Well, for Lois and me, this is truly the first day of the rest of our life - a cruel era, when the local convenience store in the village is no longer willing to deliver our weekly groceries on a Saturday - the ones we order by phone on Fridays.
Oh cruel world, that has such people in't !! (Copyright William Shakespeare, modified)
Budgens (on the right), the convenience store in the village,
seen here in happier times, when the management team was kindness itself
and willing to deliver whatever groceries we ordered by phone - oh dear!
the local "Simply-Fresh" mini-supermarket
There's plenty of parking there, which is nice - do you remember it used to be the Fox and Hounds pub until a few years ago? Lois and I used to come here some evenings, and I came here on one or two lunchtime "do's" from work. [Nobody's going to care enough to remember those days - be realistic! - Ed]
the Simply-Fresh mini-supermarket in happier times -
as the Fox and Hounds pub, before it closed in 2017: sob sob!!!!
These are the two cut-out-and-keep "souvenir snapshots" of us actually in a shop. Make sure you order copies - they could be valuable and much-sought-after in a few years' time.
Lois looking at the so-called "bread section"...
...and me at the sadly depleted "cake corner"
we prepare to take our shopping out of the boot
and lug it (or "schlep" it) into the house
we have our weekly zoom call with Sarah, our younger daughter,
who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their
9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica
The family has been in Perth since 2015, but they're planning to move back to the UK in the next few months - and Sarah and Francis are getting worried that the twins will be way behind kids in UK schools, particularly when it comes to English and maths.
Sarah says that their teacher at the local primary school, Mr Black, has been setting the twins harder homework than the rest of the class, so he obviously recognises there's a problem.
Next month the family are due to move house, short-term, to a suburb nearer the coast, and rather than make the twins change schools for about the fifth time, Francis has decided to "home-school" them in maths, while Sarah will home-school them in English, at weekends, when she's not working. There isn't so much of an issue with English, Sarah says, because both girls are excellent at spelling, and they love to read - trips to the library in Joondalup are the highlight of their week, Sarah says.
Lois and I agree to order a maths text-book from Amazon UK, and post it to them - Amazon UK won't deliver to Australia, it seems, perhaps afraid of stepping on the toes of Amazon Australia.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
the maths text-book that the twins have been studying in their spare time -
we agree to post them the next in the series: the books are linked
to UK national curriculum requirements for particular grades / years
Years ago, a friend of ours, Mike, persuaded his daughter Suzanne and family to move back to the UK from New Zealand, because of what he called the poor standards in the local schools over there. At the time, I thought it was just Mike being fussy - he's always been a notorious "obsessive". But when I hear today from Sarah that the twins' class of 9-year-olds still aren't familiar with any multiplication tables more advanced than the "two times table" (Can This Be ??????), I feel like sending Mike a virtual apology for all I was thinking about him at that time, even though he never knew about it of course haha!
a typical two times table
The ancient duodecimal system is believed to have been based on the fact that you can count to twelve using the 3 finger joints of a hand of 4 fingers, without involving the thumb.
You do the maths haha!
Thumbs didn't like doing maths, which is a shame - it was a rich vein of human experience that they missed out on, wasn't it, and as a result the human race also missed out, unable to enjoy the pleasures of a nice 14-based or "quattuordecimal" system, which would have been even more fun.
A pity - and a missed opportunity there, no doubt about that.
14:00 For Lois and me, this is now our special time, for the next couple of hours. During the current mini-heat-wave we've taken to going to bed at 2 pm, in our daughter Sarah's old room at the back of the house - it faces north and looks out over the garden rather than the street, so it's nice'n'quiet. We close the windows and the curtains and turn the big fan on to max - that's the way you do it!!!!!
the view from Sarah's old bedroom window
- nice and quiet, just the way we like it!
21:00 Well, now we've "done" 2 days of this 3-day mini-heatwave, which is a nice feeling. We decide to go to bed on the Larkin poem in Thursday's radio tribute - a Larkin a day keeps the doctor away haha!
And we learn tonight that Larkin himself had a favourite toad paperweight that he made use of at his desk to keep a pile of papers in order - a horrible big fat ugly toad - oh dear!
Larkin is saying that you'd think it would be nice to be at the park instead of at the office, but when you think of the men you'd see there whiling away the day - men off sick or recuperating, down-and-outs rifling the litter-baskets, old men with walking sticks etc - Larkin is happy that he's not one of them.
There's some discussion in the programme about whether Larkin is sneering at these men, but the consensus seems to be that he isn't - he's just imagining himself in those roles, and what it might do to him not to have a job-based routine to his life, one that takes up around 8 hours out of every 24.
Larkin at his desk
Lois and I think it may be relevant to this poem also that the economic climate was so different in those days, in the pre-Margaret Thatcher era, with the average job being thought of as "safe", a true "job for life".
Coincidentally, in another programme we see tonight on TV, we learn that the comic actor Richard Briers, star of sitcoms such as "The Good Life" and "Ever Decreasing Circles", originally worked for a short time as a clerk for a cable company in the early 1950's. But after being told in his first few weeks that his retirement year was now fixed at 1999, he decided to give it up, horrified by the thought of doing that same job for another 40 odd years. This is basically what drove him to go in for acting as a career.
On the other hand, it does feel like it would have been kind of cosy for Larkin, to have a sometimes boring, but safe, job with an in-tray and a "loaf-haired" secretary, something to spend five days of your week doing. And who, sitting at some school-desk or at some work-desk at the UK's latitude, doesn't remember with nostalgia the shortened days near the winter solstice, when the street lights come on early and remind you that it'll soon be going-home time?
Larkin seen here in a churchyard with his "loaf-haired"
secretary (and lover) Betty Mackereth
It's a bit sad that Larkin thought of the job as getting him safely through to his eventual "home" at the cemetery, but then, that was Larkin, wasn't it! After all his favourite song was Bessie Smith's "I'm Down In The Dumps" - oh dear (again) !!!!
Poor Larkin !!!!!
a typical heavy toad-style paperweight
of the sort favoured by Larkin
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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