Danskcolin: Sunday October 10th 2021

08:00 A text comes in from Alison, our elder daughter, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children: Josie (15), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11). Lois and I had talked about going to stay with them during the school half-term later in the month.

flashback to Lois's birthday in June: (left to right) Alison, Ed,

Rosalind, Josie, Lois, and Isaac on the terrace at their house in Headley

Now Ali is saying they could come to us, instead. I guess this would be without Ed, because he probably has to work - he's a legal consultant for some railway companies, and mostly works from home, but he spends some days up in London: he takes his bike up on the train and cycles to the office from the station. Simples!

one of the routes that Ali and the children could take

on this 100-mile journey

That'll be so nice, but we'll have to get our house in better shape, that's for sure. We don't get visitors, pretty much. No visitors have stayed in our house since way before the pandemic hit in spring 2020, and we've kind of let the cleaning etc slip a bit, to put it mildly.

All I can say is - YIKES !!!!!

Still it'll be good for us - a kick up the backside is what we need, that's for sure!!!

At least we are hardly likely to have to cope with any poisonous snakes during their visit.

Yesterday our other daughter, Sarah, who lives in Perth, Western Australia with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie told us about a nasty snake that's native to the state, the dugite, which we'd never heard of before. It was spotted during one of Francis's rounds of golf with his golfing buddies.

The Aborigines call it the "dobitj", which sounds to me like they're trying to say "Yes, it DO bite", but I might be wrong there - I'm not an expert in aboriginal languages, to put it mildly.

Lois and I have never heard of a dugite, so we look it up on the web.

Yes, I think I've chosen the right word, yes, it's.....YIKES!!!!

10:00 I look at my smartphone, and I see an interesting email from my Hungarian pen-friend Tünde, all about an article on the index.hu website. It's all about Prince Charles's recent speech at the Hungarian Embassy in London, celebrating 100 years of diplomatic relations.

He also sends a greeting in Hungarian to the Hungarian President and people, which is nice.

Charles pointed out that the UK has the largest Hungarian-born expatriate community in the world outside of Hungary. And I'm old enough to remember the news of the large numbers of Hungarian refugees arriving in Britain in 1956 after the failed Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union, when Lois and I were 9 years old.

So it was another Orbán who toppled Stalin's statue, but a good one this time haha!

The Hungarian journalist reporting the Prince's speech mentions the fact that Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations were established after the Treaty of Trianon was signed in Paris at the end of World Wat I. As Tünde points out, this reference will have left a nasty taste in the mouths of many Hungarian readers - many Hungarians have never forgiven the victorious allies for cutting the size of Hungary by 75% in the treaty.

Oops !!!!

10:45 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in the first of her sect's 2 worship services today on zoom.

I go out into the back garden to wind up the garden hose round its reel in the shed, and other routine jobs to help tidy up for winter, now that the vegetable and fruit growing season is approaching its end. However the end isn't approaching quite as nearly as I thought, as I discover when I monitor Lois's raised vegetable beds. My god - she's got plenty of vegetables still going strong, no doubt about that. It's a forest !!!!

I go out into the back garden to tidy up a bit, and I find

that Lois's raised beds are still bulging - my god!!!!

Later Lois even finds some extra raspberries - we'd given up on those, but we've had a bit more warmer weather in the last week, and she was able to get half an ice-cream tub of bonus raspberries as well. My god (again) !!!!!

Spoiler alert: These elements will make up our dessert tonight- yum yum!

another half-tub of late raspberries - yum yum!

18:30 Time for dinner: roast lamb, roast potatoes and roast home-grown vegetables, with mint sauce.

20:00 We watch the first half of the massive (90 minute - yikes!) Michael Caine documentary on Channel 5.

As is well-known, film-star Michael Caine is the spiritual leader of Britain's thousands of "nosy neighbours".

So tonight Lois and I are hoping to pick up some helpful tips on how to keep a watch on our deceptively mild-mannered neighbours' superficially mundane activities from this programme, but it unfortunately it seems to concentrate mainly on Caine's life and career: we're not sure why!

And we don't hear, even once, Caine's famous catchphrase "My name is.... Michael Caine.... and I am..... a nosy neighbour", which is a pity.

We do see some action clips of him looking through his bedroom curtains, however, from the Ipcress series and from "Harry Brown". The main thing we take from these clips is that Caine also deems it advisable to have a gun in his hand, which we think perhaps would be taking the hobby a bit too far, particularly in the Prestbury area. But we'll bear it in mind!

And who knew that Caine fell head-over-heels in love with that "Brazilian" woman in the Maxwell House coffee commercials? He got so infatuated just by seeing the woman in the commercial that he was planning to fly out to Brazil to meet her, until he found out that she lived in the Fulham Road, London.

And the rest, as they say, is history.