Today is a bit of a nothing-day for Lois and me, as we're both suffering from colds, especially Lois, whose cold is worse than mine, and every so often the quiet of our little home is ruptured by one of her mega-sneezes. My goodness !!!!
We cancel our usual weekend zoom session with our daughter Sarah, who, with her little family, sadly lives 9000 miles away from us in Perth, Australia. Sarah has also got a cold. But it was nice over Christmas that we've had a few photos from her of our beloved 9-year-old twin granddaughters, Lily and Jessica.
Jessica ....
...and Lily
the twins, here showcasing the junior sewing machine
that Lois and I gave them for Christmas
And we remember those happy days when Sarah used to bring them to us on Mondays and Fridays every week for us to look after while she was at work in Evesham and Francis was working online at home.
me and Jessica at Prestbury Bakery Stores
Lois and Lily in our living-room in Cheltenham
flashback to July 2014, when the twins were approaching
their first birthdays, showing their first interest in clothes
We don't manage much today, but we do manage to put a Morrisons grocery order in online, which is due to come late on Monday morning.
Also I start to think about our U3A groups. Lynda, who leads the local "Making of English" group is going to be holding our first meeting of 2023 on Friday. And although we usually spend our meetings looking at medieval texts in Middle English, we're going to be doing something different this time, doing a bit of Middle English, but also discussing approaches to some of the many other forms of English, including both Anglo-Saxon and American English. So watch this space.
In a couple of weeks' time Lois and I will be hosting our next Danish group meeting, continuing to read Sissel Bjergfjord's book of short stories, all based around the lives and loves of a group of passionate Danish vegetable-growers, all working their allotments in the same little complex just outside Copenhagen.
Danish writer Sissel Bjergfjord with her book of short-stories
about the tempestuous lives of some passionate Danish vegetable-growers
I decide to make a start today of doing vocab sheets for the next lot of pages that we'll be looking at during our next meeting.
It's nice that the stories avoid clichéd "neat endings" - in the first few of her stories that we were read, I was disappointed by this, but I've come to like the writer's realistic approach. In the current story a mother of two is being regularly beaten up by her partner, a passionate Mediterranean type called Sergio.
The woman eventually gets away from him and hides herself away with the 2 children in a friend's cottage on the allotment complex A nice, unassuming, single young neighbour at the allotments, René, befriends her and offers to fix her faulty door-frame and the door lock. In return she helps him find his missing cat.
Later that evening the René calls round with a bottle of wine to celebrate the return of his cat, and you think that maybe the he and woman will end up in bed together. And maybe René will be the woman's rescuer, settle down with her and help her bring up the kids and ward off the violent Sergio.
But no! The evening ends, and with it Sissel's short story. René indeed just politely says goodnight, and the woman goes to her children's bedroom to check on them and tuck them in again, before going to bed herself.
That's real life, though, isn't it. No easy answers or pat solutions - oh dear!!!! Still, maybe René will call again - let's hope so!
copyright Hazel O'Connor
It's all about Jack Malik, a struggling musician in rural Suffolk, and about his young manager, Ellie Appleton, who dotes on him, unrequitedly.
The weird stuff starts when Jack Malik wakes up after a road accident in 2004, to find himself in a world where nobody has ever heard of the Beatles and their songs, nor have they heard, confusingly, of Coca Cola or cigarettes, or Harry Potter: everything else seems to be normal, strangely.
How weird is that?
Jack tries to capitalise on this situation by pretending that he has just composed all of the Beatles songbook that he can remember the words for, and he starts to gain worldwide fame as a result. He decides to dump his local Suffolk manager Ellie, who still carries a torch for him, in favour of an ambitious trans-Atlantic manager Debra, and he starts to play big stadium concerts in the US and UK.
The premise of the film is that Jack eventually rejects all the fame and fortune, and goes back to Ellie, and the two live happily ever after, in obscurity in Suffolk, with Jack releasing all his supposed "compositions" onto the internet, downloadable for free.
And there's a touching subplot about where the Beatles songs came from, in this scenario: in the story, we discover that John Lennon did in fact write all his great songs, but that he also rejected fame and fortune, and, now in his late 70's, he is still alive and living a happy life with his partner, in obscurity, somewhere on the Lancashire coast. And that's why nobody has heard of him, or heard of the Beatles.
Does the plot all hang together, and does it really make any kind of sense? Of course not!!! But never mind, eh, it's New Year's Eve after all !
And it's nice to hear so many Beatles songs again, that's for sure, including "The Long and Winding Road", sung by Jack in a small Suffolk venue, before he became famous, being talent-spotted by Ed Sheeran.
I've probably told you before that I first heard this song in 1970-71 on a tannoy, when I was walking through a massive Tokyo department store during my student year there. Did I mention that it made me feel incredibly homesick, for England in general, but mostly for... [Yes, yes, mostly for Lois - we know all about that! This is your final warning: don't ever bring that blasted song up again! - Ed]
flashback to 1971: me outside a Tokyo department store
22:00 We put ourselves, and 2022, to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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