08:00 Lois and I roll out of bed fairly early today with a long to-do list. One of Lois's responsibilities is to book visiting preachers for her sect's Sunday services and she has had little luck getting them to respond to her requests to commit to a particular Sunday.
The worst responders are all young men - young and vague, she calls them, like the notorious Brother Taylor, who's unquestionably the worst! Oh dear!
a typical young-and-vague young preacher,
in a world of his own, looking at his phone,
[n.b. the man pictured is not Bro. Taylor in case you know him haha!]
So that plan comes to nothing - damn !!!!
11:00 We manage to complete Item 2 on the to-do-list - to order UK schoolbooks to send to our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia. She and Francis are half-thinking of moving back to the UK next year.
Sarah and Francis don't think much of the educational standards in the local schools over there, and they're worried that their 8-year-old twins will struggle to adjust to UK schools if they do come back.
Jessie (left) and Lily, our 8-year-old twin granddaughters
in Perth, Australia
We succeed in ordering these workbooks and UK national curriculum guidelines today from so-called "Amazon Australia", which is just a front for "We'll get them from Amazon UK and pretend they're from us". But they still won't be delivered in most cases for at least 2 months - what a crazy world we live in !!!!
Lois and I think that the twins are both "bright cookies" and that they'll quickly adjust to standards over here, although we can understand Sarah and Francis's anxieties.
Jessie has even written a book - a short one, admittedly, but still it's a start, isn't it!
Jessie showcases part of the book she wrote in February-March this year
12:00 I get a text today from Gill, my sister in Cambridge, who's been talking to our "new" cousin David (b. 1959), the online journalist, who we only discovered about a month ago, as the result of a DNA test.
David lives in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, and he was originally a bit gobsmacked to find out that not only has he a brother or half-brother (Jonathan, b. 1949) but also about 30 cousins. He was adopted as a baby and never knew until recently who his "real" family were.
David is going to try and meet up with as many of these cousins as he can. So far he has met my sister Gill (b. 1958) in Cambridge, John (b. 1950) in Witney, and Kate (b.1947) and Jonathan (b. 1959) in Devon. Gill says he's hoping to meet Jeannette (b. 1937) and Liz (b.1939) next week in Beaconsfield, (Bucks), and Oxford respectively.
Our "new" cousin David (left) with his wife Zanne, and my sister Gill (b. 1958)
David (left) with John (b. 1950)
David (centre) with Jonathan (1958) and Kate (b. 1947)
16:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch for a cup of tea and a snail bun.
I look at my phone, and I see that our daughter Alison's husband, Ed, jetted off to Italy this morning for a conference in the Italian Lakes Region for legal specialists. He has put this selfie on social media today from when he was waiting for take-off at Gatwick Airport. Nice to see that he's all "masked-up"!
Ed waiting to fly to Italy
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, an interesting documentary about the life and career of singer Bing Crosby.
And "Holiday Inn" was just the right thing for the times, in 1942.
In the more serious side of his acting career, Bing made a couple of films in a row as the same Catholic priest, Father O'Malley: firstly in "Going My Way" (1944) and then in "The Bells of St Mary's" (1945). He won an Oscar for the first one, and was nominated for an Oscar for the second film, but the committee weren't falling for that one again, and he didn't win the actual award the second time around.
Poor Bing !!!!!!
Ironically, many Catholic countries banned the two films, because they didn't like to see a Catholic priest wearing a baseball hat in an attempt to "get down with the kids".
Poor Bing (again) !!!!
What madness !!!!!
And who knew that Bing was such a whiz at the technical side of recording music and sound? It started when he was with the US Army in Germany, where he was able to "liberate" some recording equipment that he said was way ahead of anything we had in the West.
It was Bing who persuaded CBS to let him include recorded segments in his long-running radio show. The network opposed this because they thought that recordings were poorer quality than live broadcasts, but he persuaded them otherwise. And the use of recordings allowed better syndication of his show at home and abroad, which also meant more money for him - makes sense!!! And later he was in the forefront of doing the same thing for video recordings and TV.
Also it's Bing we have to thank for the idea of the "laughter track", which came to be used for occasions when the studio audience either wasn't there, or else didn't understand the joke etc.
Well, what do you know !!!!!
Yes, Bing was never "short of a few bob", as we say in Britain, or "hard up for shillings" as they say in Denmark. But great wealth brings its own cares and worries. And during one recession, wasn't it Bing's great friend Bob Hope who revealed, in a candid interview, that Bing was "down to his last city" ?
I have a personal debt to pay to Bing, for his line "[she] got up and finished fourth" from the film "High Society" (1956), a sentence which I've put into my conversation many many times, although only when it was appropriate to do so - and I always send sixpence to Bing's estate every time I say it, so fair enough!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment