After all the excitement and fun of the weekend, when Lois and I played host to our daughter Alison and two of her 3 children - Rosalind (14) and Isaac (12), today life exacts its revenge and we have a fairly "yuck" day to compensate for the weekend of pleasure.
Oh dear!
flashback to Saturday, and our weekend of fun activities
with our daughter Alison and 2 of her children
Today it's back to reality!
First I have to get to grips with financial and legal matters, because our other daughter Sarah in Australia needs to know details of how she and Francis and their 9-year-old twin daughters are going to be able to buy a house in the UK. This whole subject is a struggle for me, because financial/legal matters are not my strong point, to put it mildly. Sarah needs answers, however, so I've got to do some research work, which is a pity!
I grit my teeth and get down to it, but try to keep the end result in my head - the fact that if all goes well, in a couple of months or so, Sarah and her little family will be living not too far away, instead of at a distance of 9.000 miles, which is what they are at the moment.
flashback to 2015: Sarah and family in Evesham, UK,
a few months before they moved to Australia - the twins are around 2 years old
the twins the way they look today, aged 9 and a half
How Lois and I long to see them all again'
Yikes!!!!!! And double yikes !!!!!!!!
A third (3rd) unpleasant task today is to (yet again) "clear the decks" for yet another "tradey", in this case a painter, who has been detailed to come to our house tomorrow at any time, could be as early as 8 am, to do some painting inside, in this case to paint our so-called "picture rails". And then we've got to stay in until he arrives and finishes the job.
How many times have we done this "clearing the decks" before, only to find that the "tradey" concerned doesn't turn up for some reason?
What a crazy world we live in!!!!
we start to take ornaments etc down and store them
in baskets in preparation for the painter coming tomorrow.
What a madness it all is !!!!!
11:00 An email comes in from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend with the latest ghastly news about inflation affecting food and other prices in Hungary (source 444.hu) .
But yikes, Hungarians, you deserve better than this!
One further downside to Brexit is that we seldom now see charts comparing our situation in the UK with that of our nearest neighbours, which is a pity.
12:30 Luckily the mood is lightened by another set of amusing Venn diagrams, something that Steve, our American brother-in-law, monitors for us on a weekly basis:
And perhaps we'd better all try and finish the original "Ulysses" before it's replaced by a new woke-style version, like they're doing with Roald Dahl. What a madness it all is !!!!!
I personally wasn't too impressed by this episode - it starts off in a rather low-key way with a miscellany of minor relics from the ancient city of Petra, but each segment only lasts a couple of minutes. Maybe these are Petra clips that should have stayed on the cutting-room floor perhaps?
20:00 We wind down with another episode of Bettany Hughes' oddly-named new series on "Treasures of the World".
It's interesting to hear about the ancient city of Jerash, which Lois and I had not heard of. A hundred miles north of Petra, it was first settled over 9000 years ago. However the city really came into its own under the Romans, when it had a population of 20,000 - greater than Pompeii. It's one of the best preserved Greco-Roman cities in the world.
remains of the Greco-Roman city of Jerash - the large area
surrounded by pillars was the forum
Jerash had 2 outdoor theatres, and it's nice to see that the seats were all "numbered" by figures carved into the stone, so I suppose you could ring up and book a specific seat, e.g. somewhere not behind a pillar, which is always good! [I hate to break it to you, but they didn't have phones in those days! - Ed]
a theatre with numbered seats - a nice touch if you
wanted to book somewhere not behind a pillar
[They didn't have pillars in those outdoor theatres surely! - Ed]
Another modern touch - the council must have been short of money. A lot of the roads stopped halfway towards their planned destinations, a bit like the HS2 today. See Venn diagrams above.
And although there was a nice temple to Artemis, the city's patron goddess, the council never got round to roofing it, which was a pity! And then in 749AD there was a massive earthquake spelling the end of the city, so by then it was too late. Oh dear!!!!!
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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