07:30 Lois and I wake up and take a quick shower. We're staying at the moment at our daughter Alison's house, a crumbling Victorian mansion, pet-sitting for the family, and they've got builders coming in every day this week to rebuild the car-port wrecked by Storm Eunice back in February.
flashback to February: we inspect the car-port wrecked the
previous night by Storm Eunice
Then it's time for gardening duties in these massive 6.5 acre grounds - mainly watering because of the dry weather, but Lois also wants to collect any vegetables, salad plants etc that have become ready, and Alison has also asked us to prop up some vegetable plants that are leaning over or have fallen on their faces. What madness!!!!
Lois stands ready with the garden hose...
she waters in one of the greenhouses, while Otto the cat,
the so-called "Norman the Foreman" looks on
...while I have the important job of turning the water on and off.
Well, it's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it haha!
we embed a long stick to support a
drooping gladiolus
11:00 We relax with a coffee and I look at my smartphone. There's a couple of pictures from Sarah, our other daughter, who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Sarah. It's the twins' 9th birthday tomorrow, and Sarah and Francis are holding a birthday party for them at their house in Tapping, in Perth's northern suburbs.
For their birthday present, Lois and I have bought the twins a wheeled scooter each - I think that's what these scooters are called. And today Sarah sends a picture of the scooters before she and Francis start wrapping them up. And Francis,, despite his 6'2" height, can't resist having a go on one of the scooters himself - what a wag he is haha!!!
the scooters we are giving our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica
for their 9th birthday tomorrow
the twins' dad, Francis, can't resist trying one of them out
- what a wag he is: we think he's about 6' 2" or thereabouts !!!!
Go Francis haha !!!!
I wish I were nine again! This is me aged 9 in 1955, with my sister Kathy aged 7 in the back garden of the family home in Kingsbury, NW London:
Happy days!
But the twins - 9 already. How time flies - can it really be 9 years since we saw a photo of the twins on the day they were born. What a precious souvenir for them to have, and to show to their own grandchildren some day, hopefully.
Sarah's twins, Lily and Jessica, on the day they were born
at Gloucester Royal Hospital in 2013
What are the chances of that happening, eh? YOU TELL ME, eh haha !!!!! Yes, you do the maths haha!!!!
12:30 We have lunch and I see an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law. He says that apparently tonight's first head-to-head TV debate between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, who are vying to be elected Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, is going to be an acrimonious one. Oh dear! And it's starting at 9 pm, which is a pity. Lois and I really don't want to witness anything like that just before we go to bed, we'd rather have a cup of cocoa haha!
flashback to July 26th 2013: Left to right, Lois's niece Sharon,
our other daughter Alison, and Lois, at a 3rd birthday
party for one of our other grandchildren, Alison and Ed's son Isaac
flashback to July 26th 2013: during a 3rd birthday tea for our
grandson Isaac, we see pictures by phone of our 2 new granddaughters,
who had just been born in a hospital in Gloucester
15:00 Lois and I have tea and a slice of coffee cake on the terrace.
we have a cup of tea and a slice of coffee cake on the terrace
An email comes in from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, alerting me to the fact that, according to the influential Hungarian news website telex.hu, a day or two ago a new record was set in Hungary for "highest daily minimum temperature". The temperature only dropped as low as 25.4C (77.7F) during one recent night. These "highest daily minimum temperatures" must be the new fashionable thing in weather-reporting - I noticed that a week ago, during a 2-day mini-heatwave in the UK, a similar weird record was reported.
In the UK last week....
and now in Hungary - what madness !!!!
What a crazy planet we live on !!!!
16:00 After we finish the tea and cake, we go upstairs for a supplementary nap. How lazy we're becoming. But why not? The builders working on the new carport seem to be getting along okay without any instructions or cups of tea from us, so we decide to leave them to it. Well, wouldn't you, if you had the chance? Go on, be honest haha !!!!!
20:00 We settle down to watch a programme about the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, which is the world's largest open-entry art competition. Yes, anybody in the UK, even you, or it may be you, can photograph their art-work for the first-round online judging, and if you pass this, you can take it along to the RA of possible mounting on the RA walls for the summer.
What an opportunity, eh?!!!!!
It's fun to watch comedian Joe Lycett introducing us to nine of the aspiring artists and to the works that they've entered.
I won't say that Lois and I are cynical about the art world and its so-called "judges", but we can't help noticing that of the 9 works featured, it's the 3 that needed a lot of time, care, artistry and skill that get rejected, and the other ones which were, by comparison, for the most part fairly quick to knock up, and which required minimal skills, that get accepted for display in the RA's exhibition.
I wonder why that was haha !!!!!
This beautiful and incredibly detailed pencil drawing of a crab, for instance, gets the thumbs down from the judges.
What utter madness !!!!!
Come back, John Constable, all is forgiven haha !!!!
20:45 One of the cats, Otto, comes to join us on the couch, which is nice.
one of the family's cats, Otto, comes to
join us on the couch, which is nice
21:00 We watch a bit of tonight's head-to-head debate between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, who are campaigning to become the new Conservative Party leader, and, in consequence, our next Prime Minister.
It isn't the debate it could have been, with calm statements of the candidates' approaches and analysis of their answers to the questions. It could have been like that, if interruptions had been banned, and the BBC's two tame political and financial experts, sitting on the side-lines, had been allowed to really challenge the candidates' arguments as well. A missed opportunity.
This type of weeks-long contest is a crazy way to choose the next Prime Minister anyway, Lois and I think.
It's just the Conservative MPs who should be voting, not the party members in the country as a whole. It's the MPs who have to work with the successful candidate in Parliament, and they need to have expressed their majority support for him or her in a vote, don't they? It's all quite simple really, and not in the least bit rocket science, to put it mildly!!!!
What a crazy country we live in !!!!!!
Come back, Boris, all is forgiven haha!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment