Danskcolin: Sunday April 17th 2022

Easter Sunday, and a quiet day for Lois and me even by our standards - my god!!!!

08:00 A good start to the day in bed as we open our Easter presents to each other - identical "his and hers" giant chocolate Easter eggs - yum yum!

with my early cup of tea in bed, I open

my giant Easter Egg present from Lois - yum yum!

later in the day I showcase the egg and accompanying

bag of orange-flavoured chocolate buttons in the living-room

10:00 I spend the morning "crafting" an email to Annie, our favourite British expat in France. Are you interested to know what's it like being a British expat in Europe after Brexit? Well, for a start, being in Europe doesn't stop you getting angry with the British Government, that's for sure. In fact being abroad seems to make Annie even angrier - yikes!

She writes, "With the risk of upsetting you at the forefront of my brain, I shall say that I have been within a veritable whisker of setting fire to my British passport! The Utter Rubbish that keeps pouring out of the mouths of various UK government ministers [including your Muppet of a PM!] is just astonishing. The lies, damned lies [that’s a quote, but I can’t for the life of me think whence it comes!], the blurtings-out of totally fictitious numbers in their millions and billions, the complete and utter debacle over the obligation for Ukrainian refugees to have visas... it’s just Unbelievable!

Right, I’ve got that off my chest, so I’ll move on!!! [I’m sorry – but Brexit was a Rubbish Idea!]

Annie, our favourite British expat in France

the Auvergne, in the plumb dead centre of France, where Annie lives

flashback to 2007: me, newly retired, relaxing in Annie's front garden

Annie is a widow who's around our age, maybe a year younger, so, like us, she's got to decide where and how she's going to spend her "Very Old Age". The choices are: (a) stay where she is in her little house until she's carried out feet first, or (b) move into a French retirement home (not an attractive prospect, she says), or (c) move to Queensland, Australia, to be near her daughter - which also means being near lots of poisonous creepy-crawlies, while at the same time losing her French pension, which is half her income.

Oh dear!

10:45 Meanwhile Lois is twiddling her thumbs on zoom. Her sect's first Sunday morning meeting is due to start, but the sect has had an influx of Iranian Christian refugees over recent months, and they haven't arrived yet this morning at the Village Hall where the sect holds its meetings - the train they travel on from Gloucester has been delayed again. What madness !!!!!

flashback to last August: we visit the village hall

where the sect holds its Sunday morning meetings

The meeting finally starts 30 minutes late, which is awkward, because there's normally only a 30 minute interval between the end of this first meeting and the start of the next - oh dear!

Not all the Iranians speak very good English, so the preacher has to boil down his talk to a series of slides, on which each bullet point is shown in both English and Farsi. Lois says that an unintended bonus of the bilingual approach is that the preachers aren't tempted to make their address either too long or too complicated, which is probably a good thing. But what madness (again) !!!!!

a typical bilingual slide, extolling the necessity for

adult baptism by full immersion

flashback to last October: Andy, a church elder,

baptises new member Clare

14:00 I get a text from Lily, one of our twin granddaughters in Perth, Australia. Lily in particular, has taken to collaring her mum's smartphone and sending us texts. How cute she is!!!! The family went kayaking today on the Moore River

Is it not worth all the money in the world to get texts like this from a granddaughter? [I've warned you, stop saying that every time your grandchildren do something! - Ed]

The Moore River is about 80 miles north of Perth, Western Australia

flashback to March 2018: Lois and I visit the mouth of the Moore River

at Guilderton WA - pictured here are Lily and Sarah.

16:00 All day the radio has been tuned to Classic FM, as we follow the station's Easter tradition of Hall of Fame Top 300 classical pieces, as voted for by listeners.

Again this year there have been massive changes in the list since last Easter, and Lois and I are listening out for possible skulduggery in the voting. One year, there was a notorious attempt by video game music fans to skew the charts by engineering massive voting by a small clique determined to put video game music in the top ten.

flashback to 2015: video games storm the Classic FM Hall of Fame Top 300

What madness !!!! Why would you bother???!!!!! And as I always tell Lois, and as I have told her so many times since that she mouths my words as I speak: if only a small number of people are voting anyway, you're bound to be more likely to get massive swings from year to year, and the opportunity for crazy minority groups to exert undue influence.

This year there seem to us to have been intimations that fans of movie scores have been voting in large numbers and ousting from the chart some of the tried and tested "proper" classical favourites like Beethoven etc.

