Today's going to be a big day, for Lois and me, and for all our little family - our daughter Sarah and her husband Francis have an appointment with a renting agent in Alcester at 10:30 am, at which they'll sign a contract and take over the keys to the house they'll be renting there. So an end for Sarah, Francis and the twins, to their crazy life of spending weekends here with us, and spending the working week in a tent in a field at Ashton-under-Hill.
It's been such a crazy life, for all of us, since Sarah and family moved back to England from Australia at the start of May.
07:45 After a brutally early breakfast (for me) and a not-quite-so-brutally early coffee for Sarah, I drive her over to the field at Ashton-under-Hill to join her husband Francis in loading up, into our two tiny cars, as many of the family's belongings as we can before driving over to Alcester for the crucial 10:30 meeting with the agent.
And this is what that field at Ashton-under-Hill looks like at about 8:15 in the morning, I can now exclusively reveal, in these brutally early photos that I took - yikes!!!!
the slowly emptying family's tent as the majority of its contents
are moved into our 2 tiny cars
Our son-in-law Francis, taking a well-earned rest
we stuff as many of the family's belongings as we can
into our two painfully small cars - a Mini Cooper (theirs) and a Honda Jazz (ours)
Francis, seen here making the long 100-yard-or-so trek
across the field to the loo and shower "block"
This is my first view of the house, and I'm impressed with the location: only about 50 yards away from a park with a children's playground and zipwire, and also near the local so-called "Eric Payne Community Centre" [who he? - Ed]. Both facilities look smart and well looked-after, and in use by local families, which is nice.
I keep out of the way, as Sarah and Francis talk to the rental agent in the house, sign the papers etc, and then gradually carry their stuff into the house. And I google "Eric Payne" to see that he was a popular town mayor, who sadly died a few years back.
11:30 Francis will stay at the house tonight, after transporting the rest of the family's stuff, including the tent itself, from the Ashton-under-Hill camp-site.
15:30 Eventually Lois and I get out of bed and stagger downstairs. We try and sort out a film for the girls to watch on TV, to keep them out of Sarah's hair, as she's still doing her overtime at the laptop.
20:00 Sarah and the twins go upstairs - she needs to give them a bath. So Lois and I watch an interesting documentary on BBC4, all about Captain Cook and his voyage of discovery to Australia.
A really fascinating programme, from which Lois and I learned a lot we didn't know. Cook came from quite a poor background up in Yorkshire, and though he quickly made good after joining the Royal Navy, he wasn't really even a captain when he set off on his voyage in 1768 - just a lieutenant, and at the time, in the mid-18th century, the Navy had 900 or more lieutenants: it was total madness! And Cook had never done any long voyages at all, so he had had no preparation for becoming the first person ever to circumnavigate the globe in a solo-ship expedition with zero backup.
me driving my fully-laden Honda Jazz, parked in front of the house
the rental home in Alcester: Sarah can just be seen,
standing in the open doorway
the house (rightmost) is only about 50 yards from the park and playground...
... and from the so-called "Eric Payne Community Centre" [Who he? - Ed]
And now I get the opportunity to take what is possibly the picture-of-a-lifetime: myself at the wheel, as well as Francis and Sarah coming out of the house to get more of their stuff from the two car-boots etc: Francis visibly exiting the door (left) and Sarah herself visible through the car's rear window.
is this the picture of the century? I snap myself at the steering-wheel
plus Francis and Sarah exiting the house to grab more of their stuff to take inside
Nice shot, eh?!!!! [It's hardly going to make you "photographer of the year", now, is it! - Ed]
I drive Sarah back to our house in Malvern, where Lois has been entertaining Sarah and Francis's 9-year-old twins, Lily and Jessica.
Luckily the twins are really easy to entertain - they love creating things, whether it's drawing, painting, making all sorts of things out of cardboard with scissors and sellotape: you know the sort of thing. And they like baking too, so Lois also sets them to work baking some chocolate Rice-Krispie cakes, although using cornflakes, as we don't have any Rice Krispies. And they also have "fun with bubbles" in our back garden.
Jessica (left) and Lily creating something out of beads, cardboard,
coloured pencils and sellotape
some of the chocolate Rice-Krispie cakes that the twins
baked this morning - yum yum!
fun with bubbles in our back garden: oh to be young haha!
