Sunday July 3rd 2022

Today is a day that Lois and I can restore our equilibrium by having a couple of free hours in bed this afternoon.

We feel a bit like physical and emotional wrecks. Selling our house after 36 years and buying another one 25 miles away has played havoc with our legendary calmness, and we've got two days this coming week when we'll be visited by "inspectors": a mortgage inspector on Tuesday who will decide whether our house is worth the price we're asking, and a buildings surveyor on Wednesday who will decide whether our 90-year-old house is falling down or not, which it may well be, for all we know: we've got our suspicions, to put it mildly.

the house we're hoping to buy

What a week it's going to be - my god! And we've just got tomorrow to make our own house and garden look something other than a pigsty. Oh dear.

10:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in the first of her sect's two Sunday morning meetings on zoom, and I settle down on the couch to look at what's come in on my smartphone. It's always a tonic to see what our 8-year-old twin granddaughters have been up to in Perth, Australia.

Today they've had the treat of a trampoline party to celebrate the 9th birthday of one of their schoolfriends, and one of the twin has sent me a souvenir picture decorated with a couple of emojis, which is the girls' current craze.

Our 8-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica

enjoying one of their schoolfriends' birthday trampoline party

in Perth, Australia - they're the two with the long fair hair.

How cute they are!

Meanwhile, our other daughter, Alison, who lives in Hampshire with Ed and their 3 teenage children, has been having fun potting and re-potting in her greenhouse. How like Lois she's become - Lois likes nothing better than keeping a watchful eye on her plants and vegetables, but I'd never have guessed, from Alison's childhood years, that she would grow up and take on the same interests as her mum.

Alison writes:

That's genetics at work, I guess!

flashback to 1978: Alison (3) (left) with Sarah (1) and Lois (32) -

who would have guessed then that Alison would become a keen gardener!

[Well it's a bit silly to expect to see future gardening tendencies in a photo of a child of three, now isn't it. Be reasonable! - Ed]

12:00 Lois emerges from her first zoom meeting and we have a quick lunch. Then she goes back for the second meeting - but the technology's giving trouble, she says.

The ranks of the sect-members have recently been swelled by a couple of dozen Iranian Christian refugees, both men and women - they like to be called "Persians", because the British public tend to associate the word "Iranian" with terrorism, which is a pity, but you can see how it happens.

 a group of sect-members, including Iranians,

relaxing on a hilltop in the Malvern Hills....

....and in Montpellier, Cheltenham

A lot of the refugees don't speak very good English, so when the preacher is giving his remarks, his words are usually simultaneously translated into Farsi by some software, I think it's a form of Google Translate, or something similar. 

But today the preacher, Preacher Sam, is speaking remotely from his home, because he's got COVID and is officially "isolating". The congregation, however, is listening to his words in the village hall near Tewkesbury. And the sect's technical guys are having trouble getting Sam's remarks to come through loud enough for the translation software to work satisfactorily in the hall. 

In the end, the meeting president has to take over and give his own impromptu remarks based on the same passage in Scripture.

What madness !!!!!

flashback to August 2021: Lois showcases the little village hall

where the local sect-members hold their Sunday meetings

Although the sect now holds its services near Tewkesbury, most of the refugees in fact live in Cheltenham or Gloucester, where the sect used to have a chapel. The costs of maintaining the chapel, which was listed as a historic building, became prohibitive, however, and a few years ago the sect sold it to a local couple, Ian and Sallie, who opened it up as an art gallery, called "Chapel Arts".

I read online today, that now the art gallery has itself closed, due to two years of lockdown followed by rising costs.

I suggest to Lois that the sect could maybe buy the renovated building back, and use it for services again, now that all these Persians have joined the sect.

Both of our daughters, Alison in Hampshire (turning 47 next month) and Sarah in Australia (45) attended several years of Sunday school in that building, so there are plenty of memories associated with it, going back 40 years. And Lois was a Sunday School teacher there for more years than she cares to remember. 

My god !!!!!

flashback to February 2017: Lois and I visit the Chapel Art gallery,

where her sect used to hold its Sunday meetings, and

we have a cup of coffee in the café, which used to be the chapel's kitchen

Happy times!!!!

14:00 At last we can go to bed for a couple of hours and forget all those hassles in an instant haha! 

16:00 We roll out of bed at 4 pm and relax on the sofa with a cup of tea and a buttered scone with home-made gooseberry jam. Yum yum!!!!!

19:00 After dinner we break the mould of our usual early evening activities by going for a walk around the local football field. Lois has a birthday card to post, so we do that on the way. 

It's a bright sunny evening, the shadows are long, and Cleeve Hill stands out particularly clearly - you know how that can happen in evening sunshine, don't you. We usually come in the mornings, so it's a change tonight to see the young people out playing soccer, instead of the Old Codgers we normally watch. My god!

Unfortunately the Whiskers Coffee Stand is closed now, it only stays open till 5pm -  damn!

we go for a walk round the local football field

that early evening sunlight - you can't beat it, can you.

20:30 We decide to watch the last hour or so of Paul McCartney's set at Glastonbury from last weekend. It's been hanging around on the "tape" for long enough.

Poor Paul!!!!

The last hour of the set is enlivened by Paul's two surprise guests - Dave Grohl, whom Lois and I have never heard of, and Bruce Springsteen. Paul enlists the aid of Dave to sing "When I Saw Her Standing There", and then he sings along with "Glory Days", Bruce's song, which is nice.

Those are young man's lyrics - "She was just seventeen, you know what I mean!", so it's nice for Lois and me tonight to hear some older people's lyrics in Bruce's "Glory Days". "Time slips away and leaves you with nothing" - oh dear! Yes, those glory days - they pass you by, no doubt about that!

And it's nice also that Paul finishes his show and sends the crowd back to their tents and sleeping-bags with his old lullaby, the Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End medley.

Yes, "once there was a way to get back homeward, once there was a way to get back home", and it's time for Lois and me to stagger up to bed.

For us, some of the biggest stars of the show were just the massive, raucous and happy Glastonbury crowd, a great mix of ages who seem to know all the words of the songs, and who sing along with them enthusiastically - my god, it's been worth watching just to see them!

Yes, "Hey Jude" - Lois and I remember seeing the Hey Jude video on TV when it was first aired, in 1968, and now, 54 years later, we're still here, and watching Paul singing it. My god! 

[That's enough My gods ! - Ed]

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!!

flashback to 1968 - the original video

But enough!!!!!

22:00 Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!