It's here - the longest day of the year, and the sky is quite light even at 4 am if we happen to wake up. Lois has got into a habit of waking often about 4:30 am, and she needs to read a bit before she can get back to sleep again. At the moment I'm getting up at about 5:30 am to do a bit of computer work, and I can open the downstairs curtains and watch the early morning joggers dashing past the house on the road outside, which is fun.
typical early morning joggers
What a long day it's going to be - 4:49am sunrise to 21:31 pm sunset, and of course the hours of daylight extend quite a bit further than that, at both ends of the day.
What a crazy latitude we live at !!!!!!
I see that Stonehenge is once again open to the public for the Summer Solstice revels, after 2 years of being off limits because of the pandemic, which is nice.
The worst nightmare is when Lois tries to add another signatory to her sect's Lloyds Bank Bible Seminars account. We may be moving to Malvern in the next few months, and she wants to offload her duties as Treasurer to fellow sect-member Marie-Ann.
You'd think it would be a simple thing to achieve, but no! Three times she fills in all of Marie-Ann's information onto the site, and uploads a copy of her signature, only to be told at the last hurdle that "I'm sorry we have a technical problem, please try again later". What madness !!!!!
the Lloyds Bank iconic "black horse" logo - not by your side,
and for over 250 years - what madness !!!!
And we realise for the umpteenth time what a lot of really rubbish websites there are about, where they make it incredibly difficult for users to find the information they need. In the end Lois is forced to ring the Bank's helpdesk, who seem to be completely unaware of the problem until Lois reports it - and they find out later that apparently a lot of other users have been saying the same as Lois.
What a crazy world we live in!!!!!
In the end we at least manage to download a PDF application form that we can print off and fill in, and send back to them in the post - but my god !!!!!!
10:00 At least I manage to invite my sister Gill, who lives in Cambridge, to mine and Lois's golden wedding celebration which will hopefully take place in August at our daughter Alison's crumbling Victorian mansion in Hampshire. Neither she nor her husband Peter drive any more, so it would be dependent on their daughter Lucy being able to drive her down, and for carers to look after Peter in Gill's absence. But fingers crossed, and it'll be nice for Gill to see our daughter Alison's incredible house and land for the first time.
Yes, it's coming up to 50 years since Lois and I got married - my god, it feels like only yesterday, well perhaps a bit more than that, to be fair!
me with my mother (52) and my sister Gill (14)
I'm still a child when it comes to technology, and I still think it's marvellous that I can be outside in our side passage pushing a wheelie-bin while talking free-of-charge to my soon-to-be-45 year old daughter, who's 9000 miles away on the other side of the world. Isn't technology wonderful !!!!! [Grow up Colin! - Ed]
Sarah, her husband Francis, and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica, are hoping to move back to the UK soon if they can, after 6 years down under. Sarah has been offered her old job back at an accountancy firm in Evesham, and they're hoping to settle in the Malvern area, where Lois and I are planning to move - see? It's all starting to make sense now, isn't it haha!
Unfortunately the house they're renting over there has just been sold by its owner - it's happening all over Perth apparently. And this means they'll have to find a new place to rent for just short-term, which is annoying.
Sarah and family's rental house in one of Perth's northern suburbs
On a brighter note, the twins have been invited to a Pamper Party Bus event tomorrow by one of their schoolfriends. I bet you've never heard of a Pamper Party Bus before - Lois and I certainly hadn't. And it's strictly a little girl's kind of a party, apparently because they all get to get their nails and hair done on the bus, which is nice.
What madness !!!!!
But maybe it's not such a bad idea, on second thoughts. Could they start Pamper Buses in the UK, strictly for old codgers and old crows in perhaps? A lot of people our age have trouble just cutting their toe-nails, or even reaching them, let alone painting them - I know I do haha!
18:00 Time for dinner and for the first time last Saturday we've been sent "Black Farmer Premium Pork Sausages" by Budgens, the convenience store in the village.
Who's ever heard of those? I know Lois and I haven't. But when we open our copy of "Which" consumer magazine today, what should we see but somebody singing the praises of Black Farmer sausages. What are the chances of that happening eh?
20:00 We feel like a couple of old wrecks tonight. And Lois strained her back earlier today which means she hasn't been able to do her usual chair yoga session online, the one led by her great-niece Molly. Oh dear!
We wind down with the second in a new series of arts documentaries on the Sky Arts channel, written and presented by Waldemar Januszczak (crazy name, crazy guy!).
We both like Gainsborough's early work, "Mr and Mrs Andrews". What a lovely down-to-earth title, and so unromantic and no-nonsense, and all rather English, isn't it haha!
"Mr A." has just been out shooting on his extensive lands, and is looking relaxed and leaning nonchalantly, his shotgun in hand. "Mrs A." has come out to meet up with him, and now she's sitting down at his side.
But there's something missing. She's got a pheasant's feather on her lap, so her husband has obviously just shot one. But where's the rest of the bird?
Gainsborough obviously intended to paint a dead pheasant on Mrs Andrews' lap, but either he never got to doing it because the couple decided they didn't want it there, or else Gainsborough did in fact paint the pheasant there, and it was later painted over - censored, if you like.
Lois and I think that a dead bird, if it had been painted on Mrs Andrews' lap, in a position of prominence in the picture, would have sent a rather jarring note, in comparison to the rest of the picture, with its atmosphere of the calm serenity of the English landscape. But then that's probably a rather modern viewpoint.
In fact, as presenter Waldemar delights in telling us, dead birds were a common feature in Dutch painting, of which Gainsborough was a big fan. The birds were usually being clutched by women, with slightly unpleasant expressions on their faces (like Mrs Andrews), and were intended to be symbolic of women "getting hold of innocent, gullible men where it really hurts" - my god (again) !!!!
Waldemar explains that "a bird in the hand of a buxom Dutchwoman is invariably intended as a warning to us guys not to let ourselves be grabbed where it hurts". And he thinks that Gainsborough's painting was a secret warning to his old school-friend, Mr Andrews, about the fate of the cock pheasant that's fallen into his teenage wife's lap and been grabbed.
Oh dear, and I don't think Lois and I will ever look at this painting quite the same way again, that's for sure. My god (again) !
22:00 Enough said! We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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