Busy busy busy again for Lois and me today, a weekend totally out of keeping with our usual quiet life-style. Guests for dinner tonight for the first time for 3 years - yikes!
Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, is calling us on zoom at 9:30 am (4:30 pm Perth time), and before that starts we've just got time to clap dozens of half-marathon runners running or stumbling down the road past our house - sorry, runners, we would have stayed longer to cheer on the stragglers normally. Our bad !!!!
we talk on zoom to Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia,
and to our 9-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica
It's more talking to the twins today than talking to Sarah and Francis, because the family is moving this week from the northern Perth suburb of Tapping to a new rental home nearer the coast at Eglinton. And Francis needs Sarah to help him carry out bits of their furniture to their trailer, bits of sofa etc.
20:00 Alone again in this great big house, Lois and I wind down with a new series, "How To with John Wilson", which gives a lot of helpful tips on how to compromise in order to survive in today's society and generally to get through life - much of it coming too late for Lois and me. Damn !!!!!
How can we develop a facility for small talk? Well, according to John, a nice to begin is to leave your house or apartment and try to find somebody who's willing to talk to you.
"You can talk about how nice the weather is," John continues, "But make sure you never mention climate change."
Isn't this great? I bet nobody's thought of these rules before, but now that John formulates them, they seem kind of obvious, don't they?
It's quite amusing to be talking to the twins and to see their parents in the background lugging parts of a sofa through to the back yard.
10:30 As soon as the zoom is over, Lois and I have got to start making our house look respectable for our two dinner-guests tonight, Marie-Ann and Alf, who are members of the same church as Lois.
What madness !!!!!
Who knew, or at least who remembered that it's Fathers Day today in Australia? I'd forgotten, because our UK one is in June for some reason. So a nice surprise for me today to open a package that came in the mail yesterday containing my present from Sarah, a nice key-ring with a souvenir photo of the two of us taken at Scarborough, W. Australia a few years ago.
I find that really touching. What an old softie I've become these days. Sob, sob !!!!
flashback to 2018: me with our daughter Sarah,
at Scarborough, W. Australia
The twins let us see their Father's Day cards and presents for Francis, which is cute too.
The house is an absolute tip, as we pile books and assorted junk all over the place in preparation for our downsizing later this year, when we hopefully move from Cheltenham to a smaller house in Malvern.
They arrive about 3:30 pm and suddenly it's yackety-yack-yack-yack again - in a nice way, of course, but Lois and I just aren't used to that after 3 years of lockdowns and social distancing. And we had a full-on day yesterday visiting Oxford for a get-together of some of my 30 or so cousins. What a madness this weekend has turned out to be!
Luckily Marie-Ann and Alf are going to help us with the downsizing a bit, because they agree to take away some books and winter clothing for the dozens of Iranian Christian refugees that have joined their local church in the last few months.
(left to right) Lois, Alf and Marie-Ann: visible around the room
are some of the books and winter clothes they've agreed
to take away for the Iranian Christian refugees who joined
their church recently.
"One of the main functions of small talk", John says, "is to fill space with polite conversation until you can be alone again. So make sure to only talk about stuff from your everyday life, that anybody can relate to and forget about easily."
And John has more. "You can talk about what's on TV, but make sure that you only mention the nice stuff."
What a great new series, especially for somebody like me who instinctively avoids company and never knows what to say in a conversation.
For the next episode, I'm going to make sure I take written notes - so watch this space!! [I don't want to see those notes in your blog, thank you very much! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!
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