Sunday April 3rd 2022

Today is the Hungarian General Election - can Viktor Orbán, the country's crazy, dictatorial Prime Minister, be unseated? A few months ago I was quite hopeful, but now I'm not so sure. But we'll see - it isn't over till it's over.

Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, tells me that German comedian Jan Böhmermann has been having a bit of fun at Orbán's expense on Germany's ZDF TV channel. 

But will British people ever learn to understand German humour? I don't think we're quite there yet! Maybe the Hungarians understand it better than we do, but I'm not sure - maybe I should be told?

German comedian Jan Böhmermann (left) has been poking fun

at Hungary's crazy Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

Böhmermann makes fun of Orbán's hair style, and pretends he's not sure where Hungary is on the map, although he thinks it's probably the country that looks like a Wienerschnitzel - it isn't that one, Jan!

There's some serious stuff in the programme as well - here we see a reporter asking a Hungarian what the f*** is wrong with their country. I wonder what the reply was - it could have been illuminating!

Foreign humour is always difficult, though, isn't it, and I'm sure the Germans don't understand the British sense of humour either. And when I think back over all the French comic films that Lois and I have seen over the years, I remember that most of them left us totally baffled.

The article which Tünde sent me, on the 44.hu website, compares Jan's humour with Benny Hill's, but I don't think I'd ever have trusted Benny to do a current affairs programme, that's for sure!

Benny Hill reading the news, covering an important sheep story - 

but would you trust him ? haha!

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

09:30 Lois and I talk on zoom with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, along with her husband Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.

We usually talk to them on Saturday morning (UK time) but yesterday they were out sailing on the Swan River. Later Francis put a clip onto social media.

Sarah, Francis and the twins out sailing on the Swan River

yesterday - the skyscrapers of Perth's Central Business District

can be seen in the background

The family are planning to move back to the UK in the near future after about 6 years down under. And this has implications for Lois and me, because we've been thinking they would settle in Dorset, a county on the south coast, next to the English Channel, and that it might be a good plan for us to sell our house in Cheltenham and move to Dorset ourselves, downsizing to a smaller house at the same time. All quite scary for us, to put it mildly, after 36 years of living in this house, and bringing up our two daughters here.

if Sarah and family move back to the UK and settle in Dorset,

Lois and I might find ourselves moving there as well - it's

about 100 miles south of where we are now.

Today they've come up with an alternative plan, however, which could mean they'll be moving back to the Cheltenham area after all - Sarah and Francis are going to put their ideas into an email, so that Lois and I can study it and work out the implications. Yikes - busy, busy, busy - and all change again!!!!

10:30 The call with Sarah ends, but 15 minutes later Lois has another zoom to take part in - the first of her sect's two Sunday morning meetings. 

The start of the meeting turns out to be delayed. The sect has attracted a bunch of Iranian Christian refugees, many of whom live in the Gloucester area, and who have to travel by train the 12 miles or so north to Tewkesbury, where the sect holds its meetings. But the trains often run late, which means that the British sect-members have to fill in the time with chit-chat until they arrive . What madness !!!!

British sect-members "chat amongst themselves" while

waiting for the Iranian refugees to arrive - what madness !!!!

14:00 At last Lois and I get to have our afternoon in bed and our giant nap, delayed from Friday and Saturday. What paradise, but we deserve it, I'm sure you agree haha !!!!

16:30 We get out of bed and watch the Oxford v. Cambridge University Boat Race on the Thames, an annual event since 1829. We are both Oxford supporters, and we both think that the BBC commentary is always biased in favour of Cambridge, which just goes to show you what fanatical Oxford supporters we are, that's for sure!

It turns out that Oxford wins today by a massive amount - and the BBC are calling it one of the greatest Boat Race triumphs of all time, so perhaps they're not as biased as we used to believe.  But we'll see !!!

18:30 We have dinner,  a bit later than usual: it's a lovely roast pork dinner with apple sauce, which we enjoy, but I can tell Lois is feeling a little stressed tonight. And it's undoubtedly due to the lack of clarity over our daughter Sarah's family and their projected move back to they UK, a lack of clarity which is unsettling, I have to admit. But I'm hoping that their new plan, when it emerges, will take a lot of the stress out of the previous plan. Let's hope so, anyway! Oh dear!

roast pork with roast potatoes and vegetables, 

with apple sauce - yum yum!

21:00 We wind down with one of our favourite TV programmes, Antiques Roadshow, in which members of the public bring along, to some stately home or other, the treasures and heirlooms they've been keeping in their attics and other places, to get them discussed and valued by experts in the field.

Tonight we're at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, and what a fascinating collection of treasures these local people have brought along! 

As well as being the Scottish capital, Edinburgh is also a North Sea port, of course, and so it probably isn't coincidence that a lot of the heirlooms and antiques that we see tonight are connected with Scandinavia and Russia.

The show opens with series presenter Fiona Bruce appearing to play the bagpipes, although it quickly becomes clear that she's miming, and that the music is actually being produced by Louise, a local woman with a strong pair of lungs - my god!

This man (see below, left) had a great-great-grandfather who, through his shipping company, had business connections with Russia, and he's brought along as his heirloom some little porcelain figures of Russian peasants in their long overcoats, figures produced in the 1880's for the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia.

Apparently the imperial couple liked to place these little figures here and there about their palace  because, allegedly, they didn't get much opportunity to see real peasants! Can you believe? What madness !!!!

And when, a few years later, the Tsar and Tsarina called in at Edinburgh's port, Leith, on a visit to Britain, they invited this guy's great-great-grandfather to meet them on board. And tonight we see the actual ticket that gave him and his wife admittance to the reception - my god!

Fascinating stuff !!!!

Also tonight we see a silver brooch brought along by a woman who was raised in Norway. The brooch originally belonged to the woman's German grandmother.

During World War II, the woman's grandmother was a Luftwaffe officer serving at Narvik in the north of Norway. As the war was coming to an end, the woman became pregnant but kept secret the identity of the father. 

Lois and I suspect that her lover was probably a Norwegian man, because this brooch, which her lover gave her, is the kind that Scandinavians traditionally have given to their brides as wedding presents. Something must have happened to stop the wedding, however, but nobody knows what that was - the woman carried her secret to the grave: who the man was, and why the wedding never happened.

At the end of World War II the woman became a 7-months-pregnant prisoner of war, but she went ahead anyway and had her baby, bringing her up as a single mum, which wouldn't have been easy in those times.

The brooches are called "solje" brooches, which are associated with sunshine, because "solje" means "sunny" or "shiny" in Norwegian. And the traditional way in which the brooches were constructed goes right back to the jewellery made by the Vikings in long-gone centuries. 

Of course, the woman tonight isn't interested in the brooch's value, just in the realisation that there's such a story behind it: the sad part about the cancelled wedding and the triumphant part about her grandmother's struggle - my god!

And on the table tonight we see a photograph of the woman's grandmother wearing the brooch, which is touching. And what a beautiful woman - my god (again) !!!!

on the table we see a photograph of the woman's German grandmother 

wearing her silver Scandinavian "wedding brooch"

Sob sob !!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!