12:00 We drive over to have a Post-Fathers-Day lunch at the Bluebell Inn. I can't believe it when Lois says we were here for lunch only 2 weeks ago (exactly), for her birthday meal.
What? Really?????
That seems ages ago now, probably because of the bombshell of our daughter Sarah and her little family returning from Australia after 7 years down under. Or maybe it's just because I'm getting seriously old now, and my brain just isn't coping as well as it used to with difficult concepts like the passage of time. Which do YOU think it is - answers on a postcard please haha!
But yikes!!!
flashback to May 4th: bombshell - our daughter Sarah, husband Francis,
and the twins arrive back after 7 years in Australia!
And today there's an even worse sign of my mental decline - 2 weeks ago when we got home after Lois's birthday meal at the Bluebell, we found a bunch of Bluebell Inn vouchers delivered by our local postman while we'd been out lunching there, which was annoying. And last night we decided to eat here again for Fathers Day, because those vouchers hadn't expired yet.
So what do I go and do this morning when we leave the house - I FORGET TO BRING THE VOUCHERS WITH ME of course!!!!
All hope is gone now - that's for sure haha!!!!
Anyway we try to put all that behind us, and enjoy the meal, which we do, and enormously do, as well. Monday lunchtimes are always nice'n'quiet at the Bluebell, and it's when the young and middle-aged couples of Malvern bring their aged parents along to treat them to a meal, as we've discovered.
However Lois and I haven't got anybody like that to shepherd us inside, so we've just got to stagger along into the pub by ourselves, and struggle through the meal as best we can haha!
Poor us haha!!!!
[You're not going to tell us what you ordered again, are you?! - Ed]
Well, since you ask....!
my gin-and-tonic
Lois's peach fuzz "mocktail"
my cod goujons and garden peas (again)
Lois's barbecued chicken salad, with a donation of
(or some would say "theft of") some of my chips
centre, in the distance our young waitress can be seen, ushering in
the inn's next elderly customer and younger "minder" [not shown]
our trio of ices, a joint choice for dessert
Yum yum!!!!
No problem however, because unlike Ian, our former window-cleaner in our Cheltenham days, Martin doesn't bring a ladder - he does his business using a long pole, so he can't see us, which is nice. And when he's gone we can open the window again, so that's all right.
Martin always pushes his invoice through the letter-box when he goes, and we pay him by bank transfer.
But what a crazy world they live in, these festival-goers !!!
In Hungary, the government doesn't regard religion as a private matter for its citizens, like most countries do. It actively promotes the raising of children as Christians, which in most countries is left to parents to decide, and the government's actions, strictly speaking, violate the UN Convention on the rights of children. The country's many agnostics and atheists, as well as adherents of other religions, are fed up with being, if not totally ignored as though they don't exist, at best stigmatised and belittled, in government statements.
Later tonight there's another email from Tünde, with the news that her 15-year-old grand-daughter Petra, who lives in Germany, is spending a week in the UK on a school visit to improve the children's English. Petra is staying at Broadstairs, Kent, a popular seaside-resort especially for Londoners, the town where the writer Charles Dickens spent a lot of his time during the Victorian era.
And I can't help thinking about a very happy seaside holiday my parents and siblings had there in Broadstairs, back in 1955. I remember us going to watch a talent-competition for children, where every 2nd child, it seemed, had decided to sing a version of "Unchained Melody", a song that was popular that summer.
See? And that's the way you do it!
16:00 I check my smartphone, and I see an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law, with the latest of the amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors for us each week on the web.
Martin, our friendly local window-cleaner
does our upstairs windows with a long pole...
our bedroom window, nice'n'clean, after Martin goes
We particularly enjoy the "Brexit" one in the middle, which amuses us no end - you would not BELIEVE, but we're also struck by the first one, which features "Festival crowds in the sun".
Last night Lois and I watched a broadcast from the Isle of Wight festival, featuring, after a torrid day in the sun, a suddenly rain-affected set, by Blondie.
Yes, scorching sun followed by rain - a typical piece of British summer weather, and how do you dress for that, if you're camping at an open-air festival on the Isle of Wight for the week? There's no safe answer! And during Debbie Harry's performance of "Atomic" we were amused by the strange mixture of festival-wear we could see in the crowd.
Lois and I agree with the older guy in the front of this next picture, by the way,, the one in the yellow plastic mac and rain-hat. Call us old stick-in-the-muds if you want haha!
In his weekly "Venn" email, Steve also notes the similarities of dress style on the part of certain political leaders.
Is this significant?
I wonder... !
16:30 By coincidence, there's also an email from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, which gives an insight into the Hungarian Government's peculiar stance on the Christian religion, in a report on the influential Hungarian news web-site 444.hu .