[For you, that ship truly sailed a long time ago, to put it mildly! - Ed]
14:00 In the afternoon, Lois and I disappear upstairs to bed for a nap, while Sarah sits down with her laptop on the kitchen table to do some weekend overtime for the accountancy firm she's taken a job with in Evesham.
We come up with "The Water Horse" on the Great Movies Channel, but we find that, tellingly, the twins would rather go away and do their own creative stuff, and it's poor old codgers Lois and me that end up on the sofa watching the film, while the twins do other things. What madness !!!!!
it's a children's film, but it's we two poor old codgers, together with
so-called "Floppy Dog" (centre), who end up watching it
- what a madness it all is !!!!!
And when the twins come downstairs again, we can explain to them that Captain James "Jimmy" Cook is basically the reason why the people living in Australia today all speak English, just like you and me, and not French or Dutch, which is handy, and also saves a lot of work haha!
What a guy!
And, amazingly, at the same time he was also a nice guy, quiet and gentle, always keeping his cool - he was firm about insisting that his men kept the ship's rules to the letter, but he was a kind, reasonable master of his ship, the HMS Endeavour, and his crew are said to have loved him: quite unusual at the time, to put it mildly. And when it came to interacting with "the natives" in the Pacific islands etc, he treated them with respect and friendship. My goodness!
And Cook was also a clever man, who, from the Pacific Ocean, on Tahiti, successfully measured the 1769 Transit of Venus, i.e. the planet Venus crossing the Sun as viewed from Earth - which was the voyage's "unclassified" mission. His measurements were crucial, because, although the transit was measured at various points in the world, Cook's measurements were the only ones taken from the Southern Hemisphere. His findings enabled British astronomer Thomas Hornsby to estimate the distance between the Sun and the Earth at about 94 million miles (c. 151 million km), which is really close to today's estimate of about 93 million miles (c. 150 million km).
I didn't know, although Lois did, that, together with his botanist Joseph Banks, Cook managed to ensure that no sailor on this super-long, 3-year voyage, died of scurvy. Experimenting with various possible remedies, Banks included a diet of drinking lime juice, rich in Vitamin C, which later became a regular practice in the Navy. It's also the reason why in some parts of the world, "limey" is a slang term for a British sailor, or for Brits in general.
Of course, as everybody knows, the "classified secret" part of Cook's mission was to find and explore the mysterious "Southern Continent", the continent that scientists assumed must exist, if only to prevent the Earth from being too "top-heavy" with all the big continents in the north. The Navy assigned Cook with the task of finding this continent and then claiming it for the British Empire, thus foiling the ambitions of the dastardly French and the dastardly Dutch, who had similar plans. My goodness (again) !!!!!
Cook and his crew were amazed at what they saw after they landed in Australia on April 29th 1770, in what Cook and his botanist Banks decided to call Botany Bay. It was a totally strange world to them, as regards human and animal population, and all the different plants etc.
"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it, " Banks could have said to Cook. And maybe he did say it - who knows!
And it's interesting to me to learn that when Cook asked one of the natives what people called the strange, giant hopping animals that seemed to be everywhere, he got the initial answer "kangaroo", which apparently just meant "I don't know" in the native language that the man spoke. What madness !!!
presenter Paul Rose asks James Wilson Miller,
an Aboriginal historian, about the origin of the word "kangaroo"
So, that's another instance to add to my catalogue of great linguistic misunderstandings. I think it's true, isn't it, that "Canada", the name that the French gave to what became possibly the world's biggest country, just meant "village" in the native language. And when, in the 5th century AD the English starting arriving in what is now England, from their homes in North Germany and Denmark, they asked the "natives" what they called this river or that river. They often got the answer "Avon", which is actually just the Welsh word for a river; and this is the reason why so many of our rivers are still called "the Avon", even today.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
Fascinating stuff !!!!! And the map at the end reminds the twins that the bulk of the family's belongings, which have followed a similar route to Cook's via Singapore, apart from going through the Suez Canal, arrived in the docks at London just a couple of days ago, including some of their favourite, much-missed toys etc.
Awwww, bless them !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!!
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