Today's big question is "Will my sister Gill, my sole surviving sibling, decide to visit us on Sunday, together with her daughter Lucy?" - Gill is going to make a final decision today.
flashback to 1960: me, aged 14, in my school uniform, with my little sister Gill,
aged 2, in the back garden of our parents' house in Bristol
...and on the beach at Weston-super-mare,
If the answer is yes, Lois and I will have to get the house in shape - (1) we'll need to banish the clutter from the living-room and dump it somewhere else, and (2) we'll have to turn our so-called office-dining-room into more of a dining-room than an office: at the moment it's 75% office with about 8 square feet of the table still available for Lois and me to grab a scratch meal on haha.
Whereas if Gill and Lucy dine with us - incidentally the first people to dine with us here since the pandemic started - yikes!!!! - then we'll have to create more of an atmosphere of "fine dining" haha!!!!
See? Simples !!!!!
this is our so-called "dining-room" as it looks this evening
at 6 pm - not so much a dining-room, more a 2-person office for Lois and me.
Only 8 sq.ft. are reserved for potentially "fine dining" space. What madness !!!!!
The last time I saw Gill, now my only surviving sibling, was in Oxford in November 2019, just before the pandemic hit. And the last time we saw her with her daughter Lucy was in Great Haseley, a quiet Oxfordshire village, in February 2018, almost exactly 4 years ago.
How time flies !!!!!!
flashback to November 2019: Lois and I meet with Gill in
an Oxford restaurant
flashback to February 2018: we meet with my sister Gill and her daughter Lucy
in a pub in the village of Great Haseley, Oxfordshire.
Why Great Haseley? Well, Lois used to live there when she was a toddler. See? Simples !!!!
flashback to 1948: Lois, aged 2, sitting on a bale of hay
near the village of Great Haseley, Oxfordshire
11:00 While we wait for Gill's decision, we go for our walk round the local football field.
Lois and I go for a walk on the local football field
we treat ourselves to a coffee and a yoghurt flapjack
from the blonde Polish girl at the Whiskers Coffee Stand
It's hardly a secret that Lois and I are both quite old - we're in the old codger, old crow class these days, even though we don't feel any different mentally from when we were about 20. But we find we often attract the attention of other old codgers and crows also going for a stroll on the field.
Today is no exception, and of course a lot of the old codgers and crows that we meet have grandchildren that they want to talk about. And it's amazing how many old codgers have family in Australia, which is always the start of a conversation, because we have a daughter, son-in-law and twin granddaughters in Perth. My god!
Today we meet two sisters, who both turn out to have connections with "Oz".
we meet two sisters - seen here buying their drinks and eats
at the Whiskers Stand
One of the sisters has a daughter in Melbourne, that she's going to be visiting in the next couple of weeks.
And the other sister starts to tell us about a drive she and her husband took down the Queensland coast a couple of years ago, starting form Cairns right at the top and going down to Sydney, followed by a flight over to New Zealand - my god! The trip was originally planned by her 80-year old father, who went with them and insisted on doing the driving on alternate days.
What madness - at 80 years of age!!!! My god !!!!!!
Still that's the kind of thing that happens when you're an old codger or an old crow. Other old codgers and crows make a bee-line for you, and then "talk the hind leg off a donkey", no doubt about that!!!!!
14:00 This afternoon is one of our so-called "self-indulgence" afternoons, when we take a shower and then have a nap in bed before staggering downstairs feeling a bit woolly headed around 5 pm.
The good news is, however, that Gill and Lucy still plan to visit on Sunday, which will be great.
17:00 We listen to the news. What an idiot Sadiq Khan is, the Mayor of London! He wanted to "look tough" so he bullied the hard-working head of London's Metropolitan Police Force, Cressida Dick, with the result that she decided to resign, and guess what. Nobody else wants to do the job. What a buffoon that man is!
And what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
20:00 We watch today's programme in Michael Portillo's new series, "Great Coastal Railway Journeys".
Tonight Michael concludes his 5 days of travelling along England's north-east coast.
In the small town of Berwick-on-Tweed near the Scottish border, Michael has an interesting discussion on the accents to be heard in the north-east: an area which consists basically of just two counties - Northumberland and Durham.
It's said that pronunciation varies more in Britain than in any other English-speaking country. And Michael says he finds it amazing that it can change so much across such short distances, and that the differences have survived the advent of mass media.
To explore the accents of the North-East, Michael meets actress Sophie Catleugh, who grew up in the region.
Sophie says you can hear a mass of different accents just in these 2 counties. There are, for instance, (1) the "Mackems" (Sunderland and Wearside), (2) the Geordies (Newcastle and Tyneside), (3) the "Smoggies" (Middlesborough), (4) the "Pit-yackers" (County Durham), quite apart from people of the country areas of Northumberland, who have their own accent again, but who don't have their own special name. My god !!!!!
And poor Northumberland-country-people, who don't have a special name !!!!!!
Michael asks Sophie what her own accent is, and apparently she's classed as a so-called "Pitmatic".
Sophie was born a "Pit-yacker" from a mining village in County Durham, but her speech has been modified by time spent outside the area at university or in her acting profession, and so she's now a so-called "Pitmatic". What madness!
The speech of people from he north-east is probably the most impenetrable of all for people who speak southern or standard English, although we're exposed to a lot of it on TV these days, that's for sure. And it's probably the most difficult for people from other countries in the Anglosphere.
In Australia, they're generally fairly familiar with the north-east accents because of all the tremendous amount of British TV shows that they see on their screens over there, e.g. shows like "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet", but mostly it's harder for people from the north-east to achieve really big international fame.
Lois and I are trying to think of any north-east people that have become truly international stars, and the nearest we can get to is Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals pop group from the 1960's, who achieved some international fame for a time. I think I once read that model Cheryl Cole was tried out as a judge on the US version of the X Factor, but she didn't last long, because viewers hadn't got a clue what she was saying!
north-east model Cheryl Cole on the US version of "X Factor"
My god! What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
Talking of accents, today is my first day without my one daily tablet of paracetamol. I remember an old joke or riddle "Why are there no pain-killers in the jungle?" which has the reply, "Paracetamol !", because for many British accents this sounds the same as "Parrots ate 'm all".
But today Steve, my American brother-in-law, told me that in the States paracetamol is apparently called "acetaphinomen" . Can anybody think of a joke with that as the punch-line? Don't all speak at once!!!
Answers on a postcard please haha !!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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