Today is the last day for Lois and me to be rattling around this house like peas in a drum, because tonight around 6pm our daughter Sarah, plus Francis and their 9-year-old twins, will be arriving from their latest Airbnb to spend the weekend here.
They're still waiting for the rental home they've applied for to be made available for them. The date is expected to be around the end of May but, incredibly, this date hasn't been firmed up yet, and so in the meantime they have to squeeze themselves and their belongings into our tiny new-build home, here in Malvern every weekend.
I think "Yikes!" is the appropriate word, once again - oh dear!
We spend the morning adapting things in our house as best we can to accommodate 4 extra people, and generally cleaning and vacuuming everything that doesn't move. Madness reigns as usual, in other words.
The twins' room is particularly problematic - there's hardly room to walk in there, as in the bedroom that Sarah and Francis are using.
We've been washing and drying the twins' sheets this week, and today we have to move piles of soft toys and huge bags of possession off of each bed in term, so that we can change the sheets and make each bed up again with its own little duvet. Then we can put the soft toys and bags back on top of the beds again. This is madness, taken to a new level, if ever you saw it - my goodness!!!
13:20 After lunch we get some big news from my sister Gill in Cambridge. Her eldest daughter Zoe and her partner Chris are expecting a baby, she says, and the first scan is all okay, which is really great news all round - we are so happy for Gill, who's had a rough few months recently, bless her, since her husband Peter sadly died at around Christmas time 2022.
13:45 I browse the Hungarian media (as you do!). I see that the EU is trying its best to hit back at Orbán, Hungary's crazy pro-Russian Prime Minister, by continuing to bar Hungary from getting EU aid, and looking to declare Hungary unfit for the Council Presidency when its turn comes up.
And Lois tells me that Hungary is also increasingly being shunned by Poland, at one time the country's fellow far-right ally in the EU, mainly because of Orbán's support for Putin, which contrasts with the enormous assistance that Poland has been giving to the Ukraine and to Ukrainian refugees.
And Lois also tells me that one of Hungary's top military chiefs this week went so far as to downplay Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, calling it "a local war that got out of hand".
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
It's all a rather sad contrast to the early 1990's when Viktor Orbán, the guy who's now become a crazed would-be autocrat, was in those far-off days the great white hope for democracy in Eastern Europe, in the period when the Soviet Union was starting to break up.
The advert for Fidesz, the party with the orange as its symbol, features the slogan "If you're tired of bananas, why not try an orange?", which I was told was a joke popular in women's prisons, although I'd like that confirmed please, and as soon as possible, but only if you can find the time, obviously! Send me a postcard - first class stamp, naturally haha!
14:00 Lois and I decide to go up to bed for one of our afternoon naps, as it's our last chance for a while - there won't be any afternoon naps at the weekend, that's for sure!
16:00 We come downstairs and have a cup of Earl Grey and some little cakes on the sofa, and we look at the puzzles in next week's Radio Times.
This afternoon's nap has clearly done us a lot of good, because we get unprecedented 8 out of 10 scores in both the Popmaster quiz and on the intellectually more prestigious Eggheads questions, which is nice. We've still got it, evidently! [I'd like to see more proof of that than what you've offered here! - Ed]
The Only Connect categories turn out to be (1) Canadian provincial capitals, (2) "Kings", (3) Horror Films, and (4) Michael Jackson songs.
See? Simples haha !!!!!
18:00 Sarah Francis and the twins arrive, and suddenly this house is full of people again, and the conversation is going full-blast and without a break. Let's hope Lois and I can keep up with it all this weekend - but we're not as young as we were, to put it mildly.
20:00 Francis has gone out with the car, and Lois, Sarah and the girls have gone out for a walk round the estate, so I get a rare moment of peace and quiet with my laptop in the kitchen, which is nice!
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