Lois and I wake up this morning, to find that, as usual, we're in bed, and not in the least "hungover", but we watched several hours of the Glastonbury Music Festival over the weekend, and so we feel a bit like we're waking up in a tent after a second noisy, boozy day and evening.
this is the way Lois and I feel when we wake up this morning in our "virtual tent"
- tired, but, surprisingly, looking a lot younger suddenly...
So where do we travel next to keep this "high" going? Not "travel" in the sense of going anywhere, just travelling through the magic of TV and the internet, obviously - we're not made of money, plus, we like our sleep!
We've got our eye on Denmark's iconic Roskilde Music Festival, starting soon. The weather outlook is poor there, however, so for the "virtual festival gear" that we'll be putting on here in our living-room, we'll probably have to go with what one elderly veteran festivalista wore for the Isle of Wight, as shown in this picture:
see the guy in the front in the yellow mac at the Isle of Wight Music Festival?
that's how Lois and I are going to dress on the sofa for our "virtual"
participation in Denmark's likely-rain-sodden Roskilde Festival
- makes sense to us haha!
No escaping the mud this year! Danish music festival junkies at Roskilde
prepare for the worst, as forecasters predict heavy rain and thunderstorms
"It's the calm before the storm here at Roskilde Festival..."
".... which allegedly is going to get hit
by bad weather in just a few hours' time!"
These two young women, Mille and Johanne, will try to find a coffee stall
and try and squeeze in there to shelter...
... these 2 young guys, Bertram and Valdemar, are scared of thunder and lightning -
the one on the left will just go home, and the one on the right
will seek shelter with his grandmother who lives not far away in the town
- awwww, that's so cute !!!!
.. and this guy will just crawl into his tent and hope for the best.
Bless his little cotton socks (not shown haha!) !!!!!
11:40 By coincidence, there's a Glastonbury reference in the amusing Venn diagram that Steve, our American brother-in-law, sends us this morning, from the series that he monitors for us each week on the web.
Although, come to think of it, it's also us when we haven't just spent 2 days at Glastonbury.
Good observation, Colin !
And do you remember how, during the COVID lockdowns, people used to appear at their doorways at set times, to stand and applaud the brave and dedicated NHS workers who were keeping the country going? Lois and I did it at our old house in Cheltenham, and we used to stand, wave and shout a greeting to our neighbours on both sides of the road, before going back inside to spend the rest of the evening just consorting with each other, as we did in those days.
Lois and I approach this first programme with high hopes of being able to compete seriously with the contestants, because we're both initially buoyed up by our score of 8 out of 10 in the Popmaster Quiz in the Radio Times magazine (see above).
A bit surprising perhaps, however, in a way, isn't it, that none of the five contestants could remember a fabulous closing lyric like "Ahhh-ahhh-ah": especially in these days of "dumbed down" lyrics.
Oh dear!
16:00 We settle down on the couch for our tea and ice-creams. We look at the puzzles in next week's Radio Times. We're specially keen to hone our skills on the Popmaster Quiz, because later tonight the first ever live Popmaster show on TV, hosted by Ken, is scheduled for the More4 Channel. This afternoon we score a creditable 7 out of 10, so hopes are high for this evening.
And we do quite well on the intellectually more prestigious Egghead questions, even though, we think, the questions are getting more obscure by the week. What are these guys playing at? Are they just trying to impress each other? I think we should be told.
Plus, Lois and I need to start learning something about Chinese dynasties. They keep coming up time and time again in quizzes. We never bothered before, because, we always used to say, "Who cares?". Well, we're ruing that decision now, no doubt about that. Oh dear!
19:30 We look at the first of Michael Portillo's new railway adventures for this week. It turns out he'll be down south, in London and East Anglia for 5 days, starting today.
Tilbury is the name of the docks on the River Thames where in June 1948 the ship, the Empire Windrush disgorged a thousand or so passengers arriving from the West Indies.
Black faces were a rare sight in Britain before that time, unless they were American GIs during the war, but Britain needed a boost to its labour force: in 1947 alone half a million Brits emigrated to the "dominions" - Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, to escape the gloom and austerity of post-war Britain, "the bomb-sites and the blackened buildings", as Portillo says. Oh dear!
