09:00 The day begins and - what passes for excitement galore during pandemics: we've got 2 deliveries today: (1) from Sainsbury's supermarket and (2) from Waghorne's, the butcher's shop in the village. Hurrah! Lots of comforting swabbing in store, to put it mildly!
We know that Sainsbury's will deliver between 10am and 11am, which they do, but Waghorne's is only a little local shop so they deliver when it suits them, not when it suits us - oh dear! So I stay at home when Lois goes out at 11:30 am to take a walk and post some letters and cards. Waghorne's eventually deliver the meat and cheese at about 2 pm, and Lois breaks the handle of the freezer door when she's putting the stuff away - damn !!!! We can still open and close the door fortunately: what a mad world this is, though !!!!!
11:30 While Lois is out, I do a bit more work on my so-called "presentation", the talk I've foolishly volunteered to give next month to Lynda's U3A Middle English group on "The Influence of Old Norse on the History of English".
I discover that the Anglo-Saxons borrowed a lot of words from the Vikings' Old Norse (ON) language, but then "wasted the words" by not using them very much. That's criminal if you ask me! And I bet they paid the Vikings good money to borrow their words - a lot of them were copyrighted you know!
16:00 We speak on the phone to Gill, my sister in Cambridge. Gill recently had a DNA test done, and as a result we found out that we have a cousin we didn't know about - David, a 72-year-old online journalist, who was apparently the illegitimate son of our Aunty Joan.
David's mother Joan and our own mother Hannah are buried in the same grave in Oxford, and this week David and his wife and daughter, who live in nearby Woodstock, paid a visit to the grave, which understandably was a very emotional occasion for him.
Gill has only talked with David on the phone up to now, but David and his wife are actually going to be going to Cambridge and visiting Gill in person next month, which will be nice.
Gill thinks that while David and his wife are in the Cambridge area next month, they'll also maybe take the opportunity to see the hotels in the village of March and the town of Peterborough. David's mother Joan was a hotel receptionist in those places, and David's father Peter was Joan's boss. Never go to bed with the boss, ladies haha!
17:00 Lois is like a tiger when she's on the trail of genealogical information - when she's "sleuthing" a long-lost relative, as the Norsemen would have said.
She's researching the so-called "Sarawakian" branch of the family tree, which is connected with David, because they're related to his father Peter.
Peter's wife Elizabeth, the wife that Peter was cheating on with our Aunty Joan was the daughter of a British mining engineer, John, and a Sarawakian woman, Poing-Ah-Lian. Lois has discovered the couple had two daughters born out in Sarawak, Elizabeth (born 1914) and Susan (born 1919), both of whom John brought back with him to England by boat in 1923.
Today Lois discovers that there were 2 more children born out in Sarawak - Charlie (born about 1917) and Joan Mary (born about 1926). John brought Joan back to England with him in 1932. Whether Charlie was ever brought back we don't know at present.
Charlie's mother is just given as "a Chinese woman": but I guess that could have been Poing-Ah-Lian again, even though that's a sort of Malay-type name rather than a Chinese one.
However the authorities weren't always too particular about people who weren't British, I'm ashamed to say!!! Either you were British or you were just "something or other foreign" - what a crazy world they lived in in those days !!!
Gill later points out that to describe Charlie's mother as "a Chinese woman" suggests strongly, however, that the mother and John were not married. Oh dear!!!
So we've got, born to John out in Sarawak:
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