Lois and I are staying at our daughter Alison's house this week, to catsit while Alison, Ed and their 3 children spend a week in a self-catering cottage on the Isle of Wight. It sounds like a nice peaceful break for us, but it isn't as peaceful as you might imagine.
Today we've got to make sure we're not in bed when Joanna the cleaning lady arrives at 8:15am - she's going to concentrate today on the first floor of this crumbling Victorian mansion, the floor which includes our bedroom, and then after she'd done that she'll go down to the ground floor, just limiting herself to the kitchen, utility room and additional bathrooms. She'll do the rest of the ground floor next Thursday - it's a two week cleaning plan.
a typical cleaning lady
Joanna turns out to be a chatty soul, and we have some nice conversations with her during her four-hour stint - she says that it's tough times for cleaners at the moment. A lot of families are cancelling their cleaning ladies, she says, because of all the cost of living rises going on at the moment.
Joanna's husband is a stone-cutter, however, a profession that Lois and I have never heard of, but it seems people are still building stone arches or ordering garden features made of stone, so his job seems safe. We know there are also stone-cutters in the Minecraft computer game, however, because our grandchildren have told us, although those jobs aren't open to Joanna's husband, needless to say, which seems a little unfair, but life can be cruel sometimes haha.
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
a typical stone-cutter who exists in the real world,
not in the world of the Minecraft computer game
On the way round the mansion's extensive grounds, Lois takes the chance to revive her badminton skills, learnt from some Malaysian fellow-students at her college in Brighton in the 1960's. And yes, she discovers that she's still "got it", which is nice! Next time, she's going to try playing against an opponent, which will be a sterner test, no doubt about that!
Lois revives her badminton skills, learnt from Malaysian
fellow-students at her college in Brighton in the 1960's
- she's still "got it", no doubt about that!
It's been a worrying time for the family, because there's a severe shortage of rental property in the Perth area at the moment, due apparently to the fact that a lot of people from "over east" as they say in Perth (i.e. people from the East Coast) are wanting to move to the Perth area currently - Lois and I don't know exactly why.
They've been very anxious to get this rental, because, unusually, it's on a 6-month contract - usually these places want you to stay a full year, but Sarah and Francis are hoping to move back to the UK in the spring so this contract is ideal.
16:00 Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, says that there's currently speculation in the Hungarian press, that the Russians are considering handing over bits of the Ukraine to Ukraine's neighbours. Presumably, if true, this is a bribe to make these neighbours - Poland, Romania and Hungary - feel more charitable towards Moscow.
Sarah and Francis's new home in Eglinton WA
Russia's alleged plan to "downsize Ukraine" to the benefit mainly of themselves,
but also to the benefit of Hungary - the ringed purple Transcarpathia region -
as well as other regions that the Russians have allegedly earmarked for Poland and Romania
Meanwhile, after a speech delivered a few days ago, controversial pro-Russian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been accused by the influential Hungarian news website telex.hu, of stealing jokes from Billy Graham's wife to put in his speeches.
Orbán joked in his speech a few days ago that his wife, Anikó Lévai, had never considered divorcing him - but murdering him, yes, definitely!
controversial pro-Russian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
seen here with his wife, Anikó Lévai
Apparently this was a joke first made, and copyrighted, by US evangelist Billy Graham's wife, Ruth Bell Graham, the website reveals.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
Ruth Bell Graham, with her evangelist husband, Billy
the back wall of Ed's so-called "lawnmower port"
is now half done - they've started from the bottom, which makes sense to me
- although I don't know anything about this type of job, let me admit that!
I don't know if they're hoping we'll tell that to Ed, and soften the blow, but Lois and I have decided to stay out of this one! It's between the builders and Ed - that's what we say !!!!
flashback to last Saturday: I inspect the so-called "games room"
(behind me and to the left), the back wall of which the builders say
is quote "as rotten as Johnny" unquote. Oh dear!
It's total madness, I tell you !!!!!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch a programme in the series "Who Do You Think You Are", which traces the family trees of celebrities. This one is all about Sue Perkins, comedy partner of Mel Giedroyc - the "Mel and Sue" double act.
Comedy duo Sue Perkins (left) with Mel Giedroyc,
on the cover of a recent Radio Times
Sue and Mel co-presenting "The Great British Bake-Off"
Her mother's family were ethnic Germans who 100 years ago were well-to-do farmers and owned a big farm in what's now Lithuania - who would have guessed that?!! Sue certainly didn't know that until the BBC's genealogical researchers got to work on her mother's back-story, that's for sure.
And Sue is especially pleased to know that her mother's family came from what is now Lithuania, because the family of Mel Giedroyc, Sue's comedy partner, also has roots in Lithuania. This bombshell has Sue in tears of joy, which is nice to see. Lois and I were quite surprised tonight to see that Sue, despite her tough image, sheds tears at the drop of a hat - who would have guessed !
Sue was born and brought up in England because her mother's grandparents, Emil and Anna, left Eastern Europe - a part of what was then called Russia, in the late 19th century and ended up over here, getting married in London in 1901. And the rest is history.
The Tyzlau family stayed on their farm until 1939, when the Nazi-Soviet pact split up the whole region between the two great totalitarian powers of the era, and the Tyzlaus' neighbourhood ended up in Soviet Russia.
Ethnic Germans from the area were then "returned" to Germany. Here, they found themselves being "graded" to one of four different degrees of "Aryan-ness" - they turned out to be Grade 3 ("below average or of mixed race"), i.e. next to bottom. A lot of the criteria were based on completely phoney "eugenics" measurements like shape of head, distance between the eyes etc.
the registration card indicating that Sue's forefathers
were classified as "Grade 3 Aryans"
The saddest part of the story is about one member of the family who was a deaf mute with learning difficulties, who ended up in a Nazi death camp.
We see Sue about to conclude how lucky her mother's grandparents were to have escaped all this by having moved to Britain, but unfortunately she finds out that Emil, her great-grandfather, didn't escape upheaval entirely. He found himself interned in Britain as a German national for most of the First World War.
Emil didn't have too bad a time though - he was sent to a camp at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, where he was able to carry on his trade as a tailor. One of the jobs on offer to Germans in the camp was to sew clothes for the other inmates. And his wife Anna carried on the family tailoring business in London, until her husband was released.
an old photo of the sewing machine room at the Isle of Man internment camp
at Knockaloe, where Sue's great-grandfather was able to carry on his tailoring
And who would have guessed that one of Emil's fellow inmates at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man was none other than Joseph Pilates, inventor of Pilates and the spinal release principle?
But doesn't the whole programme show what awful upheavals some people had to go through in those far-off times, and how lucky Lois and I, and our forefathers, have been, in the quiet lives we've all led here.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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