Easter Monday - it's a public holiday here, and also in Australia. We're expecting to do another zoom call with our daughter Sarah in Perth at 9:30 am UK time (4:30 pm WA time), but Sarah says she and Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica are still on an outing to the beach at Hillary's Harbour, and they ask if they can do the call later.
flashback to 2018: Lois and I visit Hillary's Harbour with Sarah and the twins:
(left to right) Lily, Sarah, Jessica, Lois, and me (shadow only haha!)
The zoom postponement is okay by us, but it means we're more or less tied to the house till they call us, so we decide to postpone our usual Monday walk till tomorrow. This is just as well, as it turns out, because Sarah doesn't call us till 1:45 pm, after she's given the twins their tea.
10:00 To fill the morning, Lois decides to get going with this year's vegetable crop, planting seeds in various of her 6 raised beds.
I really envy Lois having a hobby that's actually useful - it helps to feed us through the year. Why can't I have a useful hobby like that? Why do I spend my time learning Old Norse, and similar eccentricities? What's wrong with me haha !!!!!
I'm as bad as Sheldon in Big Bang Theory with his Finnish - yikes!
At least Lois needs me to do some of the donkey-work, getting out the garden hose and uncoiling it, lugging the incredibly heavy bags of compost down to the raised beds and that sort of thing. My god!
I wheel the 2 heavy bags of compost down to the raised beds
so that Lois can use them...
...I uncoil the garden hose, and "wake it up", getting rid of the kinks etc,
after its winter hibernation: note the temporarily discarded "old man's" slippers!
...and I fill our two giant water-butts from the outside water tap.
Gosh, thirsty work haha!
16:00 We relax with an Easter left-over hot cross bun each and a cup of tea. Lois reads me out selected articles from her copy of "The Week", which gives a digest of last week's news, from home and abroad.
She points out another advert for a so-called "Colin Cake" - which is the normal current shorthand for "Colin the Caterpillar" cake. How the idea has taken off, with all the major supermarkets jumping on the bandwagon - my god!
Will people still be talking about Colin Cakes centuries from now? Will it be further shorthanded to just "Colin", as in "Would you like a slice of Colin?" I don't know, but I think perhaps I should be told - before it's too late haha!
An email has come in from Steve, our American brother-in-law. Yesterday we watched an old episode of the 1970's sitcom "Butterflies", in which the main character, bored housewife Ria, gets a shock when she floats round a local churchyard and sees a scary epitaph on a gravestone.
Steve says that the verse, repeated on dozens of gravestones in the UK and in the US, goes back, with minor variations, at least as far back as the epitaph inscribed on the tomb, in Canterbury, of Edward the Black Prince (1330-1376), who died before he could succeed to the throne. My god!
Lois likes any mention of the Black Prince - not that she thinks a lot of the prince himself, but because she admires his wife. Usually in those days Norman nobles like Edward would marry a woman who could be useful to them dynastically, but Edward married a woman he was actually in love with, which was nice.
But what a woman !!!!!
"Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be.
Prepare thyself to follow me."
flashback to yesterday: Lois and I watch an old episode
of the 1970's sitcom "Butterflies", starring Wendy Craig as bored housewife Ria
The epitaph begins..
The woman that Norman French noble Edward fell for, and married, was 100% English - and her name was Joan of Kent. She was reputed to be England's most beautiful woman, and feisty with it - my god! She was first married at age 13, and later she took up bigamy: one man wasn't enough for her, evidently. However she gave bigamy up eventually, when her second marriage was annulled. Did she take up vegetable growing as a substitute hobby? The answer is, sadly, that we may never know, although to be completely honest, it does seem unlikely.
Joan of Kent, beautiful and feisty with it
Edward died before he could ascend to the throne, but Edward's and Joan's son eventually became Richard II, and the rest is history (and the previous stuff is as well, by the way).
But what a woman !!!!!
16:30 Classic FM's Easter "Hall of Fame" chart countdown is blasting our on the radio all day. Has the chart been "nobbled" again by some minority pressure group with a commercial interest or with some other insane axe to grind?
I know that Lois is suspicious - the chart's highest climber since last year's chart has been registered by the film music for "To Kill a Mocking Bird", which Lois thinks is "wholly unremarkable". Apparently this year it's up 156 places to no. 48 on the countdown.
What madness !!!!
Has the record company paid lots of the station's listeners to vote for it, we wonder. I think we should be told - and quickly!
the "unremarkable" music to "To Kill a Mocking Bird", this year up 156 places
to no. 48 - evidence of more skulduggery in the Classic FM Easter chart perhaps?
19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in last Tuesday's yoga class on zoom, the one run by her great-niece Molly in Leeds. Lois had to miss last week's session due to back problems, but later Molly sent her a link to the recording, which was nice. Now Lois will be up to speed (is that an appropriate expression for yoga?) in time for tomorrow's session.
Lois's great-niece Molly, who teaches yoga on zoom
Poor us !!!!!!
The first relic displayed - and for me the star of the entire show - is the marvellous so-called "Spong Man", the early 5th century clay figure that sat on the top of an Early English cremation urn, unearthed in Norfolk, where the English first started arriving.
"Spong Man", an Anglo-Saxon artefact from the early 5th century
What a magnificent angst-ridden figure - it's almost unbelievable that it was created in the early 400's AD, and how appropriate for the lid of a cremation urn. "Yikes!" is what the figure seems to be quietly saying, although nobody points that out in the programme - I'm not sure why. It was created at a time of great turmoil, with the Romans gone and all the English arriving from across the North Sea, and trying to find somewhere to settle down here.
Lois says the figure reminds her of Edvard Munch's "The Scream", and I can see her point.
Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (1893)
Gormley says that "To me the potential of sculpture to have a conversation with people that haven't been born yet is an incredibly powerful thing for me". I must say I hate that modern phrase about "having a conversation", but I'm going to let that one slide for now, because Gormley's little artwork is quite effective, I think.
Well done, Gormers!
Also tonight I must say I like the seventh century Staffordshire Hoard, found in 2009 - isn't it always poignant to see something like this, a hoard of over 4000 valuable bits of gold and silver that somebody buried in a quiet field thinking "I'll get that later, when the heat dies down", only to never actually manage it?
These were all bits of precious metal ripped off swords and that kind of thing, in somebody's hope of being "quids in" in time for their old age.
Crime doesn't pay though, does it haha. Better to take out a good pension, Lois and I think!
the 7th century Staffordshire Hoard, the biggest hoard ever discovered
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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