20:00 Unusually Lois and I go to bed on a film tonight, billed by the Radio Times as "Film of the Day". It stars Emma Thompson as a slightly past-her-best late-night chat-show host, Katherine Newbury, who has been relying on a bunch of ageing white male writers, on a show where the ratings have been slipping recently.
The network tries the solution of bringing in a young Asian-American stand-up comedian, Molly Patel, to ginger up the ethnic and gender bias in the script room. They also encourage Katherine Newbury herself to show more of herself and her opinions in what she says, instead of relying on the writers' gags too much.
Sounds good, and as the film works out, it shows the addition of Molly as saving the show from being cancelled.
My problem is that I find the jokes that the ageing white writers come up with much more entertaining than Molly's Asian-American jokes or Katherine Newbury's opinions and views on the world.
What is wrong with me?!!!! I'm clearly out of step. No, I'm not a male chauvinist pig, and I'm not a racist, I tell you! I just think the writers of this film could have come up with some funnier lines for Molly to write, and some more interesting attitudes for Katherine to portray, and perhaps even made the ageing white male writers' gags a bit less funny, and then I could have swallowed the film's premise, no problem haha!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
07:00 Lois and I roll out of bed to make sure we can have our shower and get Bedroom 3 ready before our 9 am zoom call with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia.
Bedroom 3 is in a mess because we had to transform it and move everything about yesterday so that the guy from Hillary's Blinds could do his work in there. What madness !!!!!
It's really cold here today, with sleet falling outside, so it's nice to see Sarah and our 9-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica on the beach near Perth with a gorgeous blue sky above them and a gorgeous blue sea behind them. What bliss it must be!
The girls, however, are more interested in seeing what frost, snow and sleet looks like - they never get any of those in Perth, although Sarah says it's different "over east", as people in Perth say: i.e. over nearer the East coast, in Melbourne and places like that. where they do sometimes get frost and snow.
Sarah in sun-glasses on the beach in summertime Australia...
...Jessica with the blue of the Indian Ocean in the background....
At the end of the call Lily waving us goodbye...
..and Jessica with Sarah
12:30 Lois disappears into Bedroom 3 to take part in her sect's communion service on zoom. I write a couple of Christmas cards to our neighbours, telling them that we'll be away at Christmas. I take them round in person, and we exchange good wishes for the holiday season. They're nice guys, and quiet too, which is a bonus!
15:00 I put my phone on charge and Lois and I settle down on the sofa to watch the World Cup Final between France and Argentina. I don't like to watch soccer unless Lois is sitting there watching as well, because of her amusing comments - I wish the BBC would take her on, it would liven up their soccer coverage beyond recognition, that's for sure! "Well, France won it last year, they mustn't be greedy!" was her masterful comment at the end of this game, which pretty much sums it all up, doesn't it!
16:00 I go over to pick up my phone to check something, and that's when I read the awful news. Forty minutes ago my sister Gill in Cambridge had texted me to say that her husband Peter passed away this morning. He hadn't been well for a couple of weeks apparently, and he and Gill spent Friday night in A&E. They had been married for 36 years.
Thankfully, Gill has one of her 3 daughters, Lucy, with her at the house, and another, Zoe, is on her way home. Gill and Peter's third daughter Maria, however, is away on her honeymoon in New Zealand with Tom - Lois and I had attended their wedding reception in the summer.
At time of sending her text, Gill had not been able to contact Maria. She and Tom had finally managed to get away this month after many disappointments - both wedding reception and honeymoon had been heavily postponed because of the pandemic.
There's never a good time, we realize that, but we can't help thinking, what an awful time for Peter to pass away, just before Christmas, and how awful also for Maria, on her honeymoon, the holiday of a lifetime in New Zealand. Our hearts go out to her.
As the news begins to sink in, Lois and I think immediately of similar events in our own lives. We were on holiday in Hungary when Lois's only sibling, her brother Andrew, became critically ill in Oxford. We were able to get back to England in time to visit him in hospital, but he died shortly afterwards.
And then during our holiday in Denmark in 2013, my brother Steve died, also in Oxford - we actually got a phone call, while we were walking along a street in Copenhagen, from the policeman who had discovered Steve's body at the flat, where he had lived alone. And later during that same holiday, Jenny, Andrew's wife, i.e. Lois's sister-in-law, also died in Oxford.
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