Lois and I have both had a disturbed night, after being overstimulated yesterday - oh dear! We must try and have a more boring time today, that's for sure! We've got a "sound machine" on our bedside table that makes the sound of waves breaking on a beach, which is a help towards inducing sleepiness: and we have really put it to work overnight - my god! It must be getting red hot with over-use haha!!!!
08:00 Lois and I are lying in bed thinking after all the excitement of yesterday and our first ever meeting with Cousin David and his wife Zanne, that we haven't got much to do today and we can afford to stay in bed a while longer. But then Lois remembers she's got an appointment with James, her hair stylist, at 9:30 am - damn !!!
Later in the day Lois showcases her new hair
I suppose it was predictable that Lynda would choose something Christmassy, but speaking personally I would have preferred something a bit racier - still, that's just me, isn't it!
I've got to do a carol written for the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Beckett, who was assassinated in Canterbury Cathedral in the year 1170 by 4 "knasty" knights, who stabbed him to death thinking that was what King Henry wanted them to do. What tropic madness !!!!
flashback to 1170 - an artist's impression of the scene in Canterbury
Cathedral during the assassination of Thomas a Beckett,
Archbishop of Canterbury
Poor Thomas !!!!
The problem for me is that every month our Middle English group is progressing steadily through the centuries, reading stuff that is less and less "Middle", and looking more and more "Modern", which means that it's basically getting too easy for us to make sense of. How can I tell Lynda this?
She's given us a set of carols by John Audelay. According to wikipedia he was born in 1417 at the latest, but died in 1426, so he could have been a baby or child when he composed them.
a photographer's impression of John Audelay (1417-1426)
as a baby, composing one of his famous carols
This (below) is the carol I'm supposed to put into Modern English, but I'm finding it's a bit on the easy side.
It's medieval madness, I tell you!!!
See what I mean - not much of a challenge is it haha!!!
I wish I could think of a new direction that our group could take. We're a good group that has really gelled together well, and we always have a lot of fun during our meetings. But how can we make the actual work more of a challenge? Answers on a postcard please!
11:00 We go for a walk over the local football field and stop for a hot drink at the Whiskers Coffee Stand. Monica, the Polish waitress, showcases her latest concoction for us to try out - we like being her guinea-pigs. Today it's hot chocolate with an orangey flavour.
Yum yum, we give her 5 stars!
Lois agrees to try Monica's latest offering at the Whiskers Coffee Stand
we try out Monica's latest surprise - hot chocolate
flavoured with orange - yum yum!!!!
14:00 After lunch we go up to bed for a nap and put the "wave machine" back on full blast. What madness!!!!
20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch to see an old episode of the 1990's sitcom "One Foot in the Grave", all about irascible retiree Victor Meldrew and his long-suffering wife Margaret.
In this episode Margaret is planning to send Victor out on an errand to the local fruit-and-vegetable shop to buy some ingredients for the casserole she'll be making. Victor, however, isn't keen to go, for fear of tangling with the sultry widow who owns the shop.
Evening falls and Victor is waiting for a bus to take him to Wembley Stadium to watch a football match. Millicent is driving by and offers to give him a lift, but her van is stopped by police, and poor Victor can't get to the stadium in time for the match.
As compensation Millicent offers to let Victor watch the match on her TV instead, and then when he's inside she invites him to go to bed with her.
Unfortunately I don't see the rest of this episode because I'm interrupted by a phone-call. I'll have to see what happens next when I watch the rest of the episode another night. Things look a bit more promising for Millicent at any rate !!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch an interesting retrospective on the Beach Boys, on the Sky Arts channel.
flashback to 1983: we fly to Denver to stay a couple of weeks with m cousin Susan:
(left to right) Sarah (6), Alison (8) and Lois (37)
The result was that when we moved back to England from the US in 1985, we came by sea.
We say goodbye to the US in a spectacular thunderstorm:
However, when our daughter Alison and family moved to Denmark in 2012, she managed to come to terms with her fears, and we flew to Denmark several times before Alison and family moved back to England in 2018. And Lois even managed to fly to Australia twice, in 2016 and 2018, to see our other daughter Sarah, who moved there with her family in 2015.
Somehow Lois did all that. And that's what I call courage - what a woman !!!!
The programme implies that when Brian Wilson started to lead the group away from being a surfing band into playing more wide-ranging styles of music, this caused a temporary dip in their popularity in the US, where they were associated very strongly with surf culture.
Whereas in the UK, where nobody had ever really understood what surf culture was all about in the first place, it didn't really affect the band's popularity with their fans over here, and even seemed to increase it. I don't know it this was true. But we've been told haha!
"Hello England!" - flashback to 1966: the Beach Boys arrive at
Heathrow Airport, London, to be welcomed by thousands of fans.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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