06:30 I get up early, trying not to wake Lois, and go downstairs to find that our daughter Alison and her children Josie (15), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11) are already up and watching yesterday's most prestigious soccer games. What madness !!!!
Sika, the family's Danish dog is also in the room, but he's studiously not watching the game a lot of the time for some reason. We don't think he likes this particular ref - admittedly some of the more crucial decisions have been a bit controversial, Isaac tells me!
09:00 Our visitors take Sika out for an early morning "airing" as the Danes say - we would just say "walk" in English: call us crazy if you like!
10:00 Our weekly zoom call begins with Sarah, our daughter who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins, Lily and Jessica. The twins' school has broken up for Easter, so for the next two weeks they'll be at home with their house-husband father Francis, which is nice.
Francis is having a nap - he was up late last night watching his favourite English soccer team, Leeds United, and then today he's been watching the Australian Grand Prix.
It's sport madness, I tell you !!!!!
The twins are shy at first, because usually they're just talking to Lois and me, but they soon warm up. We tell them we love to hear their Australian accents - they're so cute !!!!
12:30 Lunch - another CookShop meal: lamb tagine with added-by-us couscous - yum yum!
14:00 In the afternoon there are more detective board-games to be played, not just Scotland Yard but also "221B Baker Street", the Master Detective Game".
Tremendous fun !!!!!!!
18:00 Sadly all good things come to an end, and Alison Ed and the family go home, and Lois and I set to work to transform our house back to a "house for two" - sob sob!
Even the detective board games have to go back up to their pile, way up on top of our so-called "sideboard", where they lie just two inches from the ceiling.
Poor games !!!!!!!
our detective board-games go back to their pile,
just 2 inches from the ceiling; poor games !!!!!!
Josie is a bit quiet and a little bit under stress at the moment because of her upcoming exams - as always she is concerned to get the best grades possible, and she has spent a lot of her spare time here learning Spanish vocabulary items. Rosalind as usual is always looking to be helpful to Lois and me in getting the meals ready etc. Isaac is a delight with his non-stop "soccer facts" and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the game's history and statistics.
What a lovely family !!!!!
"Fun is the one thing that money can't buy" (Copyright Lennon & McCartney)
20:00 Lois and I are completely exhausted, and Lois's back is playing up, which is a pity. We try to watch a bit of TV, but we can't really keep awake for very long at a time.
We watch tonight's edition of Antiques Roadshow, the series in which members of the public bring along heirlooms and treasures from their attic, to have them discussed and sometimes valued by experts in the field. Tonight the programme is coming from Aston Hall, a 17th century stately home near Birmingham.
We sleep through a lot of the programme, but we manage to catch one striking set of mementoes from a Chinese woman whose family escaped from mainland China in the late 1950's / early 1960's, during the early years of Mao-Tse-Tung's so-called "Great Leap Forward", a campaign that resulted in wide-scale hardship and misery for millions.
The woman says that her parents sneaked her, as a baby, over the border into Hong Kong, then a British colony, and left her in a stairwell on Hong Kong Island, hoping that the police would find her and assign her to family that would give her a better life.
She says she understood that, because of Mao's so-called "Great Leap Forward", the population of Hong Kong virtually tripled overnight, with many families living on the streets or in caves, or on the hills.
The woman was lucky - she was rescued by police from her stairwell, and spent a few months in a couple of orphanages before being flown to the UK in 1963 for adoption here.
The woman brings along the baby's silk jacket she was wearing, plus a news photo of the moment she arrived in the UK, plus the British passport she was given, and also an identity tag showing the name she was given in her first children's home in Hong Kong.
a news photo taken when the woman arrived in the UK:
she's the baby in the middle of the photo
the photo, the passport, the ID tag and the silk jacket are the only
mementoes she has from her earliest years
Which leaves Lois and me wondering, for the umpteenth time, what's wrong with all these countries like China and Russia? Why after all these centuries have they failed to achieve even the minimum standards of a civilised, decent society?!
21:30 We limp a little early up to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!
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