09:30 Our weekly zoom call with our daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie. The call is delayed a bit from its usual 9 am slot, because Sarah and the girls have been at a Christmas singalong concert at Perth's RAC Arena, with the lyrics all displayed on screens. And RAC is an Australian phone company.
As soon as the zoom call starts, however, we can see that the girls are really really tired - it'll be easy to put them to bed tonight, that's for sure! The concert at the RAC Arena was quite exciting for them, coming on top of a morning playing with their neighbourhood friends Samara and her little sister.
the choir performing at today's Christmas concert
Presented by West
Australian Symphony Orchestra with the support of Lotterywest and City of
Perth, this free end of year concert for everyone features a magnificent
combination of sing-along Christmas hits and dazzling special effects.
Your State Orchestra and special guests will
perform a much-loved program of Christmas classics. Families can sing-along to
Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Here
Comes Santa Claus while also enjoying favourites from Frozen and The Nutcracker.
This magical production features more than 130
West Australian performers on stage including the Orchestra and WASO Chorus led
by conductor Peter Moore. They are joined by an all star cast of singers
including Amy Manford, Genevieve McCarthy and Paul O’Neill with the one and
only, Santa.
With the twins exhausted, we talk mainly with Sarah and Francis. Francis is a bit annoyed that the Western Australian tough policy on keeping the state borders closed means that the England cricket team will not be visiting Perth to play one of this tour's test matches.
The first test in the series has now been played and resulting in a humiliating defeat for the England team. Francis has been on the receiving end of "banter" about the wretched England performance from the twins' new school principal - oh dear, poor Francis!
Anglo-Australian rivalry on the cricket field must be one of the most intense sporting rivalries in the entire world, dating back to the 19th century, when England and Australia were pretty much the only countries in the world that played cricket. It's a rivalry that gives immense pleasure to the fans of both sides, that's for sure!
The first ever defeat of the England cricket team by Australia on English soil, in 1882, sent shock waves through the English cricket world, much like when the England soccer team was defeated by Hungary at Wembley in 1953, by a margin of 6 goals to 3, which sent shock waves through the English soccer world.
What a madness it all is !!!!!
But back to the zoom call with Sarah and Francis.....
One of the Western Australia State Government's quarantine hotels is a local resort at Joondalup, which Lois and visited in 2018 during our last visit. We were planning to visit the family again in 2020, but that trip was a casualty of the pandemic, unfortunately.
flashback to 2018: Lois and I visit the golf club at Joondalup Resort,
now the State Government's quarantine centre for visitors from other states
- my god, they're tough in WA, but it's paid off, that's for sure !!!!!
It's still hot over there, with the temperature reaching 104F/ 40C one day last week. The flies are starting to get fed up with the heat as well and there don't seem to be as many coming into the house any more, which must be a relief.
Francis is a keen golfer, and he said he's noticed, when playing golf at the club at Bullsbrook, that the cows in the next-door field tend to stand in long lines, so that the tail of one cow can flick around, and keep the flies off the face of the cow behind, as well as keeping them off her own backside, which we think is really smart. Whoever said that cows were stupid haha!
The twins pop in from time to time during the call, with bits and pieces of news. Jessie tells us that Santa sent them an "Elf on the Shelf", this week, with his official accreditation and adoption papers: it seems to be the same idea as the Danish nisse dolls, that keep an eye on children's behaviour in the run-up to Christmas, to report back on any naughtiness, which is a smart idea!
14:00 A nice morning but Lois and I waste the afternoon away with our twice-daily shower, postponed from Friday afternoon, followed by a prolonged nap in bed - oh dear, how lazy we have become!
Still you're only old once, aren't you haha!!!
20:00 We watch a film on the Film4 channel, all about poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).
An amusing and entertaining film, with plenty of passion. We see dozens of long kisses between Emily and her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, the love of her life from childhood days to the end - the kissing starts the minute that the 2 women find themselves alone together: my god!
And Susan marries Emily's brother Austin specifically so that the two women can live next door to each other and spend hours together without arousing suspicion, which is smart.
just 2 of the many kissing sequences in the film between Emily and Susan,
starting from their adolescence - my god!
However it's the grunting of Emily's brother Austin downstairs on the hearth rug with his then current squeeze, Emily's anthologiser Mabel Todd, that persuades the censor to give it a PG13 rating, "for sexual content".
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Mabel Todd asks Emily's brother Austin for
her "after dinner treat", while Emily tries to sleep upstairs
The film is based on the modern view of Emily - the idea that most of Emily's poems were actually written to Susan, although this fact was later concealed in Mabel Todd's revision of Emily's work - and we see Mabel in a curious sequence, painstakingly erasing all occurrences of Susan's name. My god (again) !
The modern view of Dickinson also reveals the untruth of the old view that Emily had no interest in being published before her death - "Posthumous is good enough for me", was the idea. Quite false, it seems. She made numerous attempts to get magazines to publish her poems, without much success: only 11 out of her 1800 poems were published in her lifetime.
If Lois and I were to criticise the film, we'd just say that you don't get much idea about Emily's poems, although you hear scraps of her verse quite frequently, and see them in the original manuscript form floating briefly across the screen. But there just isn't enough time to really take them in and digest them. On the other hand, I suppose you could say that you'd expect to go somewhere else to do that - this is a kind of biopic, after all, not an English Literature lecture, so fair enough, perhaps!
Susan Ziegler as Susan (left) with Molly Shannon as Emily (right)
one of the many poems that Emily wrote about Susan
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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