Wednesday January 11th

Stephen, our friendly handyman friend from Cheltenham, arrives at around 10am and is working here till 5pm - yikes, what a day! And we don't get our afternoon nap upstairs, which is a pity!

through our window we see Stephen arriving

and beginning to unload his tools from his car-boot

It turns out to be a long day, and on top of that, our kitchen-diner becomes, all day, Stephen's workshop, which is a  bit inconvenient, to put it mildly - my goodness!

our kitchen-diner becomes Stephen's temporary

workshop - what a madness it all is !!!!!!

Still, taking the long view, it doesn't really matter about all the disruption, because at least now we've got shelves and hooks in the larder, a small wall-cabinet in the downstairs loo, toilet-roll holders upstairs and downstairs, door-stops for all the doors and numerous other sine-qua-nons of civilised living haha!

our shiny new larder - hurrah!

Unfortunately we can't put our food - all those bottles and tins and all those packets - onto our shiny new shelves yet, because the shelves have been treated with something called "Danish oil", which we've never heard of, so we've got to wait until tomorrow to ensure the shelves are completely dry. Damn!!!!

We're still awaiting delivery of various items, like a large mirrored cabinet for the upstairs bathroom and sets of coat hooks, so Stephen will be back at a later date to fit all those, and also to retro-fit a picture rail, so that we can hang up a selection of our many pictures.

Perhaps after that, life will slowly start to return to normal - my goodness !!!!!!

This has been Day 2 of our great "in limbo" period, when we can't go out and we can't do much in the house either because there's somebody rushing around doing things here and there. What madness!!!!

20:00 At last we settle down on the couch and watch the first half of the first half of a new Ken Burns'  series on "The US and the Holocaust" - hardly bedtime viewing, so at 9pm we call a halt and watch an old "IT Crowd" sitcom to wind down. But at least we've made a start on Ken's "magnum opus", which is the main thing!

Lois and I didn't know that the roots of US's 20th century selective restrictions on immigration went back a few decades, and certainly as far back as the late 19th century. 

Beside Emma Lazarus's 1882 lines, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”.....

...we have to compare, in 1895, the words of Thomas Bailey Aldrich: 

"Wide open and unguarded stand our gates / And through them presses a wild, motley throng / In street an alley what strange tongues are these / Accents of menace, alien to our air / Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew / Oh Liberty, is it wise to leave the gates unguarded?"

Before the Civil War (1861-5) most immigrants to the US came from Northern Europe, but between 1870 and 1914, 25 million immigrants arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe, and included 2 million Jews.  In 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act tried to put the clock back, putting restrictive quotas on immigration from outside Northern Europe, although it had limited effect - the quota figures for Northern Europeans were never reached anyway, in practice.

And according to the programme, moves to limit immigration from the Far East, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, contributed to the anti-US resentment in Japan that finally found expression in the Pearl Harbour attack in 1941.

Throughout history, whenever and wherever they happen, floods of immigration always create a backlash, and it's never too long before it's the immigrants who start getting the blame for whatever big national problems are starting to concern people.

Lois comments that the pseudo-science of eugenics, which anti-immigrant parties seized on, was formulated first in Britain, but then was taken much more seriously in the US. But then at this time Britain did not have the same levels of immigration as were seen in the US, to put it mildly! In the US, the eugenics theory was widely propagated in the work of Madison Grant, and many respected Americans espoused the theory, including Teddy Roosevelt, Helen Keller and others.

Most American states passed various eugenics-inspired laws during this period, laws which were in later years rescinded. The last of such laws was only removed in 2014, however, so the theory had quite a long shelf-life.

And after World War I, fears of Bolshevism were added to the anti-immigrant groundswell, and figures such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Ford weighed in with their particular fears.

Another thing that Lois and I didn't know, was that, as Hitler's suppression of Jews proceeded apace in Germany in the 1930's, both American and British Jews deliberately avoided making noisy protests in the fear that this would make things even more difficult for their fellow Jews in Germany.

We were also unaware that when Hitler began "expanding" into Eastern Europe during World War II, he claimed inspiration from the American drive to annex and populate the west of the United States during the great westward expansion period of the 19th century.

Chilling stuff.

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!