Sunday June 12th 2022

At last it's Sunday - my "I don't have to run" day [copyright Prince]. No house-hunting or house-hunting phone calls today, which is a relief.

But Lois and I do talk houses with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, on a 9:30 am zoom call. Sarah and Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica want to move back to the UK soon, after 6 years down under. Sarah's been offered her old job back at an accountancy firm in Evesham, and they want to settle in the Malvern area, so we're planning to move to Malvern too. 

we talk houses on zoom with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia

It's so nice to discuss houses with Sarah - she's had a lot more experience of estate-agents and their little wiles, than we've had. Last week Lois and I put in offers on two houses, but we've been feeling pessimistic about whether the offers will be accepted, or whether we'll be outbid by other prospective buyers. 

Sarah, however, thinks that both the vendors may well be happy with the offers that we've made, so she thinks that Lois and I may have to choose between the two, this coming week. Well, we''ll see.

Earlier today, Sarah, Francis and the twins were helping out at their sailing club, Nedlands, down on the Swan River. Every spring (yes, it's spring out there right now - what madness !!!!) the club holds a "busy bee" day when members go down to the club and do little jobs for free, like weeding and painting etc. And I think they get a bit taken off their annual subscription if they do. So it all makes perfect sense.

flashback to last year: the twins at the Nedlands Yacht Club

10:00 The zoom call with Sarah ends, and I check my smartphone. Our other daughter, Alison is having a busy weekend, to put it mildly. Alison lives with her husband Ed and their 3 children Josie Rosalind and Isaac over in Headley Hampshire.

Poor Alison !!!!!!   When Lois and I were bringing up Alison and Sarah in the 1980's, there just weren't the range of activities for school-age children that there are today. 

10:45 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's two Sunday morning meetings on zoom, while I huff and puff around the house getting all our recycling items ready for the Borough Council's early morning collection on Wednesday. A very important job, let me tell YOU - and one of my top priorities haha! 

Lois's meetings start late again. The sect's numbers have recently been boosted by a bunch of Iranian Christian refugees, who are being housed in the Gloucester area by the Home Office, and they have to travel by train to the sect's meeting room in Tewkesbury: today, as often, the trains are running late, apparently, so the meeting starts 30 minutes late. Oh dear!

A lot of the refugees don't speak much English, but the sect is using some simultaneous translation service, I think it's the google translate one, so that they can understand the preacher's words. I don't know - the wonders of modern technology again - my god!

flashback to last month: several sect members,

including a bunch of young Iranians, enjoy a barbecue

at sect elder Andy's home

14:00 When Lois's services finish we take a shower and then spend a couple of hours in bed, which is nice. Then we get up and enjoy a cup of tea and half a snail-bun each on the patio. 

The sun comes out from behind the clouds occasionally, and we're in a good mood after our nap, so we do the crossword in this week's Radio Times, and finish it in half an hour, which is probably a record for us. 

Unfortunately we strike out on the Egghead so-called "general knowledge" questions: only 4 correct out of 10 this week. As always we blame the questions for being "too obscure" or "too heavily based on popular culture". So that's all right then! 

And I mean, I ask you, is it fair to have two snooker questions out of a total set of only ten? 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

So a bit of an emotional roller-coaster - we finish the crossword in record time, but then everything goes pear-shaped when we try the Eggheads. Life can be emotionally hard on retirees, no doubt about that!

17:00 I see an interesting email from Steve, our American brother-in-law, reporting the results of a survey on the UK's minority groups. 

The survey is all about what percentage of the population "minorities" make up, and also what the popular perception is of how big a percentage these minorities actually make up in reality.

Surprised? I know Lois and I were. It's natural in a free society for minority groups to fight for, and to protect, their right to be treated the same as everybody else, and I guess this "noise" that they need to create distorts the general perception of their numbers. 

Minority groups such as "Black", "Asian", "Muslim" are perhaps different from the others, in that racial or religious minorities are often clustered together geographically, whereas the other types of minorities perhaps not at all, or not as much. And some minorities are identifiable by visual clues, and others not.

But fascinating stuff !!!!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa and unwind by watching the rest of the film we started watching last night, a biopic about the Swedish-speaking Finnish author, painter and graphic artist Tove Jansson (1914-2001), who created the Moomin books for children (books loved by a lot of adults too, including Lois).

When we switched off this biopic last night after seeing the first 30 minutes or so, Tove was a struggling artist starting to make a name for herself in Helsinki. She was a somewhat shy young woman but with unconventional ideas and a huge sense of fun - and beginning to write about, and to draw, the similarly shy, unconventional blob-like imaginary animals she was calling her "Moomins".

some typical "Moomins" created by Tove

There were a surprising number of sex scenes in the first 30 minutes of the biopic that we saw yesterday, but tonight we see that Tove eventually settled down to having two main lovers, a married man called Atos, a progressive MP, and a married woman called Vivica, a theatrical director. 

Tove (left) in bed with Vivica

It's Vivica who's Tove's main love interest, but Vivica isn't faithful, and is constantly going after other women, which makes the normally quiet and unassuming Tove boil over with anger.

It's interesting to see how much Tove puts her ideas about herself into the shy Moomins, like Moomintroll, that she creates. 

When she writes a play about them, which Vivica produces for Helsinki's Swedish Theatre, the question that a member of the cast wants to know the answer to is,  "Why is Moomintroll so kind all the time?Why does he never get angry? Is he scared of being disliked?" 

Vivica then puts this question to Tove, who is sitting quietly in the stalls observing the rehearsal.

Tove then gives her answer - obviously still smarting over Vivica's latest bout of unfaithfulness with a dancer called Irja.

It's clear that Tove also had issues with her father, going back to her childhood. Her father, Viktor Jansson was a famous sculptor, who was constantly criticising Tove as she grew up. He seemed to look down on her "childish" stories and drawings, and he took issue in particular with Tove's "lack of focus" - she was always uncertain about whether she wanted to be an artist or a writer.

The most touching scenes in the film occur when Viktor dies, in 1958, and Tove goes home to be with her mother, who is going through his effects.

Having believed all her life that her father despised her work, Tove is taken aback to see that in fact her father had kept a scrapbook of all her achievements and awards etc, and pages of cuttings of her work, including the comic strip in English that Tove had been writing 6 days a week for the London Evening News.

The discovery of the scrapbook reduces Tove to tears. 

My god, that father-daughter relationship again - it's sometimes a weird one, isn't it. Why didn't Viktor ever tell his daughter how proud he was of her achievements, that's the question Lois and I want to know the answer to, that's for sure!

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