Tuesday May 30th 2023

 07:30 Lois and I are in our bed, awake but keeping a low profile as our daughter Sarah, husband Francis, and their 9-year-old twins, prepare to load up their tiny electric Mini Cooper and drive off to Evesham, dropping Sarah off at the accountancy firm that she's recently taken a job with, before Francis drives himself and the twins off to the campsite where the family are going to be camping during the working weeks to come. They'll be staying at the campsite every Monday till Friday for the time being, before returning to stay with Lois and me every weekend. 

It's all a bit of a madness isn't it?! Go on, admit it haha!!!

Our bed is right next to the window so from our pillow we can observe poor Francis trying to pack some of the family's mountain of belongings into their tiny electric Mini Cooper in the chilly early morning. What a madness it all is! 

[Just watch it, that's all, it isn't 7 o'clock yet and already you're approaching your madness quota for the day! - Ed]

From the comfort of our pillow, Lois and I can watch our son-in-law Francis

struggling to cram a selection of the family's mountains of possessions

into their tiny electric Mini Cooper

07:45 Finally Lois and I leave the comforting warmth of our bed and go downstairs in our dressing gowns to wave the family goodbye, and to give them our good wishes for the coming week. But brrrr!!! Yes, it's pretty chilly and breezy when we're standing at the front door bidding them bye bye for a few days. And "brrrr!" is the word - that's for sure. My goodness!!!

standing outside our front door for a few chilly, breezy moments,

Lois and I bid farewell, just for 4 days, to our daughter Sarah 

and her little family. Yes, brrrrrr!!!!!

We come back into the warmth of the house and start putting things to rights again, making it officially a house just-big-enough-for-two-old-codgers again, rather than a house way-too-small-to-accommodate-six-people, which is what it's been for the last 3 days. Oh dear!

Lois and I are going to miss them, but at the same time we're both exhausted after the 3-day weekend, and it'll be nice to have the place briefly to ourselves again, that's for sure.

I put the dinner-table in our tiny made-for-two kitchen-diner

back to its normal state, that is, set just for two old codgers, which is nice

We're neither of us fit for anything very physical today - we've just got to somehow get through the day and hopefully we'll feel more like it tomorrow. We're getting old, no doubt about that!

14:00 Sadly our afternoon nap in bed is curtailed today but no matter, because it's for something nice. A young woman, Joanne, a.k.a. "Foot Woman", is coming to cut our toenails and check our feet over, caressing them and rubbing nice things on them. 

Joanne, a.k.a. our masterful "Foot Woman", rubs nice things on Lois's feet

This is Joanne's second visit - she comes to see us now every 8 weeks - it's one of the unexpected perks of being old, and with Joanne it's such a delight, because she's so masterful with us, and also really easy to talk to. We've both got feet, and Joanne's got feet too, so we've all found suddenly that we've got a lot in common haha!

And everybody needs feet, as Bernard Bresslaw once remarked, on his 1958 hit record "You Need Feet", the B-side of his sizzling scorcher of an A-side, "Mad Passionate Love".

flashback to 1958: Bernard Bresslaw, singing his hit B-side, "You Need Feet" 

with some of his backing singers, the Vernons Girls

I'm a bit of a character in the local foot-world, because I've got an interesting 4th toe on my right foot, Joanne says - incredibly she's the first person to have noticed it, actually. And each time she's come to see me, she's taken a photo of this toe with her phone, so that she can discuss it with some of her foot-friends during seminars - that's her story anyway haha! 

close-up of the leg with the funny 4th toe (not shown),

my leg is being photographed here by Lois in a casual pose,

in front of a cattle-grid on a footpath near Malvern Common

Joanne says I don't need to worry, however - the photo will be held  in the strictest confidence, mainly for light relief in the foot world and for general entertainment purposes among lonely local foot-experts, I suspect. And certainly there's been no evidence to suggest that either of the pictures has ever "gone viral", or even "gone fungal", so far, at least, which is kind of reassuring !!!!

19:00 We try to get a word on the phone with our other daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire with Ed and their 3 teenage children, but Ali texts us to say that they're not home yet. They've all been spending the day at Bushy Park, near Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace near London, taking part in a family photo-shoot with Canadians Heather and her team, the family's favourite photographers, @funlovephotography.

The official photos by @funlovephotography are still to come out, but Ali and Ed snapped their own sneak unofficial photos while the shoot was on.

Ali, with eldest daughter Josie (16) - see the resemblance haha?

the team's photographer catches a shot of young Isaac (12),

while Ali looks on

one of Bushy Park's deer - not a member of Ali's family,

but clearly wishing it was - awwwwwwww!!!!!

Ed with Isaac

20:30 Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch the first part of an interesting 2-part documentary shown a few nights ago as part of the Barry Humphries / Dame Edna Everage memorial evening. 

The programme is all about Barry and three of the other Australians who "invaded" London in the late 1950's and 1960's, wowing the UK's cultural world with their "extremist" use of the English language: Barry, plus arts critics Clive James and Bob Hughes, and feminist tigress Germaine Greer, author of the seminal "The Female Eunuch".

Why did these four masters-of-the-English-language choose to leave the beautiful sun-kissed, raw, hedonistic, proudly outspoken but deeply boring world of suburban Australia for the mother-country at around this time? And where did these four "emigrés" in particular get their verbal virtuosity from?

Broadcaster Phillip Adams' opinion is that, "just as the pressure on coal over millions of years can produce diamonds, the pressures of boredom produced intellectual diamonds in the likes of Humphries and his fellow exiles. They were so surrounded by stultification in suburban Australia that out of it came these glittering jewels".

And writer Tom Keneally says, "There was almost a willed torpor about Australia...."

And Keneally continues, "a willed torpor which these brilliant children wanted to escape. The world of imagination was the world of northern Europe, and all the poetry we read at school and all the novels we read didn't have any spiritual purchase when applied to where we came from."

Comedian Barry Humphries, recalling his childhood in suburban Melbourne says, "My mother was a sardonic woman. She used to say, quite often in public, in front of people, at dinner, she'd say 'We don't know where Barry came from'... and [as a child] I took that seriously. I thought, 'Perhaps I'm like Valerie up the road - adopted. Perhaps if I stand outside the house long enough, my real parents might come by and pick me up. And my real parents would be bound to be much more interesting!'"

Later in the programme we hear  Barry Humphries saying more about growing up in Melbourne. He says, "Melbourne was my inspiration, and when I say that it was very dull, it was exhilaratingly dull...."

And Barry continues, "I used to think [about Melbourne], 'Heaven could live there. But I don't. I drift by like a ghost. And this dullness was of course the inspiration for my character Dame Edna Everage, and also for one of my other characters, the elderly Sandy Stone, who's a ghostly figure in his dressing gown clutching a hot-water-bottle, who sits in a chair and ruminates."

Poor old man! Yes, it's Sandy Stone, one of Barry's lesser-known characters

Barry says, "I wanted to see how boring I could make a monologue, with no jokes, nothing even faintly amusing. What would happen to an audience who had to listen to this? And it became popular, because people laughed at the fact that there were no laughs. In a way I had liberated comedy from the necessity to be funny."

We also see Barry doing some of his early appearances as Sir Les Patterson, the foul-mouthed "cultural attaché" at the Australian High Commission in London, which is nice.

When Barry and his fellow "cultural" Australians came to 1960's London, they immediately impressed with their refreshing lack of class-consciousness, and their extreme use of the English language. 

Barry's compatriot fellow-exile, Sydney-born critic Clive James talks about the verbal acrobatics of Australian English. saying that "The ability to say and write memorable sentences sometimes transfixes you with the vividness of the expression.  Some languages are dull, but Australian English isn't dull." 

And author and BBC presenter Melvyn Bragg says, "[Australians] have a taste for pushing the language of hyperbole as far as it would go, while holding an intellectual argument. And they relished it, relished the language they were using. Germaine [Greer] has this flair for extremism in expression, which holds to a very strong argument she's making."

Germaine herself says, "Australian speech is characteristically exaggerated and over-coloured. We overstate a case if we can: e.g.. 'That bloke was so generous, he'd give you his arse-hole and forever after shit through his ribs". Only an Australian could even THINK that! I mean, it's so metaphysical, it's so crazy!"

Fascinating stuff !!!!

22:00 I glance at my smartphone and I see that our daughter Sarah has sent us a charming photo of her husband Francis and the twins Lily and Jessica, relaxing with a football at the campsite they checked into today near Evesham, where Sarah is starting working at her old job again after a gap of 7 years while they were living in Perth, Australia.

our son-in-law Francis and the twins, relaxing with a game of football

at the camp-site they checked into today near Evesham. Brrrr!!!!

Lois and I are hoping there'll be some English children staying at the campsite this week, as it's half-term. This will start the process for the twins of absorbing how the local children speak and act, before they start school here, hopefully in the very near future.

And let's hope they're not too cold tonight, sleeping in a tent. Yikes, Australia it's not, is it - and that's putting it mildly !!!!

Lois and I thankfully can now go upstairs and get into our very warm bed, by contrast. Still Sarah and co are younger than us - I expect they'll enjoy the rigours of it all...fingers crossed: but oh dear!

Zzzzzzzzzz!!!!