Even Defence Minister
Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczkyi has weighed in, calling atheism "one of
the hallmarks of hostile ideology" - my goodness, is it a defence matter now?! To me, it's the Hungarian government that bears the hallmarks of a hostile ideology, and it's not just me who thinks that, I'm sure!
Hungarian Defence Minister Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczkyi (left), who has said,
"Atheism is one of the hallmarks of hostile ideology": my goodness, is it?!
What a madness that was !!!!!
Photo X54168, taken by a local photographer: (left to right) Kathy, my 7 year old sister,
Steve, my 3 year old brother, my 41 year old father (all three redheaded)
and 9-year-old me (the blondie). A professional photographer appeared and
took our picture in the water, a copy of which we later bought in his shop in the town.
Me on Broadstairs Beach
Here are some of the chart hits of the summer of '55 (see below). It was a peculiarity of those days that there were often multiple versions of particular songs, sung by different singers, in the charts at the same time. What a crazy world it was! [That's enough craziness! - Ed]
20:00 We wind down with tonight's first programme in Margaret Thatcher's former Defence Minister, Michael Portillo's new series, "Great British Railway Journeys".
As always with Michael's programmes, there are several interesting segments in tonight's episode. He recalls the era of "national service", compulsory military service for young men, which was the law between 1947 and 1960, when it was abolished, and after which the UK's 3 services all became volunteer-only.
The vast majority of our armed forces were "demobbed" (de-mobilized) after 1945, at the end of World War II, because men were needed to work in industry, but the UK still had a massive empire in those days, covering a quarter of the world's population - isn't that hard to believe now?!
And quite apart from the Korean War and occupying the British sector of Germany and Berlin, lots of soldiers were still needed, alongside more seasoned men, to police all these British colonies, a very dangerous job for young lads who were essentially "amateurs".
Most colonies were peaceful, but not all of them. And national servicemen had to fight all the "insurgents" and "terrorists", where they were active - the Communists in Malaya etc, the Mau-mau in Kenya, the returning Jews in Palestine, EOKA in Cyprus - remember Nicosia's notorious "Murder Mile"? And we hear tonight that around 400 national-servicemen got killed around the world in those years.
Remember "Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello?
A common topic among us schoolboys in the 1950's was, "Which service - Army, Navy or Air-force - are you going to express a preference for, when your time comes?" I never had an answer for that one, my mind used to go a complete blank, and Lois says she couldn't imagine me being at home in any of the services, and I've got to give her that one - my goodness!
Her best model for me in the services, she says, is Gunner Graham (John Clegg) in the sitcom "It Ain't Half Hot Mum", based on the entertainers in the "concert party contingent", that entertained UK troops fighting the Japanese in Burma during World War II. Gunner Graham was the intellectual in the unit, the guy with the university degree, who played the piano for all their songs. Remember him?
"Gunner Graham" (John Clegg), the intellectual piano-player in the BBC sitcom
"It Ain't Half Hot, Mum", set in the Burmese jungle
Tremendous fun !!!!!
And who knew, as Michael Portillo recalls tonight, that Britain's first prototype motorway was the Preston By-pass, which later became part of the M6, eventually going all the way from Birmingham to Scotland?
The local Lancashire county surveyor had the vision to start this off, Sir James Drake, and it was opened in 1958 by Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Incredibly the road had no speed-limit in its early years, just like a German autobahn. Yikes!
And tonight, when Michael is in the cotton town of Blackburn, Lancashire, we hear a lot, in connection with road-safety, about Barbara Castle, the local MP.
In 1965 Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made Barbara Castle his transport minister, and, in 1966, when deaths and injuries in UK road traffic accident peaked, with 8,000 deaths, Barbara introduced a 70 mph speed limit, compulsory seat-belts and breathalyser tests to combat drunk driving. This resulted in an immediate 37% drop in casualties. She also introduced equal pay for women - so there!
On zoom, Michael interviews her former aide, later Tony Blair's Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who confirms that Barbara was a very strong-minded woman.
here Michael asks Jack Straw what his first impressions were of Barbara Castle,
MP for the Lancashire cotton town of Blackburn
Other locals recall Barbara's style in the world of Blackburn politics. One says, "I think she predated a lot of the ways that modern politicians now engage. She had these 'soapbox' events - it was "showmanship" in a way, which was unusual in those days. She brought a bit of glamour, really."
She stood down as an MP in 1979, but since 2021 there's been a nice statue of her in Jubilee Square, Blackburn, where she's depicting not standing, but striding, which is unusual in a statue, to put it mildly.
What a woman!!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!!
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