And it turns out that around the same number of West Indians - half a million - moved to Britain in those immediate post-war years, with the ship the Windrush bringing the first instalment, in June 1948.
The arrival of the Windrush attracted a huge "media circus", as we hear tonight.
the arrival of the ship the Windrush at Tilbury Docks in June 1948,
bringing the first instalment of about 1000 passengers from the West Indies
Lois and I didn't know that these visitors from the Caribbean mostly never intended to stay more than a couple of years or so, to make a bit of money and then go back to the sunshine. However, a lot of them had also borrowed money from relatives in order to buy their ticket, and this money had to be earned and repaid, so, in the first instance, they had to stay long enough to be able to do that - so five years maybe?
But, as Colin Grant, a historian with Jamaican roots, tells Michael, year followed year, and when you start to think about changing the wallpaper, you know you're here to stay!.
After his visit to Tilbury, Michael travels into London to see the "futuristic" Barbican residential development. Before the war 120,000 people had lived in the actual central City of London, but even as late as the early 1950's the place was still more or less just one enormous bomb-site, filled with rubble, and with a population of not much more than 5,000. Yikes!
As a remedy, the 40-acre Barbican site was planned as a model for the residential mini-town of the future, with a new "utopian", or, as some would say, "brutalist" concept of architecture, exposing concrete, with minimal decoration but also with residents' communal gardens, and lots of water and lots of plants, so that wildlife could visit there.
Confused? Well, you will be, when you see the pictures!
part of the post-war Barbican estate, with its "brutalist"
concept of blocks of flats, and its spaces for wildlife
You must remember!
Well, you can imagine what a spectacle that touching tribute would have been at the Barbican estate, with its tower blocks upon tower blocks, with their rows upon rows, of flats.
My goodness! And we hear a bit about this tonight when Michael meets one of the residents of these thousands upon thousands of flats, who gives him "the tour" of her flat, and also reminisces about the lockdown days.
Fascinating stuff !!!!
I remember visiting the Barbican for my first, and only, time in 2008 or so, in the company of Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend who was visiting Britain for a few weeks.
I can't find any pictures of the Barbican, but here's a few others I took during her visit.
flashback to 2008: Tünde at Westminster
and me at Madame Tussauds, with Oscar Wilde was it?
Tünde with Oliver Cromwell and Charles I,
and me with Margaret Thatcher
Tünde with Queen's Freddie Mercury
Happy days!
20:00 Lois and I grab a couple of naughty digestive biscuits each, spread generously with Nutella, and then we wind down on the couch with the first programme in a TV version of the old BBC Radio "Popmaster Quiz" series, hosted by its original question-master, veteran Scottish DJ Ken Bruce. And the arrival of this first TV series is greeted by a massive splurge of blurb in this week's Radio Times.
What madness!!!
We soon realise, however, that it's a different matter sitting on the sofa figuring out the answers to the questions in Radio Times, where we can discuss it between ourselves, scratch our heads, and eventually come up with the answers after a few minutes of painful initial "blankness" and memory failure.
On the actual TV version, however, the five contestants only have a few seconds to come up with the answers - oh dear, yes!
None of tonight's initial contestants are young exactly, but some are less old than others, and it shows.
the first ever TV version of Popmaster: none of the contestants
are young exactly, but some are less old than others, and it shows - oh dear!
And as Lois and I predicted at the start of the show, it's the older contestants who get eliminated first - I think your brain just doesn't work so fast as you get older, and so even though you know lots of "stuff", it just takes such an awful long time to bring that knowledge up from the deepest depths of your memory and up to the surface. That's what we say, anyway!
Oh dear (again) !!!!!
As we begin to think about going to bed, however, we feel reasonably "pumped", because we each manage to get 2 answers that the contestants didn't remember, so that's all right then!
Only I recognised the early Animals' hit "I'm Crying" (1965), in the prestigious "Name That Tune from the Last Line of the Lyrics" round:
They don't write them like that any more, do they!
Go on, admit it !!!!!
And only I knew it was Helen Shapiro who sang "You Don't Know" (1962). For her part, only Lois knew that Cilla Black's first hit was "Anyone Who Had a Heart" (1965), and she also remembered it was Dana who sang some other hit - but I've forgotten the title already (again) !
On reflection that's not much to be proud of, though, is it!
Damn - back to the drawing-board, then !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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