07:30 June 5th has dawned, and it's Lois's 77th birthday today. But we can't linger in bed - there's no peace for the wicked haha! Kieran, the customer care manager of this Persimmon new-build estate in Malvern where Lois and I moved to 6 months ago, says he'll be dropping round, together with a team of various "trades", who will try and rectify some of the many faults we've reported with our house.
Knowing how customer-care guys and painters, bricklayers etc. often ring at the doorbell as early as 8 am, I leave Lois in bed, while I wash and dress and get myself ready to greet any callers. This will leave Lois free to take her time to get up and have a shower etc.
09:30 Absolutely nobody has rung our doorbell, but now Lois is downstairs, so we have a cup of tea on the sofa and I hand over to her my card and my present to her - a dress, plus the present - Giorgio eau-de-cologne - sent her by our elder daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 teenage children.
And Lois opens all the other cards she has received in the post over the last few days, and then displays all her cards received so far, on our dinner-table, together with the dress and the eau-de-cologne.
Lois showcases the birthday cards and presents
that she has received so far
Lois was born in 1946, in the same hospital as me - the former Radcliffe Hospital, then situated in St Giles, Oxford. I had been born there just over 2 months earlier, but we didn't meet till much later, not surprisingly.
Here are some early pictures of Lois:
Lois, sitting on a bale of hay in the Oxfordshire countryside,
looking thoughtful
Lois, second from the right, talking to neighbour kids
outside the family's "prefab" home on the Woodstock Road, Oxford
Lois at school, just visible in the next to back row,
the little blondie, 5th from the right
flashback to 1972: our wedding day - pictured here
with our parents standing behind us... (left to right)
my father Ken, Lois's mother Ruth, Lois's father Dennis and my mother Nan
...and on our honeymoon in Norway, at Åndalsnes Railway Station
a guy from Persimmon, the builders,
replaces a broken brick in the paving in front of the house
the strip of rough ground along the back wall of the house
today at last gets filled with gravel - what a madness this saga has been !!!!
11:45 We drive over to the Bluebell Inn for Lois's birthday lunch. Being Monday it's quite quiet with just a couple of mums with their toddlers and about 3 other elderly couples, which is nice.
Lois and I both decide to have the goujons of cod with chips and garden peas as our main meal. But first Lois has the breaded mushroom starter and I have a "botanical" gin and tonic and the soup of the day, falsely described as "mushroom soup" by the Inn's "meet-and-greet" guy, a soup which turns out, on inspection, to be oxtail - which is still fine with me, luckily!
we have our starters - breaded mushrooms for Lois and oxtail soup for me
we leave the Inn in a good mood, but we're ready for an afternoon in bed,
to be frank, we're so tired after the weekend - oh dear !!!!!!
14:15 When we arrive home, it's a bit annoying to be greeted by a "30% off" coupon from the Bluebell Inn, which must have arrived in the post while we were out. However, we're going to let that one slide, because we'll be able to use the coupon soon when our elder daughter Alison visits us with her eldest, Josie (16), in a couple of weeks' time, which is nice!
16:30 Over a cup of Earl Grey tea on the sofa, we catch up with some of our emails. My Hungarian penfriend, Tünde, has emailed me with a story about King Charles on the influential Hungarian news website, blikk.hu .
Charles, who has just been over there visiting his residence at Zalánpatak (see picture above), to be greeted by the locals with flowers, really loves the Transylvania region, formerly part of Hungary, and he's connected by family ties: his father's cousin was King Mihály, the last Romanian king, expelled by the Communists in 1947. And Charles's great-great-grandmother was the Hungarian Countess Claudine Rhedéy. Who knew?!
But ten properties - my goodness (again) !!!!!
Despite the above blurb, this is actually a fairly balanced programme, even despite the opening "health warnings" about polarised views etc and despite a lot of shouty people we see taking part in demos.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
19:30 It's Lois's birthday, so I give her the complete choice of what we watch on TV tonight. First we watch an interesting documentary about so-called Gender Wars on Channel 4.
I get the impression that the programme is saying that the important practical issues on gender are quite simple really. None of what the shouty people on both sides are shouting about really matters in practical terms, as long as trans-women aren't allowed to compete in women's sports, which would give them an unfair advantage, and as long as trans-women aren't allowed in women's public bathrooms, women's hospital wards, women's prisons etc, because of the well-known predatory nature of a minority of men.
Is that what it's saying? I think so, but let me know if I've misunderstood - postcards only this time, and no "lectures" please either haha!
And the programme is saying, we think, that of course none of those issues matter at all in the case of trans-men - obviously they're not going to be serious competition to the men in men's sports etc.
Lois and I think ourselves that maybe the future of public bathrooms is going to be just individual loos complete with mirror and wash-basin etc, such as you get in many places already.
It's a sweet story, which in typical Welsh fashion, seems at times as if it's going to transition suddenly into something tragic, disastrous and serious, like when Herb pulls out a toy gun in a Danish bank, but then it all backs down from seriousness and becomes sweetly self-effacing, low-key and Welsh again, which is nice!
Great song, isn't it !!!! [If you say so! - Ed]
Fabulous stuff !!!!
20:30 We go to bed on Lois's second choice of viewing - a sweet film from Wales with a typically Welsh, understated, self-effacing story about a quiet Welshman, Herb, in a dead-end Welsh coastal town, who sees a TV documentary about how nice life is in Danish prisons, and so he decides to go there and get himself arrested.
What could be more normal than that - to a Welshman anyway haha!
Lois and I know Denmark quite a bit from the many visits we made there when our daughter Alison and her family were living in Copenhagen from 2012 to 2018. And in tonight's film there are a couple of sentimental touches that strike a chord with Lois and me.
The first is when Herb is in a harbour bar with Mathilde, the Danish woman who's befriended him, and the singer is singing one of our favourite songs, "Tom Traubert's Blues (Copenhagen)", copyright Tom Waits.
The second sentimental moment for us comes at the very end of the film, when Mathilde takes Herb through the dunes to the beach, to see a typical Danish midsummer night festival with bonfires on the beach, on the year's longest day, what the Danes call "Sankt Hans Aften" (Saint John's Night). This is a custom that Lois and I first read about in 2012 when we were just starting to learn some Danish, from our first ever Teach-Yourself-Danish language book.
Happy days!
Here we see Mathilde encouraging Herb to follow her into the grass-covered dunes.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment