Saturday March 18th 2023

It's been a day of self-indulgence today, I'm happy to report.

Tomorrow is Mothers Day in the UK and Nigeria, but Lois and I don't want to go out to lunch on Mothers Day, when all the pubs and restaurants will be packed at lunchtime. Why put ourselves through that? Haha!

So we do our usual thing and do lunch out on the day before, the Saturday, when it's much quieter, and you get served more quickly. It's a no-brainer, really, isn't it!

So Lois puts on her lovely red earrings - the ones I like particularly - and a nice skirt etc, and I find a jacket and tie etc, and we go off to the Bluebell Inn, which we've passed by many a time, but have never gone inside, since we moved from Cheltenham to Malvern about 4 months ago.

we arrive, looking like a typical stylish couple, 

at the Bluebell Inn, Malvern's oldest pub

It's a lovely old pub, with the oldest bit being to the right of the main building (see photo above). 

Would you believe that the oldest bit of it was built over 500 years ago, in 1512, when a young and still dashing, 21-year-old King Henry VIII had been on the throne for only about 4 years? Well, it's true you know! And this was well before he started getting fat: at this stage he was still a bit of a sportsman, wowing all the young ladies of the court etc. 

When we go inside the Inn and order our starters, we're the only customers in this roomy pub, but then it slowly starts to fill up. We notice a theme with the customers today - it's middle-aged couples or middle-aged women, bringing in their poor elderly mothers, or elderly father too if he's survived, to sit them down and give the poor old devils a little treat on the-day-before-Mothers-Day, when it's quiet. 

Poor souls haha !!!!

And poor us, because we haven't got any sons or daughters living nearby to drive us over for a special treat, so we have no option but to drive ourselves here. Poor us (again) !!!!!!

it's still very quiet as we start on our starters - Lois has a toasted

bruschetta with feta cheese, tomato, onion, basil leaves etc

I have some soup of the day with some nice crusty bread roll

We move on to our main course, and there are a few more customers now.

Lois has a smoked beef and pancetta lasagne, with side salad etc

I have sausage and mash with crispy streaky bacon 

and caramelised red onion gravy - yum yum!

We soon start to realise that we've struck out again as regards the main event - the pudding, because we made the mistake of having both a starter and a main course, and now we're both soon feeling far too full to contemplate ordering a dessert. Damn!!!

Plan B swings into operation - why not just go home, go up for a nap, and then come down and have one of the chocolate puddings from the freezer on the sofa. See? We're not as completely clueless as we look haha! And after that, we can work on the crossword in next week's Radio Times, and Lois can read me out news highlights from her copy of "The Week". Perfect!!!

we do a bit more of the crossword in the Radio Times,

and then Lois reads me out some shocking stories from her copy of "The Week"

- a typical scene on the sofa at our house, no doubt about that!

Lois always gets far more done in a day than I do, needless to say, and I would doing her a disservice if I didn't say that today is not entirely 100% napping and eating for her. In the morning, for instance, she manages to catch a talk or two on zoom from a preacher at her church's Study Day in the Midands, all about the Israelites and their wanderings in the wilderness. How does she do it all? What a woman!!!

today's preacher, his subject "The Book of the Wilderness",

all about the Israelites and their exile in Egypt

In the last couple of years, the church's ranks have been hugely swollen by Iranian Christian refugees, attracted by the church's rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, and escaping Iran's current manifestation of all the crazy regimes that the country has had, pretty much non-stop, since the Shah was kicked out in 1979.

some of the Iranians, with their British friends,

in the Midlands today for their church's study day.

Some of these refugees are starting to develop a good standard of English, but many are struggling, not surprisingly. Farsi is very different from English, to put it mildly. The languages are actually related, because they're both from the Indo-European family, but the two languages split off from each other thousands of years ago. 

There aren't many words where that relationship actually helps you - my goodness, no! A couple of the numbers look vaguely familiar: two is "do", six is "shesh", nine is "noh" for instance", but that's not a lot of help is it. These are all relics of our shared ancestral Yamnaya culture in South West Asia several millennia ago, when our linguistic ancestors first learnt to count from one to ten on their fingers.

map of the original Yamnaya culture - and location of our linguistic ancestors

...........

Learning Farsi for English-speakers is a challenge also, no doubt about that!

But, to get you started, here's a genuinely useful tip for the beginner - "Bisto" isn't a make of gravy in Iran, it's their word for "twenty", becomes it's "twice-ten" - bis-to, see? 

an old 16 oz tin of Bisto gravy powder

Warning: in Iran, "Bisto" has nothing to do with gravy, so just be careful, 

that's all I'm saying - to confuse the two words is a typical "rookie error" and

marks you out as a beginner from the get-go, not to mention

that it's also bound to cause more than a few furtive smurks at your expense!

Some of the churches in Lois's fellowship use modern technology, like Google Translate, to flash up a simultaneous Farsi translation of the preachers' remarks on a screen behind him as he talks. This, however, must be tough going for the Iranians listening, I suspect, and I bet also that the Google version isn't always perfect. 

Today, for the study day, a different approach is being used -  the audience hears first the English sentence from the preacher, followed by a Farsi version from the interpreter. However, this means that all the talks take twice as long, and presumably also come across a bit disjointed, so this solution also isn't without its issues.

flashback to a typical Sunday at Lois's home church at Tewkesbury -

note the bits of Farsi text at the top of the screen behind where the preacher normally stands

22:00 We wind down on the sofa with an interesting TV documentary about autism in women, featuring the experiences of Christine McGuinness, model and wife of TV game-show host Paddy McGuinness, although the couple have been separated now for a few years.

A fascinating programme for many reasons. I don't know that much about autism, for a start, and, while Lois knows much more than I, she's interested to learn more about the female angle: she knows already that many treatments and medications are researched and tested solely or mainly on men, because men basically have simpler bodies than women. They don't have to have babies so there's less to consider in your research, which works out to be much cheaper.

But what a madness !!!!

Autism has for a long time been considered a male problem, and when autistic women have sought medical help in the past they were fobbed off with alternative, and incorrect, diagnoses, like social anxiety, bipolar disorder ADHD etc, and they tend to get prescribed various medications that don't work. Another impediment is that women are better at hiding or "masking" their problems, than men are. 

I didn't know that one of the things autistic people hate the most is when things happen that they haven't been able to plan for. They like to rehearse everything in advance, including the kind of conversations they're going to have with the people they're due to meet that day. Nothing panics them more than somebody saying, "Let's meet up at lunchtime for a drink", for example. 

They watch other people to get clues as to how they should be reacting. "Are other people laughing? Then I should probably join in!". And sufferers from autism don't like changes, or food they haven't tried before. They prefer simple-looking food - the so-called "beige diet", and clothes in simple colours: no patterns please!

I also didn't know that autistic people have hugely heightened senses of smell and hearing - they will hear and smell pretty much everything in the room, and they find it unbearable to be in a noisy or smelly environment, for example. 

Many women develop autism when they get to secondary school. At primary schools, the days tend to be very structured, while secondary schools encourage a more free-and-easy approach, to prepare students for being able to lead responsible lives as adults. But at this point autistic youngsters start to panic - they like structure!

Christine herself found she couldn't cope with secondary school. She dropped out in her mid-teens, and her mother encouraged her to go in for beauty pageants, because her other talents had been "masked" by her autism, and she appeared to have no other career prospects.

A test is being developed for autism, the ADOS test (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule), which measures the degree of the condition in the patient. However, male subjects respond differently to female subjects, so more research is needed maybe.

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

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