Wednesday April 6th 2022

09:00 An early email from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend. She sends me a report from the Hungarian "444 website" showing how desperate the Russians are to claim the crazy Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Hungary in general, as Russia's friend. And it's certainly true, the Russians aren't exactly flush with friends just at the moment, to put it mildly!

Apparently the Russian ambassador in Budapest has told the press that the Hungarians "didn't really want to" join in with the West's anti-Russian sanctions, but just went along with them because they were "bullied into it by the EU". So that's all right then!

Are Ukrainian refugee children now starting at British schools? I haven't heard anything about it, but this morning I see on the news from Gentofte, the Copenhagen suburb where our daughter Alison lived with her family for 6 years, that school boards are already getting children starting at 3 separate schools in the suburb. My god, that's quick! Why aren't we doing that yet in the UK? 

What's wrong with us !!!!!!

Ukrainian families equipping themselves for their

 new life in Denmark

Later I get an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law. He says that Putin's other "friend" in Europe, apart from Orbán - France's Marine le Pen - is doing better in the run-up to the French elections, and is now breathing down Macron's neck. Oh dear - things just aren't going the right way, are they!

11:00 Lois and I go out for our walk, with (as usual) her looking a lot smarter than me, to put it mildly - oh dear! She had an appointment at 10:15 am with James, her local stylist, so she's looking in top form. Whereas I famously (only in our house, famously) haven't had my hair cut professionally since the 1960's - I snip away at the back of my head myself as best I can, which gives my hair that "slightly random" look, which I'm still hoping will come into fashion eventually if I live long enough - my god!

Lois, pictured earlier this morning, on her return from an

appointment with James, her local stylist

James, Lois's stylist, caught here by mistake

on a security camera

Halfway round our walk on the local football field, we stop for a hot chocolate and a flapjack. It's Monica, the wife of the manager of local pub the Royal Oak, is serving today at the Whiskers Coffee Stand. Ewa, the Polish girl, who sometimes serves, is on holiday in the Netherlands this week. 

Ewa said about 4 weeks ago that Poland was reaching saturation point with Ukrainian refugees. I guess that Poland, and also Denmark, are so much nearer to the Ukraine than we are, but is that a good enough excuse for us? I'm not sure it is these days.

flashback to last month: Ewa (right) in happier times,

chatting with one of her English buddies

It's really deserted on the field today - not even the dog-walkers are around, which is a bit spooky. Still at least it's nice'n'quiet - the way we like it. Call us reclusive if you like, but we've got used to just living in each other's pockets since the pandemic began: and it's become "the new normal" for us, that's for sure. My god (again). Will we ever be "reintegrated" back into British society????!!!!! [I don't think they'll want you now! - Ed]

us this morning - sharing a flapjack on a park bench, 

and generally "living in each other's pockets" - my god!

16:00 More generally, Lois and I are still in total limbo at the moment wondering whether Sarah, our daughter in Australia, together with her family, is going to move back to the UK this year or not, after 6 years down under. 

our 8-year-old twin granddaughters, Jessica and Lily, 

waving to us from 9000 miles away, during a family trip

on their 16 ft boat "Rioja" on the Swan River at Perth

We're still waiting to get an email from her with their plans - if they move back, Lois and I will be selling up our own house and downsizing, so that we can move somewhere near to them. But everything's on hold at the moment till they come to a decision. In the meantime, however, we're continuing efforts to de-clutter our current house, just in case. We'll have to downsize at some point anyway.

Busy, busy, busy!

16:30 I speak on the phone with Gill, my sister in Cambridge. She, together with her husband Peter and daughter Lucy, will be taking a holiday in Lancashire in mid-May, hopefully meeting up with their other 2 daughters, Zoe and Maria and their partners. They will be staying in self-catering cottages, the ones they stayed in in 2018 to celebrate Gill's 60th birthday.

flashback to May 2018: Gill and her 3 daughters,

staying near Blackpool to celebrate Gill's 60th birthday

At the moment Gill is trying to find a carer who'll stay with them up there, and also drive them up there: both Peter and Lucy are handicapped. 

flashback to 2016: Gill and Peter's 30th wedding anniversary

I take the opportunity to ask Gill about her experience with house-clearance firms. Her house was so full of stuff left behind by their 3 grown-up daughters that she eventually, a couple of years back, she had to call in a team of professionals to part-clear some of the mess of accumulated unwanted stuff. And this is something that Lois and I will have to do if we've ever going to leave our own house, other than if we leave it feet first in a couple of wooden boxes - yikes !!!!!

a typical house-clearance in operation

Gill said she tried to concentrate as many as possible of the items for clearance into one of their unused bedrooms, and told the clearance guys to empty the room. Apart from that, she went with them into each other room telling them what to clear and what to leave. All the time she was worried that they'd do the wrong thing - taking away what they wanted to keep and leaving what they wanted to get rid of. 

