Two things are fixtures on our Saturday calendar - next week's groceries arriving from Budgens, the convenience store in the village, and we have a zoom call with Sarah, our younger daughter, who lives in Perth, Australia.
Why do our groceries always arrive simultaneously with whatever time the zoom call starts? "ANSWER ME !!!!", as disagreeable retiree Victor Meldrew commanded God in the 1990's sitcom "One Foot In The Grave".
The twins are bouncing around, full of excitement - they had shortly before come home from attending a party given by Cassion, one of their friends from their old school in Lower Chittering, and they're still wearing their party clothes and sporting well-brushed hair, buzzing with excitement from it all, which is nice.
Sarah says that Western Australia has just embarked on mandatory vaccinations for certain professions, including supermarket workers, restaurant staff, teachers, health professionals, anyone who deals with tourists etc - the state is lagging behind other states in terms of percentage of the population vaccinated: hence the drive to get better results, she says.
11:00 Time to say goodbye - sob sob!
12:00 It's chilly outside but we go for a late walk round the local football field. Junior soccer is on, and the blonde Polish girl is serving at the Whiskers Coffee Stand - Lois says that although she's nice and chatty, she doesn't give such good measure as the Asian girl. So it's "swings and roundabouts" haha!
despite the cold temperatures, junior soccer is in full swing as usual...
...and we have our drinks on the Buddy Bench: what it is to be old, eh? haha!
"How terribly strange to be 75" (copyright Paul Simon: adapted)
14:00 After lunch I go up to bed and meditate with my smartphone, but Lois has to send a email reply to Sylvia, her cousin in Melbourne.
Melbourne has allegedly just "come out of lockdown" after the world's longest ever COVID-19 lockdown. But Sylvia says it's only limited freedom.
"We can go to hairdressers or go out for a meal and I can go
and see my children. Kids aren't at school all the time and [granddaughter] Gabrielle hasn't even
gone back, as they are doing it by year level.
"We can't yet go to the gym, go clothes
shopping or even to the hardware store. [Sylvia's partner] Rod wants to see his sister who is 80kms
away but we can't do that either. [Sylvia's son] Reuben refuses to get vaccinated - I honestly
don't know what is wrong with his brain. He reads too much of these conspiracy
theory things and he says it's the mark of the beast, as here you can't work or go
to dinner or anything much without your vaccination certificate.
"We can't
travel. We have had both ours [vaccinations] and will go for the booster when it is time. They
say it will get worse in the colder weather. We have high case numbers, but not so
many in hospital or needing ICU which is good. Yesterday we had 2189 cases. We
still can't go to other states though. Its ridiculous: we are same country but
can't go to Perth or Adelaide - crazy!"
flashback to 2016: we spend a week in the Melbourne area
with Lois's cousin Sylvia
flashback to September 2018: we have a drink with Sylvia and Rod
in the garden of a local pub, "The Plough", in Prestbury, Cheltenham
15:30 Lois finishes her email and joins me in bed for a nap. I give her one of her twice-daily squirts of olive oil in her left ear. It's a chilly day but it's warm in the bed so we're tempted to stay there till 5 pm, and that's what we do haha! My god - we're so lazy these days!
17:00 An hour later than usual we settle down on the couch with a cup of Teapig Extra-Strong Earl Grey tea and half a snail-bun each.
I look at my smartphone. My sister Gill in Cambridge has "exploded" onto Facebook this week.
Gill's latest picture of herself on Facebook, having a coffee-and-cake
somewhere in central Cambridge
Gill has now become Facebook-friends with Lois and me, and with our "new" cousins David (1959) and Jonathan (1949), whom we only found out about a month or so ago, thanks to a DNA test.
(
David is an online journalist and a few years ago was working in the BBC Television Centre news-room. I didn't realised until recently that the BBC is the world's largest TV news-gathering organisation - my god!
And it's interesting for me to see online a couple of David's photos from that era, taken on the nightshift in the BBC's huge "news-room" - I didn't realise it would be so massive: you only ever see a little bit of it when you're watching one of their news programmes. My god (again) !!!!!
this second picture was taken during nightshift staff's private
mini-"Great British Bake-off" competition - yum yum!!!!
My god!
She is a real admirer of Agatha Christie, whose early novels, including "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" (1920), coined the phrase "scene of the crime", which didn't exist prior to that. The novel also talks about Belgian detective Poirot having a "crime-scene-examiner's kit" - something which didn't exist at the time in real life: not until 1924.
Agatha Christie: created a new vocabulary for forensics
Lois and I didn't know that the word "forensics" originally referred to "things in general that happen in court", but now it's used mainly to refer to the scientific and medical evidence, and Agatha Christie's works helped to popularise that new, more specialised meaning.
Fascinating stuff !!!!
21:00 We switch off the radio and watch a bit of TV, the last programme in Mary Beard's latest series of "Inside Culture": this last programme deals with the cultural relationship between the UK and Australia.
One of her guests is an aboriginal, which is fair enough, but we hear really too much in the programme about aboriginal culture, which isn't something that really impacts the UK, so it's a bit of a red herring. But I guess it's the sort of thing you have to throw into the mix these days, just to be politically correct, isn't it!!!!
The point is made, however, that aboriginal culture was, and is, a very "sustainable" one, and that that culture has a lot to teach the whole Anglosphere world about how to emulate that in these days of climate change etc etc.
Australians used to be taught that "our history began with Captain Cook", but there does seem to be more awareness, now, that their true history actually began about 40,000 years before that!
However, Lois and I very much enjoy tonight seeing the old clip of Aboriginal activist Burnum Burnum who travelled to England in 1988 and planted the aborigine flag at Dover, claiming the land for his people.
Shortly before I retired in 2006, a colleague introduced me to the output of the influential, and fearless, American news publication Onion News, which I had never heard about before. This colleague showed me a copy of a book he had, that was filled with the most ground-breaking stories in the publication's 200-year history, many of which had never appeared in mainstream media, due to political pressures and the like.
One Onion News story I have never forgotten was one that reported that an advance party of Zulu warriors had fought their way to England during the Anglo-Zulu wars of 1879. The detachment staged a daring raid on Buckingham Palace, capturing Queen Victoria and holding her to ransom.
Onion News alone had the courage to print the story, but it was kept out of the British press at the time, for fairly obvious reasons.
flashback to 1879: a detachment of Zulu warriors, who had broken
into Buckingham Palace during the Anglo-Zulu Wars,
capturing the Queen and holding her to ransom
(picture by kind permission of Onion News)
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!
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