Just another manic Saturday - Lois and I have to roll out of our bed and get ready for 2 early food deliveries, plus a zoom call with Sarah, our daughter who lives in the suburb of Tapping in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie. We've been retired for 15 years, and we still get very few days to sleep in - what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
09:00 We are ready with a cup of tea each in front of the laptop, but Sarah doesn't come through till 09:30-ish. She had fallen asleep on her bed - it's 5 pm over there local time. She had taken the twins out to spend time at playgrounds and swimming pools with their little friends Samara and Gianna, and with the two girls' father, and she was feeling so tired afterwards that she fell asleep - what madness !!!!! Poor Sarah !!!!!
we chat on zoom with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia
It's nice to see her and the twins and chat with them - Jessie is recovering from chicken-pox, just a mild case of it, because they vaccinate children against it in Australia for some reason. Sarah thinks that Jessie will be back at school on Monday, which is good news.
Jessie first, and then Lily play the opening bars of "When The Saints Go Marching In" for us on their little keyboard - they've learnt some of the chords as well, which is nice.
Tomorrow the whole family are going to go down to the Nedlands Yacht Club on the Swan River, and Francis will try to find somebody at the club to give them a little coaching on how to sail. They bought a 20 ft boat about a couple of months ago, but both Sarah and Francis are inexperienced sailors, and they feel they need a guiding hand the first couple of times they go out on the river for serious.
a possible route the family could take for the 24 mile
journey down to Nedlands Yacht Club on the Swan River
flashback to last month: Francis takes the twins down to the
Swan River to launch their 20 ft boat, the Rioja
11:00 Lois and I feel really tired after getting ready for Sarah's call and for the two food deliveries, not to mention swabbing all the food items down with disinfectant - which we still do religiously. What a crazy world we live in!
We nevertheless struggle out of the house to do the walk round the local football field, and it's a bit of a tonic to see the field humming with activity: three junior soccer matches are in progress, which is nice. Temperature-wise it's a bit raw, to put it mildly - I guess this is the start of some really wintry weather, so it's nice to get the warm cups of coffee from the Whiskers Stand, plus a raspberry flapjack.
it's a tonic to see the local football field pulsating with activity -
three separate junior soccer matches are in full swing, which is nice
brrr! - but we warm up with a cup of coffee
13:00 After lunch it's upstairs to bed for a quick nap and then downstairs for an important sign of the coming Christmas season - Lois wants to watch her first Christmas TV-film of the season on Channel 5, "Christmas in Montana". And I suspect it won't be the last one she watches this year - she likes to do this kind of thing in the late afternoon, as the shadows descend, so fair enough!
Against all expectations and despite early clues to the contrary the male and the female lead finish the film by hooking up - who would have predicted that haha!!!
16:00 We realise we haven't used the car for 7 days, when we drove it down to the County Fire Station to get our booster COVID jab and general winter flu jab.
So, worried about the health of the car's battery, we go "for a spin" this afternoon to Joyce Arnold's fruit and veg shop at Bishops Cleeve and back. And yes, some of the shops and some of the houses have their Christmas lights, which is nice.
our journey to Joyce Arnold's fruit'n'veg shop: we select the 3-mile option on
the outward journey and an approximation to the 3.6 mile route
on the return "leg", in case you're interested haha!
20:00 We watch an interesting collection of colourised films of Victorian Britain from the end of the 19th century.
It's quite moving to see these films and realise that people living in the 1890's were actually real people, just like you and me - a realisation you don't get quite so strongly from black-and-white.
For Lois and me personally the most moving pictures we see tonight are from the Boer War in South Africa.
By a strange coincidence we both had great-uncles who were involved in the siege of Ladysmith by the Boers in 1899-1900. My great-uncle Willy was a journalist trapped in the town, and Lois's great-uncle Mark was in the British forces that came to relieve the town - who would have thought it, eh? And when we see the British soldiers marching along, it's weird to think that Lois's Great Uncle Mark could have been one of the men we see.
These were the first ever moving pictures from a war zone, at least as far as the UK was concerned, and especially people in Britain who had relatives serving out there would have been amazed to watch them, we feel sure.
But there are lots of other interesting bits of film that we see tonight.
a street crowd, excited to be "on camera" for the first and
probably the only time in their lives
families on their annual seaside holiday
a man manhandling/cat-handling a reluctant cat
families boarding a liner to the US to start their new lives overseas
crowds watching Queen Victoria's 6-mile long
Diamond Jubilee procession in London
the launching of HMS Albion at the River Thames
an early porn film of a woman stripping
an early erotic film of a couple in a railway carriage
snogging their way through a tunnel under the Pennines
passengers on a day's outing by train
schoolchildren
an early commercial film for Vinolia Soap
Edward VII (right, on horseback) at the funeral of his mother, Queen Victoria
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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