At last Lois has managed to get her hair cut, at the local "Divine" hair salon - although warning: that's just the name of the shop! I drive her down there for her 10 am appointment but she decides to walk back afterwards: it takes just 20 minutes but it's pretty much all uphill.
Later she gets on the sofa and showcases the result for me.
Lois after her latest haircut - doesn't she look great?
Ave, the mortgage broker who works for the financial firm
used by our son-in-law Ed
lunchtime: we give the twins lunch on one of their last days in the UK.
A week later and they were gone - sob sob!!!!
November 29th 2015 - the awful day of farewells: sob sob (again) !!!!
16:00 Every 10 years the UK Government carries out a census of residents, but these remain confidential for a certain length of time - I guess it's 100 years, for privacy reasons. They've recently released the content of the 1921 census and Lois now has access to it through one of her family history sites.
It's nice to see the first appearance of my mother in a government census - she was born in Bridgend, Glamorgan in October 1919, and was recorded as being 1 year 8 months old at the time that the census was taken, in June 1921. Her father is listed as a grocer's assistant working for JL Stradling's in the town. My mother's 6 siblings were all still at school apart from the eldest, my uncle John, who was 14 years old at the time of the census, and already an apprentice pattern-maker (whatever that means) for local firm Shepheard & Sons.
my mother with her siblings and parents, in 1929: my mother
is in the middle row on the right, her face partially obscured by one of the twins,
which is a pity! She was "the quiet one" in what was generally a pretty loud bunch of kids.
The language of the family in 1921 is listed in the census as English - I think Bridgend was a mixture of English- and Welsh-speakers at the time.
Many of my grandfather's family (but not my grandfather himself) were active in journalism and the professions, and they were English-speakers only, whereas many of my grandmother's family were in pub and hotel management, and they were bilingual.
Certainly my mother learned Welsh after she started going to school but I don't think she ever achieved fluency in the language, although she did learn how to pronounce Welsh place-names, which was a definite advantage, living where they did. And what an achievement too - my goodness, no easy task is it haha!
Tip for non-Welsh-speakers: if you're looking for the exit to get out of somewhere unpleasant (or pleasant), look for signs saying "Allan" with a double 'L' - its usually the quickest way out: that's my "superhint" for this week!
superhint: a typical "Allan" sign in Wales
20:00 We settle down on the sofa and watch the first half of the first programme in Alice Levine's new series of "Sex Actually".
It's a bit of a weird one, this programme - the first half of it at least, before we switch over. Alexander in North Carolina seems completely in love with his synthetic wife Mimi, but we find it odd that although she talks, her lips don't move. Wouldn't that be off-putting? You'd think, wouldn't you!
Alexander, deeply in love with his synthetic wife Mimi - awwww !!!
Later we find out that Alexander is a perhaps overly sensitive guy, who had a lot of bad experiences with women in his life, including his only real long-term relationship, with a woman he was expecting to marry until she revealed that she was a lesbian.
His mother backs his choice of a synthetic wife - she had two failed marriages. It would be a hard-hearted person who begrudged Alexander his synthetic happiness, don't you think? That's what we say, anyway - call us what you like haha!
Later, presenter Alice travels to Berlin where she gets to talk to a silicon woman. The woman appears to have a proper conversation with Alice, although again without moving her lips. However it turns out later that her comments are being spoken by an operator with a headset in an adjoining room.
There's a bit of a nasty moment though, when the silicon woman tells Alice that she's heard a rumour that Alice was a very naughty girl at school. Alice is a bit taken aback at this, and denies the allegation.
It seems Alice preferred to call herself "cheeky" at school, or maybe "a bit precocious" - no more than that, she says.
The conversation turns out to be acutely embarrassing to Alice, she admits, with its suggestion that she was "very naughty" at school, because she was actually very famously head girl at her old school, the Alderman White School in Bramcote. She says she doesn't know where the potentially damaging rumour started, but she will get to the bottom of it, she stresses. Oh dear, somebody's going to be in trouble!
Oh dear, what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
And now, I can exclusively reveal the origin of the silicon woman's uncanny ability to talk. Yes, there's a real woman hidden away in an adjoining room, who is in fact voicing all the silicon woman's apparent remarks.
See? It's quite simples really!
21:00 We wind down with an interesting documentary about the activities of young Mormon missionaries in Britain.
It comes as a surprise to Lois and me that the Mormons' missionary activities in the UK are masterminded from Chorley, Lancashire, where our daughter Sarah used to live - a seemingly unremarkable town. Also surprising is the revelation that there are more Mormons in Chorley than in any other town or city in Europe. Who would have guessed?
The enthusiasm, cheerfulness and general all-round niceness and lack of pushiness on the part of the church's young missionaries, and of their older mentors, is certainly infectious. The church always pairs up young Mormon missionaries with a suitable companion of the same sex. This is partly for mutual support, but also, we wonder, maybe for helping to keep them on the straight and narrow, at a "dangerous" age: a time in life where there are a lot of temptations around, temptations that their parents' generation wants desperately for them to avoid? Perhaps it's time we were told!
This is maybe the Mormon equivalent of the practice in many Moslem and similar countries of marrying young women off as early as possible so that they've always got a man to keep an eye on them - their husband taking the place of the young woman's father. And certainly there seem to be a great eagerness on the part of young Mormons to settle down and raise a family as early as possible.
We meet Joe and Ashlyn, both 22, who have been engaged for 3 months, and are now planning their wedding. Ashlyn's parents moved from Utah USA to Lancashire 2 years ago, when her dad bought the local Burnley Football Club, and Joe, a local lad, who is also a Mormon, took a job there working for the club. And the rest is history.
Her dad sent a picture of Joe to Ashlyn and said to her "What do you think?".
And Ashlyn says "I took a video of Joe, with his accent, to send to my friends, and they're all like "Oh my gosh, he's Tom Holland!". And the couple have got Ashlyn's father's permission to get married at the Burnley Football Club stadium.
Awwwww !!!!!
A touching note to go to bed on !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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