09:00 Not much of a morning - I do a bit more work preparing for mine and Lois's first ever meeting with a financial advisor: scheduled for next week on zoom.
I've realised I haven't got much of a clue about the state of our finances: there was a point a couple of years after Lois and I retired (16 years ago), when all our incomings and outgoings seemed to be chugging along happily, pretty much the same every month, and so I stopped checking on them. What madness!
two examples of typical financial advisors - health warning:
one is real, the other is a cartoon: can you tell the difference?
Now, with this "financial advisor" meeting on the horizon, I've got to "take back control" - and I thought it would help to print out a year's worth of bank incomings and outgoings, which I did, thinking I could easily sit in an armchair, and track e.g. how much we spend on food a year. This morning, trying to work through the print, I realise that it would, instead, be much easier to look at the statements on line, so that I could do a "search" through the document, and find e.g. all the supermarket charges.
But am I just putting off doing any real work? Perhaps - oh dear!
10:00 I put together a Hungarian vocabulary test for my long-standing friend, "Magyar" Mike, whom I've been studying Hungarian with for nearly 30 years: my god!
I try and make it an easy test, because poor Mike and his wife Mary are going through a rough time at the moment - Mary and he have recently lost Claire, their only child, who was only in her 50's. Her death happened at Christmas time of all times. And nobody expects in a million years that they are going to outlive their children.
The blessing is that Claire and her husband gave Mike and Mary two grandsons, now both established in their professions, and who have a really close relationship with Mary and Mike.
Charles and Claire's two sons, Adam and Stephen - picture taken in December 2021,
on Mike and Mary's last visit to see Claire before her death
It's an indicator of the quietness of mine and Lois's life under lockdown that we get incredibly excited today to see a massively tall crane on the local building site, where some incredibly ugly blocks of flats are being built, with the ludicrous name of "Spectre Hill Apartments". What lunatic came up with that name haha !!!!
I manoeuvre my phone to take a picture of us with
a massively tall crane appearing to come out of my cap.
But does the picture "work" as a serious piece of art?
Well, the jury's still out on that one, to put it mildly!
Lois buys 2 hot chocolates and a caramel flapjack
from the Polish girl.
The Polish girl tells Lois she hasn't had many customers today, and that she's freezing cold in her little booth. She's always pleased to see Lois and have a chat about this and that - apparently it's been snowing in Poland, so at least she's that much better off in England. We haven't really had any proper snow all winter. She and her (Polish) partner have settled down here happily, but her parents are still back in Poland.
14:00 We've declared another "self-indulgence afternoon" - a hot shower followed by a couple of hours in bed. As a result we stumble downstairs at 4:15 pm for a cup of tea and currant bun each feeling distinctly "woolly-headed". Damn !!!!
18:30 After dinner I look at my smartphone and I see that our "new" cousin, David, the retired BBC online journalist, has sent my sister Gill a picture of himself outside our grandma's house in Cowley, Oxford.
my "new" cousin David, outside our grandma's house
in Oxford earlier today, a house where also I and my siblings
lived in temporarily, in 1954, when our father was moving jobs
flashback to 1954: my parents, with my little brother Steve
and me in an Oxford park
David, who was adopted as a baby in 1959, and who had no idea, till a DNA test taken a few months ago, who his real family were, has been on a bit of a pilgrimage to meet some of his 30 cousins, including Gill and me. This hastily-scribbled family tree shows just part of David's enormous "new" family:
David has also been visiting places associated with his biological mother, mine and Gill's Aunty Joan, including the grave where both our mothers are buried, and now what was our grandma's house for decades, from the 1930's till her death in the 1950's.