However, the guys did a good job, she says - it's what they do every day, after all. She'd been worried about how the guys would ever get a big sofa-bed out of an upstairs room, down the stairs and out of the house, but she says she saw later one of the guys getting it out of the house single-handedly, carrying the bed on his head! 

20:00 After dinner Lois and I settle down on the sofa in the living-room. Lois notices that I've been putting weight on around the waist - I know she's right, but I've been trying not to think about it - oh dear! 

I know that the meals we eat are small, but perhaps it's time for me to give up having fattening things to eat and drink between meals, like for instance with mid-morning coffee, when we go out for our walk, and later, with our 4 o'clock cup of tea. 

Yikes - hard times a-coming!!!!!!

21:00 We watch the first half of the first part of a documentary series on Benjamin Franklin on the PBS America channel.

A great start to this new series, although we only see half of this first programme before it's time for bed. 

It's another extraordinary story of a boy in a large family - the youngest - who doesn't get much formal education but is almost straightaway reading anything he can get his hands on, including the latest edition of "The Spectator" political weekly from London. An atypical boy somehow born to a typical Bostonian Puritan family - how does it happen, and keep happening???!!!!

In this first hour, we see Benjamin moving from Boston to Philadelphia as a youth - escaping illegally from an apprenticeship in his home town, in actual fact; moving from a rigidly Puritan society to a more free-wheeling one in Philadelphia - although the city was founded by Quakers, it was much less rigid, with more interplay of different nationalities.

We also see Benjamin moving from a Puritan way of thinking to more of an Enlightenment stance, not discarding his belief in God but nevertheless believing that when we die, we're judged on what we've done rather than on what we believed or said.

Lois and I didn't know that the young Benjamin was also very active sexually, consorting with so-called "low women", both in London and Philadelphia. But we also see him gravitating back to the young woman Deborah Read who had caught his eye on his early search for lodgings in his new city, and whom he later set up home with in a so-called "common law marriage". They couldn't marry legally because her husband had gone missing and was probably, but not provably, dead, out in the West Indies or somewhere like that, I think.

What a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days!!!!

what a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days!!!

By the time we go to bed, Franklin has achieved lots of "firsts" already for society in the colonies, organising and establishing lots of institutions: the first subscription library, first non-sectarian college (later the University of Pennsylvania), a hospital part-financed by public funds, and the American Philosophical Society, for example. He also founded new publications of his own of various sorts, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he enriched, often under assumed names, with his own saucy sense of humour. 

Franklin at the offices of his newspaper, 

the Pennsylvania Gazette

I'm especially interested to hear that, when producing the Gazette, which had a column for "Readers' Letters", Franklin would sometimes include letters written by himself under various pen-names. It reminds me that I used to do the same when I edited "French Window", a magazine for Mensan francophiles, whenever group members were too idle to write in with any genuine contributions. 

What a crazy world I lived in in those far-off days!!!!

flashback to 2005: my last ever edition of "French Window"

We see an example of one of Franklin's letters to his own newspaper, written under the pen-name of Alice Addertongue, a letter suggesting that the paper could double its number of subscribers if it included more stories about scandals:

I ask Lois what she thinks some of the "deleted expletives" are in this letter. What are "m---n--ds"? "Manhoods" perhaps? No, probably "maidenheads" we think, on reflection. And what are "cu--ld-ms" ????  Is it "cuckoldisms" perhaps, or "cuckolddoms" ????

We don't know. Perhaps we should be told !!!

But what a guy, that Franklin, eh! And what's left for him to achieve in the remaining 5 hours of this series that we haven't seen yet? What madness !!!!! [Well, you obviously haven't got to the part with the lightning rod yet, for a start, have you! - Ed]

As Lois and I go to bed Franklin has just enlisted to fight in "King George's War" against the French and "Indians" (as we used to call them). And this is a recent documentary, so it's no surprise that it's also made crystal clear how Franklin, like almost all other white people at the time, was fully complicit in the contemporary system of enslaved black servants and indeed he employed some in his own home, even though the city's Quakers were already campaigning for abolition.

And now, as we finally go to bed, some of Franklin's "quotable quotes" are ringing in our ears. Like the following, written when he was only 16 years old: a quote that was first published in the New England Courant, a paper established by Benjamin's brother James - which was also the first independent newspaper to be set up in the colonies.

He published the following, admittedly recycled, quote under his pen-name of "Silence Dogood": 

What a guy!  [You've done that one already! - Ed]

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