Danskcolin: Sunday January 22nd 2023

09:00 Our weekly zoom call with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, and with our 9-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica.

It's been incredibly hot there recently again, 102F (39C). Lois and I can scarcely imagine such temperatures. Here in Malvern last night the temperature fell to 23F (-5C). But it warms our hearts to chat to our little family 9000 miles away.

I ask the twins what they've been reading - Lily's been reading some of the children's adventure story books that we sent them: from Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" series, which Sarah herself and even Lois and I read when we were that age. Jessica astonishes us slightly when she says she's been reading "Lord of the Rings", which isn't an easy read, I would imagine, to put it mildly. My goodness!

Jessica tells us she's been reading "Lord of the Rings"

- my goodness !!!!

Jessica shows us the sparkly tiger face she's been working on

..and some of their latest butterfly stickers

Jessica also had a difficult session with the family's dentist recently. She had to have a baby tooth removed, one that was obstructing the growth of a non-baby tooth. Sarah says she was a very brave girl.

The twins have quite a lot of differences in their personalities but they get on really well together, which is nice. Lily has a shorter attention span and a huge sense of humour, while Jessica is quiet, and loves to read or concentrate on her arts and crafts.

time to blow kisses and say goodbye - sob sob !!!!

10:00 The call ends, sob sob!

Lois and I think back to 2014-5, when the family were still living in the UK, and we were looking after the twins two days a week, every Monday and every Friday, while Sarah was at work, and her husband Francis was working for his online business.

June 2014: we look after our twin granddaughters, then aged 11 months,

on the days when both Sarah and Francis were busy working

Happy days!

10:45 Lois disappears upstairs to take part in her church's two Sunday meetings on zoom.

12:30 Later we have lunch.

Lois feels tired this afternoon, and it's not surprising - it's a lot of concentrated listening for her when her meetings are on. She has to take notes, because it's her job to send thank-you emails to the preachers, giving some brief allusions to what they've been saying.

15:00 We start to make preparations for attending a funeral later this week. My sister Gill sadly lost her husband Peter just before Christmas. Luckily she's had the support of two of her daughters in the difficult weeks that followed the death.

It was Peter's birthday yesterday - he would have been 65, and Gill and daughters Lucy and Maria, plus Maria's husband Tom, all went out for lunch to celebrate the day. We think this was a wonderful idea, and one that Peter himself would have been very happy with, no doubt about that.

19:00 We get a phone-call from Frances, our neighbour next-door-but-one until we moved here from Cheltenham on Halloween. She has some mail that our buyers handed to her that for some reason didn't get redirected to Malvern by the Post Office.

our former neighbour Frances (back row, fifth from left) - a picture from 2021

Francis doesn't yet know the names of our buyers and I tell her it's Adam, and Tatsiana, which I assume is a Russian name. Luckily, however, Frances has a degree in Russian, and she is able to tell me that Tatiana is the Russian form of the name, and that Tatsiana is probably Byelorussian or Ukrainian, which is nice to know!

The unredirected mail doesn't sound urgent, so she says she will bring it round to us next month when she has one of her regular musical sessions with a fellow guy she used to play with in the local orchestra. He lives only about 3 miles from us, in Hanley Swan.

It will be nice to see Frances again and hear about how the new owners of our old house are getting on.

20:00 We go to bed on a couple of old episodes of "Early Doors", the pub sitcom from the 2000's, including the one where Melanie meets her real Dad, but afterwards assures her step-dad, Ken, that he'll always be her number one. You must remember that one -it's a real doozy haha! And after all, Melanie's step-dad walked out and left her, didn't he, whereas it was Ken who did all the hard work of bringing her up. It's only fair, isn't it haha!!! [It's only a story, Colin! - Ed]