Monday September 20th 2021

11:00 Lois finally appears downstairs. She decided to go back to bed after our shower, and why shouldn't she?! We've only been retired for 15 years haha!

We go for a walk over the local football field, in brilliant sunshine for once, and we stop at the Whiskers Coffee Stand. From there we can gawk at the Old Codger Soccer practice session taking place in the netball court, which is nice!

I reserve two places on the so-called "Buddy Bench"

while Lois gets 2 coffees from the Polish girl serving today

we gawk at the Old Codger Soccer session going on

in the netball court. "Not really eye-candy", is Lois's verdict!

Oh dear, not a single David Beckham amongst them, then !!!!!

14:00 After lunch more work on the so-called "family tree", prompted by my "new cousin" David, the online journalist, the relative that my sister Gill and I didn't know we had until a DNA test a few weeks back. David is the illegitimate son of our Aunty Joan and hotel manager Peter, who we've discovered was, outside of his hotel job, also big in the amateur theatre world. 

I think that when you hit on a family that are a bit out of the ordinary, or have exceptional talents, you just keep coming across extraordinary things that happened to them or extraordinary people that they rubbed shoulders with. This is when family history becomes a bit of a drug, because you keep coming across famous or mildly famous people, and it makes you want to look into them - and so it goes on!!!

Peter's father-in-law John was a British mining engineer who spent a lot of time in the East Indies, in the then British colony of Sarawak. John wasn't married but he seems to have had an interesting long-term relationship with a Sarawakian woman, Poing-Ah-Lian, who bore him 4 children.

Today we discover that in his later years John retired to a house in Rye, Sussex, which had shortly before been the home of a ground-breaking lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall. 

Radclyffe Hall wrote a game-changing lesbian novel, "The Well of Loneliness", that was banned in Britain but successfully published in the US in 1928 after a court battle. 

Hall had affairs with a number of women, including, principally, the sculptress Una Troubridge but also with the singer Mabel Batten; and, in her declining years, she even had an affair with the Russian nurse hired to look after her. My god, what a woman!!!!

Sculptress Una Troubridge (left) with her long-term

lover, author Radclyffe Hall

the house where author Radclyffe Hall and later 

Peter's father-in-law John lived - nice !

What madness !!!!!! 

But Lois and I must stop this family history work soon, before it drives us into the madhouse - my god !!!!!

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. 

I settle down on the couch to watch Episode 4 of the 2nd season of "The Killing", the Danish crime series, which Lois doesn't like. 

However, I only get to see about 10 minutes of this Scandi crime-drama tonight - and about 3 minutes of this is the opening "Previously on The Killing". Lois comes back out of the dining-room because it seems that tonight's speaker has a heavy cold and has cancelled - oh dear!

I switch off "The Killing" and instead we watch the latest programme in Chris Packham and step-daughter Megan McCubbin's series "Chris and Meg's Wild Summer".

Tonight Chris and Meg start by visiting the Farne Islands and Holy Island, the birthplace of Christianity in Britain and Ireland - also the first place in the country that the Vikings trashed when they started raiding the British Isles in the 9th century AD. 

Chris and Meg are here to see the seals and the birdlife, however, not the old monastic buildings. 

But they nevertheless give the old ruins a quick look-over first. 

Chris is famously a somewhat obsessive, autistic loner and Megan asks him if he'd like to live on the island - the population is only about 150. However, it seems that 150 is still too many people for Chris to cope with.

It's nostalgic for Lois and me to see these islands, because we visited the Farne Islands and Holy Island way back in 1973. We'd been married for only a year and we didn't have any children yet. What a very long time ago it seems !!!!

Flashback to 1973: we were just 27 years old when we visited Holy Island 

on the North Sea coast of Northumberland - happy days!!!!

At Bass Rock, Chris opens up to his step-daughter Meg about how their shared interest in wild life broke through the barriers had erected around himself.

He said at one point he got to a stage in his life, when he was doing a lot of travelling in pursuit of his own wildlife projects, but that his memories of those trips had just become a collection of postcards that he had basically sent to himself. He'd be travelling to places, and seeing things, but he couldn't share the memories. He felt very isolated.

Then Megan came into his life as his new step-daughter, aged just 2, but as she grew up, she began to show the same kind of interests as her step-dad.

Fascinating stuff !!!

20:30 We talk on the phone to Alison, our elder daughter, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children. 

flashback to August: we visit Ali and family: (left to right) Isaac, Ed,

Josie, Ali, Rosalind and Lois

Ali works part-time as a teaching assistant in a local primary school. She's been loving the hours because she basically works 9am till 1pm, and then she's got the rest of the day to herself. But now the school have asked her to work on a bit longer in the afternoons, until 2:30pm. Oh dear!

Poor Ali !!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!