Saturday November 27th 2021

08:00 The day starts with the usual Saturday morning chaos - dealing with next week's grocery delivery from Budgens, the convenience store in the village, while getting ready to speak on zoom to Sarah, our younger daughter, who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins, Lily and Sarah.

As happens virtually every Saturday, the two events - the delivery and the zoom call - coincide: what madness !!!! Luckily, however, most of the groceries can wait an hour to be swabbed down with disinfectant, apart from the frozen fish. 

What a crazy world we live in!!!!

09:00 The zoom call begins. Sarah's twins are in delightful mood, although they're tired. None of the family is sleeping well at the moment because of the summer temperatures in Australia: up to the 90's F (30's C). It's ironic that this morning here it's snowing and sleeting, and the winds are in the 40's mph. 

What a crazy planet we live on !!!!!

the UK to Australia is a long way - 9000 miles or so.

Could this explain the differences in the weather patterns we see today?

We pick the laptop up and show the twins the snow falling on the houses and cars outside, and they're really delighted to see it - needless to say it doesn't snow in Perth.

We pick the laptop up and show the twins the snow falling on the houses and cars, and they're really delighted to see it - needless to say it doesn't snow in Perth.

Little Lily is turning into a bit of an artist. Here she showcases her latest sketch, that she's been working on during the zoom call. It's entitled "Photobooth output".

Flies are a real plague at the moment, reports Sarah. The house is just full of them - and the moment you open the front door, more of them arrive. Perhaps it's more pleasant living in England after all, Lois and I decide. We haven't seen a fly in our house for at least a month - as soon as the weather turns colder they go somewhere - we're not 100% sure where, but I wish we could be told haha!

11:00 Over the next 3 days, Lois and I have to get our house in order. On Tuesday morning my "new" cousin, David, the BBC online journalist, and his wife Zanne, will be visiting us for the first time.

I didn't know I had a cousin David until my sister Gill took a DNA test and sent the results into a big international database. David is the son of our unmarried aunt, Aunty Joan, who had David adopted soon after he was born. And he grew up not knowing who his "real" family were. It must have been a bit of a shock to him after the DNA results came back, to find out that he had about 30 cousins on his mother's side. 

Some of the younger cousins among those 30 or so, are shown on this chart: Babs and Joan were wins so he feels a particular connection with Babs's children, as well as with his brother Jonathan, who lives in Spain.

flashback to October: David and his wife Zanne visit my sister Gill (right)

Somehow, by Tuesday, I've got to get together all the information I've got that could be of interest to David: family trees, photographs of his mother Joan etc. A new one has emerged today showing Joan with her twin sister, Babs, in their early teens when they were camping near Oxford in the 1930's.

the twins Babs and Joan (or vice versa) front row.

Their mother Gladys (my grandmother) is middle row, left

Babs and Joan were still difficult to tell apart at this age. Apparently they used to have a lot of fun fooling boyfriends they were dating by "sending" them the wrong twin every so often. What tremendous fun it must have been - my god!

I suddenly remember something else I can show David on Tuesday morning - I'd forgotten that in 2007 I filmed my mother Hannah/Nan talking about the life she and her 8 siblings had when they were very young, growing up in Bridgend, South Wales. 

 I think all the 4 youngest children - herself, Ruth and the twins were very much a group distinct from the 5 older siblings: they were all girls and they did a lot together. They were still at school, of course, while the older ones were starting to take jobs.

flashback to the late 1920's: my maternal grandparents with the 4 youngest of

their 9 children: (left to right) Ruth, Joan and Babs (the twins), with Hannah (Nan) in front:

a sunny day at the beach near Bridgend, Glamorgan, Wales

I think, however, that I'll only show David a bit of that video "interview" with my mother - there's a danger of overloading him with info. Lois and I also want to talk more generally to him and Zanne and get to know them. So it's a bit of a balancing act. Difficult !

20:00 We watch some TV, an interesting documentary on the Sky Arts channel about artist David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Lois and I quite like Hockney's pictures of landscapes and trees in his native county of Yorkshire. And it's quite amusing that he did his large landscapes by splitting them into sections - he only had a small studio at the time, so he had to be able to get them through the door and on to his walls without having to bend them - so a neat solution, all in all - it's that Yorkshire "can do" attitude again!

Hockney "en plein air", painting one of his Yorkshire landscapes,

split into sections, so he could get them through the door of 

his studio without bending them, which was a good idea

In the first part of his career Hockney also did an Alpine landscape, a memento of a trip over the mountains in the back of somebody's van - he couldn't afford to get to Italy any other way, something which is often the case in youth. The result, however, was a slightly unusual "landscape" as he couldn't see much from the back of his friend's van, understandably enough.

Hockney's famous "Swiss Landscape", imagined from the back of a minivan

Later he took to doing portraits, but they're not of people that Lois and I recognise: perhaps some of them are Hockney's friends from his time in California - we're not really sure.

The downside of the portraits is that all his subjects are sitting in a chair looking at the artist, which can become a bit monotonous if you see too many of them on the same wall, to put it mildly. Lois and I find ourselves tonight trying to work out how many different chairs Hockney seems to have in his studio - it's at least two we think!

Hockney discussing some of his portraits on the wall behind him,

with Edith Devaney, Senior Curator at the Royal Academy

Chairs are a wonderful invention, and we feel that Hockney fully appreciates that, especially now, as he's getting on a bit.

There's even an office chair to be seen in his Rocky Mountain study, "Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians", which is a nice touch. Why doesn't one of the tired Indians sit down for a few minutes? And was the chair there for a purpose, or had it just been "dumped"? I think we should be told, and quickly! 

We do hope the Rockies haven't become a place for people or workplaces to dump unwanted furniture - that would be a pity.

Hockney's "Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians"

On a by-the-way note, there's one painting we see tonight that isn't specifically named, and Lois and I are not sure what it's supposed to be, unless it's a giant cheese platter. Answers on a postcard, please!

is this a painting of a giant cheese platter? We're not really sure.

Some help here, please !!!!

Stop press [oops - too late!]: after press time, Steve, our American brother-in-law, emails to say that he's identified the picture as "Grand Canyon" (1998) - this, I feel, tips the balance marginally against the theory that the picture's centrepiece is a giant cheese. But who knows? If you can get discarded office chairs in the Rockies, why not discarded hunks of cheese in the Grand Canyon? It makes sense to me, at least!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!