Friday May 27th 2022

Lois and I are staying with our daughter Alison for a few days, and spending time with her, Ed, and their 3 children Josie (15), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11)

08:30 I get out of bed and come downstairs, but Lois wants to sleep in - she didn't have a good night. The house is empty apart from us. The children are at school, and Alison is too - she works as a teacher's assistant. 

Ed has his birthday today, but he's out doing a run with his younger brother Tom. So I have a lonely breakfast all by myself in the kitchen. On the table I can also see Ed's birthday cards and some of his presents.

I have a lonely breakfast of Weetabix, toast and a cup of tea

- poor me !!!!!

at the other end of the table are some of Ed's birthday cards and presents

10:00 Later Lois gets up and also Ed comes back from his run. 

Ed opens his birthday card from us - our present came

by email: it's a voucher from the American Golf golfing goods store.

Ed had recently taken up his golf again.

Tom has given Ed a selection of special wood chips for his barbecue. What madness !!!!

Lois isn't feeling too good today, so we just have a quiet day, starting by inspecting the enormous garden and looking at the work that's been done so far to repair the storm damage from a couple of months back. Meanwhile Ed starts to mow the grass with his ride-on mower.

Lois inspects Alison's "fruit cage" - we've give her 

several of our fruit bushes

Ed starts to mow all the lawns on his ride-on mower

Lois refreshes the water in the bees' drinking fountain

I inspect the new car-port, which is under construction -

the old one was destroyed in a storm a couple of months ago

flashback to February and Storm Eunice - YIKES !!!!!

flashback to February: the old carport

completely wrecked by Storm Eunice

The family are going to be going off to Wales early this evening for a week at a holiday cottage. They're taking Sika, the family's Danish dog, but leaving the two cats and the tropical fish for us to look after. So Lois and I spend some time today familiarising ourselves with the house's gadgets, kitchen appliances etc and reading the instructions for pet-feeding etc.

We also nip over to Grayshott, 4 miles away, to buy some CookShop ready meals. It almost feels like normal life again to park outside and go into the Grayshott Wine Shop and choose our meals, with no masks on - has life gone back to normal now? It's hardly possible to believe it. What a crazy world we've been living in !!!!

we buy some CookShop ready meals from the Grayshott Wine Shop:

has life finally gone back to normal?

16:00 Alison and the children come back from school and piano lessons. At the school where Alison is a teaching assistant, everybody has been wearing red white and blue, in honour of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, which is a nice idea.

Alison with Isaac: Alison is in red, white and blue

in honour of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee

 

17:15 The family go off to Wales - to the village of Llanthony near Hay-on-Wye, on the English-Welsh border. We wave goodbye. 

And now it's just Lois and me rattling around in this gigantic mansion for a week. Will we cope? Well, the jury's still out on that one haha!

For now, it's just us and the 2 cats and a bunch of fish in a tank. But it's nice to feel we can leave our towels and toiletries in the bathroom, and wander about the house in our pyjamas if we want to. That's total freedom!

There's a slight worry because Dumbledore, one of the two cats we're pet-sitting doesn't come in for his teatime feed, but he steps in eventually about 8:30 pm while we're watching TV, so we quickly lock the cat-flap so he's indoors for the night now.

Poor Dumbledore !!!!!

21:00 We watch a bit of TV. For some reason we've never figured out completely, the family don't have a feed of live TV - they watch everything on catch-up. I think it started when they were in Denmark 2012-2018, when they didn't want to watch Danish TV, and so they relied on pay-to-view channels like Netflix, which Lois and I don't like. 

Luckily we can also see BBC iPlayer which shows BBC programmes already broadcast and so we "catch up" with the last episode of the series "Art That Made Us". The series aims to present an alternative history of the British Isles based on the last 1500 years of art work and literature etc.

As Lois and I predicted, this final episode in a series which we've mostly enjoyed, turns out to be almost all complete rubbish, with the programme-makers quite obviously trying to include as many often unknown and quite untalented "artists", as long as they somehow represent one or other minority group: people like the rapper Stormzy and that kind of thing. What madness !!!!!

The highlight for me was a segment on a poem "Going Going" (1972) by Hull University librarian Philip Larkin (1922-1985), including a sight of Larkin's original draft. 

The poem laments the disappearance of the traditional centuries-old version of England, and its conversion in the post-World War Two era into a land of concrete and glass, and of high rise apartment-blocks. It's an elegy to the English countryside.

Larkin, pictured here closing his office door

at the library of Hull University

And we see tonight comedian David Baddiel entering Larkin's old office at Hull and looking at the original draft for the poem.

"...and that will be England gone, the shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guildhalls, the carved choirs, there'll be books, it will linger on in galleries; but all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres." 

Baddiel says, "There's always this terrible pain in Larkin's writing. and all this terrible yearning, The yearning in "Going Going" is a sense of his own life ebbing away in tandem with this lyrical idea of England".

Although Baddiel is himself of Jewish immigrant stock and has lived almost all his life in London, he admits to a sentimental attachment to the sort of things that Larkin laments the passing of.

It's also nice that, while admitting that Larkin isn't "woke" any more, since copies of his personal letters have been found that contain racist views, Baddiel says it just doesn't do to throw all Larkin's work away and try to pretend that his poems don't have a real lyrical and touching beauty in their own right. 

So there haha!

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