09:00 It's getting closer - yikes! Mine and Lois's plan is to ring up an estate agent's tomorrow and ask them to put our house on the market, after 36 years, during which time we've accumulated enough stuff to fill this house twice over, at the very least. Oh dear!
a typical estate-agent touting for business
The first thing our estate agent will want to do is to take pictures for the advertising, so we've got to make sure they give us a few days to make the house and garden look less cluttered, and hide a bunch of stuff out of sight: under beds, in wardrobes and suchlike.
And after that, the die will be cast (phrase copyright: Julius Caesar). [That copyright will have lapsed by now surely? - Ed]
YIKES (again, only louder!) !!!!!!!
We spend the morning doing fiddly little clear-up jobs around the back garden: trying to wind up the garden hose on to a reel, and failing (the rubber or plastic or whatever it's made of is as hard as anything - my god!); filling with earth and stones the hole under the wire fence, where foxes and/or badgers tunnel through at night to have a jolly good time at our expense; and, finally, putting all the broken glass from February's storm plus a broken flowerpot into the bottom of our green wheelie bin, which luckily was emptied yesterday by the Borough Council's contractors.
Exciting stuff isn't it !!!!
I try - and fail - to coil up our garden hose around its reel -
it's so hard it's like steel !!!!!!
...and in the end I have to just squash the whole lot into a big cardboard box
which I can now hide in the garage. What madness !!!!!
into the green wheelie-bin goes all our broken glass from February's
storm, plus a huge broken flower-pot: goodbye, and good riddance haha!!!
By an odd coincidence, Lois's cousin in Adelaide, Stephen and his wife Diane, have just decided to embark on the same process, selling their house and disposing of 60% of their possessions. They're both members of Lois's sect, so they've decided to move into a retirement complex run by their church.
Lois and I visited Stephen and Diane in 2016. I don't think any of us were talking about selling up and downsizing at that stage. It just sort of creeps up on you doesn't it! Yikes! [That's enough yikeses! - Ed]
flashback to 2016: (left to right) me, Diane and Stephen,
out in the countryside near Adelaide: in the far distance is the Southern Ocean
April 2016: (left to right) Lois, Diane and Stephen. We're queuing up
to "hug the koala" - Lois here is psyching herself up to do her "koala face".
What madness !!!!!!
Come on now, get ready for it Lois haha !!!!!
maybe a bit more work needed????!!!!
Attagirl! - that's the one haha!
included for comparison purposes: Sheldon Cooper's "koala face" from "Big Bang Theory": the French subtitles have Sheldon saying,
"when they start chewing their eucalyptus..." Awwww !!!!!
Awwwwwww !!!!!
15:00 In the afternoon Lois and I sit and plan how to make our living-room look less like a warehouse or the book depository that Kennedy was shot from, but we don't come to any firm conclusions.
Then, to make ourselves feel as though we've achieved something today, we order a bunch of Platinum Jubilee mugs online, two from the Australian Amazon for our twin grandchildren in Perth, Australia, and four from the charity RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) headquarters in Poole: three of these will go to our 3 grandchildren in Headley, Hampshire, and one will go to Lois herself.
the RNLI mug that will go to our 3 grandchildren in Hampshire,
with a fourth mug for Lois herself.
and this from the Australian Amazon: one each for our twin
grandchildren Lily and Sarah in Perth
Lois is keen to supplement her own existing collection of royal mugs: her coronation mug from when we was a 7-year-old at primary school, a diamond jubilee mug (2012) and a golden jubilee mug (2002).
(left to right) Lois's school Coronation Mug (1953),
our Diamond Jubilee mug (2012), and our Golden Jubilee mug (2002)
What madness !!!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, the third programme in the series "Art That Made Us", which showcases works of art from the last 1600 years' history of the British Isles, and bringing in modern artists to comment on them and sometimes create new works inspired by them. This third programme focuses on the 16th century - in England this is dominated by the reign of Elizabeth I.
Yes, it was very much a period of "England against the World" - a newly Protestant country in a Europe dominated by the Pope and the big Catholic powers of France and Spain, a country long regarded as a cultural backwater by the peoples of the Continent, "
Oh that country we get our wool from!", a country now trying desperately to come up with a defiant national identity, and a unique image and presence.
Poor England !!!!!!
Elizabeth's reign (1558-1603) had followed that of her sister Mary, a Catholic who had had hundreds of Protestants martyred, and the first cultural artwork in this programme, as Lois had feared, turns out to be the dreaded Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563).
Foxe's book gave all the gory details about the deaths, by burning, of many of the Protestant martyrs that had taken place during Mary's reign - the book was designed to consolidate the hold of the country's new Protestant national church, the Church of England, of which Elizabeth was now the head. The Church had copies of the book placed in all its churches - my god! And it's an incredibly long book: the second edition of the book is four times the length of the Bible. My god!
Lois turns the sound down on the TV as some of the gory details in Foxe's book are read out, but we still have the subtitles, so she has to look away as well. My god (again) !!!!!
The book had a huge impact thanks to the innovation of printing, introduced to England by William Caxton - and the programme's contributors compare this revolutionary development to the coming of the internet - the big best-sellers were suddenly being read everywhere around the country.
And we hear the comments of modern-day writers and academics on Foxe's book.
Stephanie Merritt, best-selling author who under the name S.J. Parris writes thrillers set in the Elizabethan period, says she gets the sense that Foxe really relishes the impact on the reader of his gory descriptions.
Yes, Lois says that Foxe's illustrations are the worst part, she thinks!
And it's true that the copies of the book dating from Elizabeth's reign that we still have around in libraries and museums etc confirm that it's the pages of illustrations that show the most wear - those Elizabethan readers must have really loved them! They're the pages that show the most traces of candle-wax, and traces of food, even.
Some readers coloured in some of the faces of the martyrs, or "defaced" the faces of the Catholic persecutors - my god!
[That's enough 'my god's !!! - Ed]
Also in tonight's programme it's interesting to see poetry that the Queen wrote herself in her 40's, when she realised she might never have a husband or children, poetry that reveals her as a sensitive soul underneath all the outward nationalist bravado.
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant.
I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate,
I am, and not.
I freeze and yet am burned,
Silence from myself, another self I turned.....
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
(from "On Monsieur's Departure", c. 1582)
Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies, says "This kind of poetry is recognisably something modern, people thinking about their inner life, their souls. And this is something in the period that we see being played out in all the creative arts, in literature.
"Poetry is endlessly thinking about questions of love, but asking, "What does the beloved think? Does she love me, does she not? What is my feeling now? Am I in love? Am I not? Is this just really about desire?" "
Another pundit looks at what these cultural trends meant for Elizabeth herself.
"For Elizabeth I don't think there's a particular distinction between what is personal and what is political, and that's what her poem is about. The fact that, as a queen, her emotions as a woman are caught up in matters of state, and vice versa - she does not have the luxury of separating the two. and that's the tension that you see throughout her poem."
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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