Saturday, 2 July 2022

Saturday July 2nd 2022

09:30 Francis, our son-in-law in Perth, Australia, has been suffering today. We know this from our weekly zoom call with Sarah, our daughter. Sarah and the twins dropped him off at the train station earlier today, so he could travel into Perth to watch the English rugby union team play Australia (the "Wallabies"), at the Optus Stadium. 

Francis is a die-hard England supporter. 

Perth's gigantic Optus Stadium on the south
bank of the Swan River

This is all going to end in tears, I can see it coming. Kick-off, or whatever it's called with rugby union, is due at 11 am British time. 

On his way to the stadium Francis happened to see a diehard "Wallabies" fan at the railway station, I guess he was a member of the Scottish "diaspora", but wearing the trademark Wallabies yellow - oh dear!

At one point, England seemed to be doing okay, and Francis rushed to publish this poignant post on social media;

Later, I read online that the English team have suffered another humiliating defeat - they lost 28 points to 30, which doesn't sound like a big margin, until you consider that Australia were a man down for most of the match. 

O tempora, o mores!!!


Poor England!!! And poor Francis !!!!

flashback to March 2018 - Lois and I visit the Optus Stadium,
just 2 months after it had been officially opened,
the third largest in Australia


flashback to January 2018 and the stadium's official opening

This heartache of yet another England sporting humiliation is still all in the future, however, as we talk to Sarah and the twins this morning on zoom. 

They've all had a rough week this week with so-called "ordinary" flu, which was at first suspected to be COVID, but which happily turned out not to be. In the family, Francis had the flu the least severely, and the twins bounced back after a couple of days, but Sarah has had it really badly, and still has a very sore throat. So we don't prolong the call too much this morning, to save her voice.

It was a nasty strain of flu, with lots of variants, and in the next few months it's going to be on its way to an England near us. Hopefully the scientists will be studying it so they can optimise the anti-flu jab that Lois and I will have in November. Yikes !!!!!



the twins - Lily and Jessica - showcase some of their latest baking projects
yum yum!

The twins are bouncing around during this morning's zoom - they're in very high spirits. They've got a schoolfriend's birthday party to go to tomorrow - it's a trampoline party: what else could you possibly desire if you're 8 years old? And they've both been doing well at school. They're in the top 8 of the 125 kids in their year for maths, and will both be in the team representing the school in the inter-school maths competitions in a few weeks' time. 

11:00 Otherwise it's a pretty quiet day, raining on and off, which is good news. Our near-neighbour Frances is away for a couple of days visiting her daughter Elizabeth in Eastbourne, Sussex.


In Frances's absence, Lois and I have to look after her garden and greenhouse. The weather has done us a big favour today because when we go round there in the afternoon, most of the garden is pretty wet already, except for the greenhouse of course.

I have the key job of turning the garden hose on and off - a responsible duty haha!

I have the key role this afternoon - turning the garden hose on and off...


...while Lois does the actual watering

Simples !!!!!

16:00 Who knew that Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert's death in 1861 may have led to a big loosening of the British class system? Well, Lois and I didn't know that, till we got an interesting email this afternoon from Steve, our American brother-in-law.

flashback to 1861: the London Illustrated News "splashes"
 the shock news about the death of Prince Albert all across a small part of this 
low-key front page, above an unrelated picture of British reinforcements 
being sent out to Canada. What madness !!!!!!

A Norwegian academic Marc Goni (crazy name, crazy professor) of Bergen University has advanced the theory that Queen Victoria's 3 years of mourning and the consequent temporary shut-down of the British high-class debutante social scene led to a lot of men and women from the nobility marrying commoners.

Marriages between nobles and commoners increased by 40% during those years, and the number of "common" MPs in the so-called "House of Commons" also increased. As a result parliamentary bills for such radical measures as universal state education suddenly started flying through the chambers and off to the Palace for the royal assent.

These were the new "mixed marriages", which took the place of the previous pattern of "assortative mating", which sounds like something disgusting, but in fact just means marrying somebody of your own social status or background, ie one of your social equals.

It sounds incredible doesn't it. But what a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days !!!!!!

At times of crisis like these, I always ask myself, "What would Cole Porter have said?" 

Well, maybe...

Daughters of earls do it,
Working girls do it,
Even not-very-cultured Pearls do it,
Let's do it, 
Let's fall in love

Does that work? [Just don't give up your day job, that's my advice! - Ed]

flashback to August 2021: Marc Goni (rightmost) joins Bergen University
as associate professor, seen here with three other new staff from the summer intake

17:00 This is the week that our much-vaunted "house deal", whereby we sell our house in Cheltenham for a certain price, and buy a house in Malvern for a certain price, could all fall apart. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday we've got, respectively, a mortgage inspector and a building surveyor visiting us, and who knows what defects they'll find that we don't already know about in our (literally) very creaky 90-year-old house. 

Yikes !!!! [That's enough yikeses! - Ed]

And will our buyers want us to drop the price they pay us when they hear how much the house is falling down? That's the big question. I'm adopting a fatalistic approach, but Lois is still going around touching up some of the paintwork. 

What a woman!

Lois touching up some of the scratched and battered paintwork
from the 36 year history of our residence here - what a woman !!!!!

20:00 We watch a bit of "telly", a little bit more of Paul McCartney's set at the Glastonbury Festival last weekend.


And by the time we go to bed, we still haven't seen it all - there's another 40 minutes waiting for us on the "tape"! My god!!!

The most moving bits in the hour we see tonight, Lois and I think, are Paul's tributes to John and George. 

First he sings the song that's his "letter to John", a song entitled "(If You Were) Here Today", which he wrote after John died.

And Paul tells the Glastonbury crowd, "When we were kids back then, you couldn't really express too much affection for each otherIt just wasn't the done thing. You couldn't turn to each other and go, 'I love you, man'. So you never really got round to it. You were just too busy trying to be hard, and cool."

And after singing his song "Here Today", he advises his audience, "So if you want to tell someone you love them, don't wait, don't put it off, okay?"




And as his tribute to George, Paul sings George's song "Something", and there's some nostalgic old pictures of George flashed up on the big screen behind Paul, as we hear the song, which is nice.



nice old pictures of George are flashed up as
Paul sings George's song, "Something"

Enough said - not a dry eye in the house, not in our house, anyway. 

Poor us !!!!!!!!




flashback to November 1963: the Beatles play at the Cheltenham Odeon:
"It's happening everywhere", said the Daily Mirror, "even in sedate Cheltenham."
back in those far-off crazy days when you could buy a watch for £8 and 8 shillings,
or "8 guineas" as we used to say, in those mad times. 
My god !!!!!!!!

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


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