Friday January 21st 2022

Not a satisfactory day.

08:00 Lois and I wake up. And oh dear, almost at once I realise we've made a big mistake this week - it would sound like a small thing to most people, but not to us. The normal highlight of our week is Friday afternoon when we have the second of our weekly showers followed by a nap in bed, not allowing  ourselves to get up till 5 pm  - it's like an island of calm in the middle of a crazy world. 

an oasis of calm - a typical couple taking a nap

Well, too late to do anything about it now, that's for sure. But damn damn damn !!!!!

Friday afternoon is the one time of the week where we prioritise ourselves. [That's not what I've heard! - Ed]. People don't realise that this is quite a modern attitude - I think it all started a couple of years ago with the game-changing Hewitt Lord Advisers report, as highlighted in Onion News at the time.

ASHEVILLE, NC—In a lengthy report laying out recommendations it described as absolutely essential to its client’s future success, consulting firm Hewitt Lord Advisors suggested Tuesday that a business keep the consulting firm on for six more months.

“After reviewing the numbers, we can say with confidence that retaining the services of Hewitt Lord Advisors should be your top priority for the next two quarters,” the report from Hewitt Lord Advisors read in part, adding that the consulting firm furthermore recommended the business double the amount it was currently paying the consulting firm in order to optimize results going forward.

 “While our projections for your firm remain optimistic, they are dependent on your continuing to compensate us through December, at least.”

Wow! And that report got a lot of people thinking, not just us, I'll bet !!!!

11:00 Lois goes off for her daily walk on the local football field. She wants to monitor progress being made by the Parish in creating its first ever "sensory garden", but disappointingly there's been no action at all since yesterday. 

But oh dear, what does she find? Disappointment at every turn, that's for sure !!!!!

Has there been any progress with creating

the Parish's much-vaunted "sensory garden"?

Lois's look says it all, I think!!!!

Oh dear! The shiny-new raised beds are still in place, she reports later, but there's still nothing in them. We're guessing the Parish is waiting for a supplier to supply something vital or other, but we don't really know. The red-and-white bags of "Postfix" are still there too - whatever they're for - and a couple of buckets of water also there waiting for something undefined. However presumably there must be some other missing ingredient that's holding up progress, but we don't know what that is, and there's nobody for Lois to ask.

flashback to yesterday: we inspect the Parish Council's progress

with installing a sensory garden near the local football field

- but today Lois finds that they're no further forward: what madness!!!!

12:00 Has the whole world stopped? That's how it feels today with this grand local sensory garden initiative that seems to be going nowhere. 

But I think it's always been like that with the world's major building projects, to be fair!

flashback to 2000 BC: a bunch of Egyptians and tourists turn up and shake their fists

in disappointment at the lack of progress on the part of the contractors

who are building the government's latest monument

14:00 It's turning into that sort of day, I can tell. The curious calm of a pandemic day with nothing much going on - there are lots of things we might enjoy doing that we can't, but those are cancelled out by a lot of tiresome things that we can't do either! So it's "swings and roundabouts".

It's not that bad, though, is it, on balance. Go on, admit it, it could be worse - haha!

15:30 Sainsbury's delivers our order. They are anxious to avoid the use of plastic bags, so the poor delivery guy has to put his two crates down in front of our door, and then stand around waiting while we transfer all the items, one by one, into our own plastic bags.

What madness !!!

16:00 We sit on the sofa with cups of Earl Grey tea and a piece of Christmas cake (me) and a currant bun (Lois), and we listen to the radio, this week's edition of "Last Word". We try to catch this programme every Friday to see if anybody has died this week or not.

Elizabeth Selby has died, sadly, aged 96, who, with her husband, ran one of Britain's most successful photographic agencies, supplying pictures to newspapers and magazines around the world.

I often think of Elizabeth, whenever Lois and I decide to go to bed early. She and her husband opted to go to bed early one night in 1940 during the Blitz - and their upstairs was so full of boxes and boxes of photographs that the combined mountains of clutter effectively shielded the couple from harm when a German bomb hit the house. My god! 

I have to say, that's never happened to Lois and me: our house has never been bombed by a foreign air force while we've been enjoying an "early night" - not yet, at least! But who knows!!!!

Elizabeth's agency was responsible for hundreds of iconic news photos, which they telegraphed round the world, including the one of Prince Charles meeting up with Camilla at a polo match - the picture which first broke the news of their affair.

She was also responsible for the first pictures of actress and film-star Liz Hurley's safety-pin dress.

Liz Hurley's "safety-pin dress"

What a woman! And she had quite a life.

She was a Hungarian Jew, living in Berlin in the 1920's, but luckily her family decided to escape when they saw the Nazis gaining support. They fled first to Switzerland, where they were granted entry after bribing border guards, followed by time in France, Spain and Italy before they finally ended up in London.

What lives people used to lead in those crazy, far-off days!!!!

Elizabeth Selby, who has died aged 96

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the first part of a new celebrity travelogues series featuring British actor Martin Clunes visiting the islands of the Pacific. Clunes is apparently famous around the world because of his role as the irascible, obsessive-compulsive doctor, Martin Ellingham, in "Doc Martin".

I wasn't very keen to watch this programme beforehand, but it turns out to be absolutely fascinating. 

We start with a visit to the former Anglo-French colony of New Hebrides, now the independent country of Vanuatu, where on a remote island the natives still famously worship Prince Philip as a god.

As a visitor's gift, Clunes brings the chief a live chicken and a ton of rice, which the chief is happy with, and this smooths the way to the chief agreeing to explain the origin of the local religion.

On arrival in the village, Clunes presents the chief with 

a live chicken and a ton of rice

The chief explains that their mountain god had a son, and that, during World War II, this son travelled west to marry the chief's daughter in Britain. They believe that mountain god's son was Prince Philip, and that when he married Princess Elizabeth in London in 1947, it was more than just a royal wedding, it was also the long-awaited fulfilment of an ancient prophecy,

"The son of the Mountain God had found his great and powerful wife", the chief adds. Well, fair enough!

For decades this village had to be content with worshipping Prince Philip from afar, but in 2007, Chief Albi and 4 other elders got the chance to travel to Britain where they finally met their god face-to-face.

the souvenir photo that the Chief still keeps, as a memento

of his visit to Britain with the other 4 elders

How heart-warming !!!!

This island still has a mainly barter-economy, but for certain things the price is set in pigs. If you want to marry a woman, for instance, you have to buy her off her father for the number of pigs the father sets her price at.

Tonight we travel to other islands besides Vanuatu. 

Who knew that Tonga is the only Pacific island is this area never to have been colonised by the European powers? They have their own well-established royal family with a bunch of royal tombs on the island stretching back over 1000 years. But I think it must have been a British protectorate, or something of the sort, because they have definitely always been part of the British Commonwealth.

This reminds Lois and me that when we were both about 7 years old, we saw Queen Salote of Tonga arrive for the Queen's coronation in 1953. I remember watching it all on our family's 9 inch TV set, converted to 12 inch by a magnifier - we were the only house in the street with a TV, so we had invited all the neighbours in. I was 7 and my little sister Kathy was 5.

me and my little sister Kathy in 1953

How could I have forgotten that?  Queen Salote made quite a spectacle in the procession, and got a lot of attention, that's for sure. My god!

If you wanted to prove to your neighbours that you had money, the key was to get really fat. The last king weighed 32 st 13 lbs (461 lbs or 209 kg) - my god! And in recent times, the obesity problem on the island has been made even worse by the introduction of Western junk food - yikes !!!!!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

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