Danskcolin: Sunday August 2nd 2021

08:00 I leave Lois in the bed again and go downstairs. The tummy upset has gone, but she has a sore throat and headache - yikes! Let's hope it's not COVID !!! Later, however, she comes downstairs and starts making lunch. She's feeling better and she wants me to drive her over to her friend Mari-Ann's house after lunch so she can take part with Mari-Ann in their sect's second worship service via zoom.

It's too late now, however, to un-cancel our weekly zoom call with Sarah, our daughter who lives just outside Perth, Australia with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie. The twins turned 8 last Monday, and today they had their birthday party at a swimming pool with a lot of other excited youngsters, unfortunately 9000 miles away from us - sob sob!

our twin grandchildren with their many buddies,

at a faraway Australian swimming pool today - bless them !!!

The twins are not going to forget this birthday celebration, that's for sure. It's the kind of memory you never forget, isn't it. Especially if Sarah and Francis decide to move back to the UK in the next 12 months, in which case it'll come to seem a bit like a dream.

flashback to July 2015 at Evesham UK - Sarah and Francis show

Jessie the two matching 2nd birthday cakes

July 2015: the twins enjoy a "bouncy castle" on their last birthday in the UK

before moving out to Australia the following December

flashback to last Monday, and the twins' 8th birthday cake,

celebrating at their home outside Perth, Australia

Time flies, doesn't it.

14:00 While Lois is over at Mari-Ann's house, taking part in the zoom service, I go to bed and have a nap.

I wake up and look at my smartphone, and I see from an email that the potential family bust-up over the discovery, after a DNA test, of two cousins we didn't strictly know about, looks like it's going to be resolved amicably. Gill and I already had about 30 cousins - which is enough for anybody - and we didn't really think that another 2 were going to pop up "out of nowhere" !!!!

If all goes well, the 2 "new" cousins - David, the 60-something online journalist, and his brother or half-brother Jonathan, a 70-something guy with a Spanish wife who's spent the majority of his adult working life in Spain - are at last going to be able to meet up with each other.

David and Jonathan were both adopted as babies, and never knew about each other, or about most of their other relations. David in particular has until now been totally ignorant of who his "real family" is, that is, until a recent DNA test found a match between David and my sister Gill. And Gill and I are sure that David and Jonathan are either siblings or half-siblings - but we're not sure which.

Flashback to 2017: Cousin Jonathan on Fathers Day

with his Spanish wife and family

It's heart-warming really isn't it. And a very big deal for David, and no doubt for Jonathan too, once he gets over his shock. My god!

15:00 I get out of bed and fetch Lois home. We have a cup of tea and a Chelsea bun on the couch.

I look at my smartphone, and I'm glad to see that one of our favourite quora forum pundits, Alonzo Machirazu (crazy name, crazy guy) has been weighing in on the vexed subject of why top speed limits are so much faster on European motorways than they are in the US.

To be honest I can't follow all the complicated stuff about different speed limits in various US states - I just like Alonzo's map of Europe with its different figures for speed limits. The UK speed limit looks odd but that's just because it's been converted from miles per hour: we're the only country in Europe that doesn't use the metric system for speed limits.

Those crazy Germans don't have a top speed limit at all, although I believe they've got an "advisory" limit - what's the good of that? And I'm surprised to see that the UK is one of the lower limits - converted to kph from an mph of 70. Nevertheless we're similar to Scandinavia and also a lot of the ex-Soviet countries for some reason.

One further question I have is "What's the significance of the difference between the blue countries and the green countries?" Alonzo doesn't seem to refer to it, and nor do any of the commentators who've rushed to weigh in with their own two-penn'orth.

What madness!!!!

If I had posted this article, the colour-coding would have been one of the first things I would have made clear.

What a crazy world we live in!! Don't they teach map colour coding science any more in schools?!!!!

18:00 Lois and I have dinner.

My sister Gill emails me again - apparently our "new" cousin David, the journalist who was adopted as a baby, has been finding out details of his "other" parent, who apparently had 2 "other" children, so two more half-siblings for David to track down. Gill and I can relax on this one, however, because these additional new characters in this real-life soap-opera are no blood-relatives of ours, as far as I can work out, which is a comfort! Gill will find out more, hopefully, when she speaks to David on the phone this coming Friday.

What madness !!!!!

20:00 Lois and I sit down on the sofa and watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in the series, "Secrets of the Museum", about the work done at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to preserve and repair its many exhibits.

It's nostalgic to see the Spanish waiter Manuel's costume from the 1970's sitcom Fawlty Towers, donated to the museum by actor Andrew Sachs's daughter Kate. Andrew, who played Manuel in the 12 episodes made, died in 2016.

here Manuel the waiter (Andrew Sachs) gives his boss Basil Fawlty

(John Cleese) a basic Spanish lesson

Somehow the museum's staff manage to clean and repair the costume while leaving in place the vital "soup stains" that are an authentic reminder of the show's many turbulent scenes.

It's fascinating to see Andrew Sachs's daughter Kate and to hear about her father's troubled childhood. As Jews in pre-war Germany his family decided to escape to England in 1938, and his mother, plus Andrew and two siblings, boarded a boat for Southampton.