flashback to last September: David, his wife Zanne, and their daughter
Rose, visit David's mother's grave, which is also my own mother's grave, in Oxford
my Aunty Joan's grave, to inspect the newly erected memorial stone:
Joan's name is highlighted in a circle bottom right
It's odd for me to realise that David's visit is, by coincidence, the 77th anniversary of my parent's marriage in Oxford in the closing months of World War II. And this photo was taken in the back garden of our grandmother's house after the ceremony at the local registry office:
flashback to March 8th 1945: mine and Gill's parents
pose for a photo in the back garden of our grandmother's
house after their wedding exactly 77 years ago today
listing for the Haydn programme, amongst a bunch of
programmes in honour of International Women's Day
Some might say it's a bit of a cheat to include Austrian composer Joseph Haydn in a series about "British Music", but there aren't many really top British composers, and Haydn visited England twice in the late 18th century and stayed in London for a couple of years each time, writing a lot of music during his stays here.
It's hard to believe now, but in the 1790's London was the richest, most modern and most exciting city in Europe: there was rampant modern capitalism, the burgeoning industrial revolution, a confident middle-class, a fair legal system, and a national constitution which, while not being perfect, to put it mildly, was one that most continental peoples would have died for - theoretically a monarchy, but where the actual power lay in a parliament where two parties, the Tories and the Whigs, competed for control of the country's government. What wasn't to like haha!!!!!
Britain was also the first country in the world to have a national anthem, "God Save the King", written in 1745, and Haydn was apparently inspired by this to write a kind of an Austrian one, later German also, but with a "proper" tune: "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" (God Save Franz the Emperor) in 1797.
It was the anthem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1804 to 1919, with the words, "Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze, Unsern Kaiser, Unsern Land" (God preserve, God protect, Our Kaiser, Our Land). Was there also a set of Hungarian words? I don't know, but I think we should be told!
And who knew that, in London, Haydn became a friend of the German-born British astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822), who's buried in Slough, Berkshire, of all places, the ultimate character-less mass of suburbia, the town that attracted poet John Betjeman's enmity in 1937, also becoming the setting for Ricky Gervais's sitcom "The Office" ?
John Betjeman's famous 1937 poem about Slough
Yes, Haydn and Herschel became good friends in England.
And who knew that astronomer Herschel also wrote music? And tonight, in Herschel's garden, where he used to observe the night sky, we hear one of his light-hearted songs, composed in 1781, 10 years before he met Haydn, all about the pleasures of eating ham.
the city of Bath, where Herschel "ran the local music scene"
In Bath, on the night of March 13th 1781, Herschel made his big discovery - the planet Uranus.
This was a big deal. During the whole of human history going back to the Ancient Greeks, everybody "knew" that there were just six planets: until Herschel went out in his back garden that dark night in Bath in 1781.
And when composer Joseph Haydn came to Britain in the 1790's, he very much wanted to meet Herschel. It's interesting also that Haydn was an astute business-man, and was particularly interested in what Herschel's telescope had cost, and how much money he was making out of being a telescope-maker - my god!
excerpt from Herschel's notebook recording his observations,
and his drawings, of the "new" planet Uranus
Herschel was also the first astronomer to realise that phenomena like the Orion Nebula, which is just about visible with the naked eye, were the sort of places where stars were being born.
The programme speculates as to whether Herschel's discoveries were in Haydn's mind when a few years later he wrote his famous "Creation" oratorio, 1797-8. Both Haydn and Herschel were religious, so to them these discoveries of Herschel's weren't challenging God or the established religion at all. It was like a "grander universe for God to have created, and for astronomers and musicians to play in", the programme speculates.
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
And finally.... as a postscript to the day:
a photo David took earlier today at a demonstration
by cyclists against a dangerous roundabout in Oxford
In David's photo there's a 4-storey brick building with colonnade on the right-hand side of the road - this is the building where Lois worked in the years leading up to our wedding in 1972. She was working for Ghislaine Maxwell's father, the Czech-born publishing magnate Robert Maxwell.
Our wedding in August 1972 saved Lois from having to go on a scheduled business trip to East Germany with Maxwell to take part in a book fair. These were the kind of trips during which female staff accompanying Maxwell were always advised to "keep their hotel-room doors securely locked", just in case of a surprise night visit from the burly mogul.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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