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

18:00 A delicious meal for Easter Sunday, a joint of braised beef, followed by a chocolate and raspberry roulade dessert.

19:30 We watch some TV, another programme in the new reality-TV series "The Simpler Life", in which 24 volunteers signed up to spend 6 months on a remote farm in Devon, living the un-technological life of the simple Amish folk of Pennsylvania, under the guidance of a genuine Amish family - a couple with two teenage offspring.

Lois and I are amazed to see the results of the community's crop planting - their fields are stuffed full of crops, as far as the eye can see: my god! It's far more than the community itself can eat, and a lot of it is threatening to go bad, but why do they not seem to have a plan for marketing the excess? It's agricultural madness, I tell you!

Also tonight we get four more departures. The series started with 24 volunteers, but Lois and I are trying to keep track: we reckon they're down to about 12 or so now - my god!

Gary, an ex-army guy who's an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, and who suffers from PTSD, was obviously hoping that the simpler life of the Amish would solve all his mental problems. But it turns out that he can't cope with the arguments that crop up between the so-called "purists" and the volunteers who hanker after their old "normal life".

Eventually he finds he can't take it any more, and so Gary with his husband Andrew, and their two sons Kai and Tommy, disappear at night. Their beds are found to be empty the following morning. Lois and I think that all the departures in the series so far have been furtive in-the-night ones, and you can see why - who wants a big fuss to be shown on national TV when you're bailing out of an experiment like this: makes sense to us haha!!!!!!

But Lois and I suspect that Channel Four probably planned all along to include in their party of 24 volunteers around 50% who they knew would not settle down to the simple Amish life, just to make the series more interesting - call us hard-bitten old cynics if you like! [All right I will! - Ed]

20:30 We have a phone conversation with Alison, our elder daughter who lives with Ed and their 3 children Josie (15), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11) in Headley, Hampshire. They've had a busy weekend - with many of Ed's large family turning up on Good Friday for fun and games - rounders, treasure hunts, etc in the house's massive 6.5 acre grounds.

my god - what a crowd for Easter weekend!!!

21:00 Lois and I wind down with an old episode of the sitcom "Butterflies" starring Wendy Craig as bored housewife Ria, with Bruce Montague as Ria's would-be lover, Leonard.

This series is one of Lois's favourites from the late 1970's - it centres around the malaise that married women were feeling at the time, when the feminist movement was still on the rise, but when most women's lives had not much changed, as yet, from the traditional roles they'd been limited to for centuries.

Ria is stuck in a middle-aged marriage with an unromantic husband and 2 selfish teenage sons. A cleaner does all the cleaning jobs around the house, and Ria is stuck mainly with shopping and cooking - and cooking is an art she has never really mastered, nor ever wanted to master, come to that.

Oh dear!

Ria's life is brightened up a bit by Leonard, a man she meets by accident in the town, and who makes romantic gestures to her, e.g. buying her flowers, although Ria tells him firmly that she's not interested in taking the relationship further.

All the outside scenes in the series were filmed in the Cheltenham area, so it's additional fun for us to identify the locations where the various sequences take place.

Tonight there's a scene in a country churchyard (we think it's St Philip's and St James's) where Ria is wandering around, looking at gravestones. She reads out the epitaph on one that particularly catches her eye:

"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."

Yikes!!!!! And Lois and I don't think it's right that people should ask for scary epitaphs to be put on their headstones like this. The vicar should have intervened surely (!) - well that's what we think anyway!!!!

Anyway this striking message leads Ria to take stock of her life, and her first impulse is to rid herself of all the things and people that she can quite honestly do without.

And it's interesting that, like me during mine and Lois's recent downsizing efforts, the first thing she decides to get rid of is a clock that doesn't work properly, as she later tells Leonard when they meet for lunch.

flashback to April 7th: I decide to throw out the clock my late father

was given as a leaving present from the school in London

where he was a deputy headmaster 1954-1956: the clock, which

hasn't worked for about 15 years, was a fixture on our living-room

mantelpiece when I and my siblings were growing up in Bristol in the 1960's

Will Ria decide that she can do without, not just the hiccupping clock, but also her would-be lover, Leonard?

Leonard, however, has a different slant on the meaning of the creepy headstone. When Ria says dying is like leaving the house and wondering whether you've turned the gas off, locked the door etc., Leonard reminds her that with death you can't come back to check. In other words, you've got to try all the experiences you want to try, before it's too late. Ria takes his point.