a big company goes undercover incognito to find out what's going wrong in his business that his immediate underlings aren't telling him about.

This is the second programme we've seen in this series, and I have to say we are quite disappointed. The formula for each programme seems to be the same: the big boss goes undercover to his best-performing departments, finds out that staff there are doing a really conscientious job in difficult circumstances with very little support from management. Big Boss starts weeping when doing a piece-to-camera. Then at the end of the programme he invites all these hard-working staff into his office one by one, reveals his identity and then awards them a bonus and a pay rise, or a free holiday, that kind of thing.

All this is good for the company's public image, no doubt about that - showing the public that it's a company where the big boss has a heart. But Lois and I wonder about how all the man's other employees react when they watch it. Are they upset because they haven't had a pay rise or a bonus, just because Big Boss didn't visit them and visited somebody else in a different department? I don't know, but I think we should be told!

21:00 We wind down for bedtime with one of our favourite TV quizzes, "Only Connect", the quiz which tests lateral thinking.

As the "Radio Times" blurb says, it's an odd moment when the usually perky presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell is seen to be close to tears when she reads out some supplementary facts about the answer to one question.

It's a routine sort of a "name a possible 4th item in this sequence" question where the sequence is names or words with, successively, 7, 6, 5 and 4 consonants in a row. The teams have, first, to spot the connection and, secondly, come up with a 4th word or name that has 4 successive consonants in it.

One of the team suggests "hitchhike" which is acceptable. Another possibility, which the question-setters have gone with is "length".

Neither of the teams, nor Lois and I, have heard of "Hirschsprung" before.

It turns out that Hirschsprung was a Dane, as Victoria explains.

Harald Hirschsprung (1830-1916)

Hirschsprung's Disease is a bowel disease in children discovered by the 19th century Danish paediatrician, Harald Hirschsprung, a man Victoria thinks was rather wonderful. The Queen of Denmark wanted there to be biblical quotes on the walls of the hospital, and he said, "No, there should be pictures of animals". He was a children's doctor and he said they should have animals on the wall.