Danskcolin: Sunday June 11th 2023

Lois and I have been rushed off our feet recently - on and off, anyway, but every weekend, here in our tiny Malvern house, hosting our daughter Sarah and family since early May, when they all returned from Australia after 7 years "down under". It's wonderful to have them around, but at the same time, when you're 77, you don't find the extra work as easy as we would have done in the past, to put it mildly. Oh dear - we're getting really old now, finally, no doubt about that!

Lois and me, pictured here yesterday on the sofa, watching a stupid film,

under the "supervision" of "Floppy Dog" - and none of us,

not even "Old Floppy", are as sharp as we used to be, to put it mildly!

But there's a change coming now, and Lois and I can feel it, that's for sure. Sarah and the twins stayed with us last night, while her Sarah's husband Francis spent his first night in the rental home in Alcester that they first got the keys to yesterday. But tonight they'll all be in that house together, as a family.

And apart from, of course, this being a huge relief to them, it's a great feeling also for Lois and me to feel that they're on the way back to becoming "settled" in the UK, with their own place to live, and no longer living a "half hobo" existence, spending a lot of nights in a tent, and still dependent for one thing or another on us, Sarah's two "poor old codger" parents. My goodness, yes!

flashback to yesterday: I drive Sarah to Alcester so that Francis (left) and Sarah

(seen through the car's rear window) could sign the contract

for their rental home, and take possession of the keys.

09:00 Sarah and the twins didn't get up till gone 8 o'clock this morning, after late nights all round yesterday evening, and who could blame them?

So it's a quiet morning here to start with, as we all wait for Francis to arrive at our door unexpectedly, as he normally does. He's a "spontaneous" kind of a guy, and he doesn't usually ring or text to give a warning of his impending arrival, which always tends to make life a bit more exciting and suspenseful than perhaps it needs to be - but hey, we're all different, aren't we, and it's all part of life's rich tapestry, isn't it haha!

While everybody's waiting around for Francis to appear "out of nowhere", Sarah asks Lois to trim her hair for going to work next week, so she can look extra "business-y". Aa month ago she took up a job at an Evesham accountancy firm: the very job she quit in 2015, when the family moved out to Australia.

Lois trims Sarah's hair in the sunshine out on the patio

Why has Sarah been able to get her old job back so easily after 7 years? Yes, well, to all our surprise, I think, including Sarah's, the partners who own the firm have been really keen to get Sarah back working there, even after a gap of 7 years, during which time Sarah has of course been working under a different jurisdiction, i.e. under Australian company law and its accompanying legal/financial arrangements. I know that Australian law is fundamentally based on UK law, but in the last 200 years or so, the Aussies have apparently changed quite a few things - the little tinkers!

So why is the firm so keen to have Sarah back, despite the 7-year gap? Well, Sarah's only been back at the firm for a month or so, but already she's found deficiencies in some of the reports that the firm's other accountants have been compiling on their local clients. And Francis thinks that Evesham is declining economically as a town, being perhaps a little bit too far from major centres like Worcester, Birmingham or the Cheltenham/Gloucester area; and that maybe the firm has had trouble recruiting really good graduates to work for it, because they maybe don't fancy living there.

The jury's still out on that one, however - time will tell, perhaps.

flashback to May 4th: on the arrival of Sarah and family from Australia,

I park outside the offices of the accountancy firm

in Evesham High Street where Sarah will be working, to pick the family up

and bring them back to sleep at our little house in Malvern

May 4th: I see Sarah and the twins for the first time since their return from Australia,

outside the back door of the accountancy firm's premises in Evesham

And here are some of the damning verdicts on the town centre from TripAdvisor:

Oh dear, that doesn't sound good!!!! So that's maybe why the country's best accountancy graduates don't fancy living there! Luckily, however, most of Sarah's firm's clients are not the local shops but the thriving local fruit-growing businesses, so the firm's prospects are still looking really good, Sarah says.

Phew - that's a relief!

10:00 Francis arrives and takes Sarah and the twins to the local Three Counties Showground, where there's a dog show on this weekend. Lois and I are both irrevocably cat-people, but our two daughters both married dog-lovers, and Sarah and the twins now love dogs as much as Francis does, which is nice. And today is "gundog" day, apparently.

So all four of them go off, and suddenly the house is all quiet again, which leaves Lois and me to collapse in a heap for a few hours. And the peace and quiet is especially helpful for Lois, because she can take part in her church at Tewkesbury's Sunday Morning Meeting on zoom, an important event in her week, and something which very much keeps her going through life's vicissitudes. And unfortunately it's something she's mainly had to sacrifice recently because of our hosting of Sarah and family at weekends for the last 10 weeks.

flashback to August 2021: we make our first visit to the village hall

outside Tewkesbury, where the church's Sunday morning meetings are held

These absences from the Sunday meetings has also been a little bit embarrassing for Lois, because the Tewkesbury meeting has given her responsibility for booking visiting preachers, a complicated and thankless task, which none of the other church-members there is keen to take over from her, and I can see why: my goodness! And apart from the difficulties of trying to get visiting preachers, often rather "vague" younger guys, to commit to coming on a particular Sunday, she also likes to email these preachers after the event to thank them, referencing perhaps some of the subjects they covered in their talks, which is a bit tricky if you weren't there to listen. Oh dear!

a typical young-and-vague young preacher, Brother Taylor perhaps, or someone similar,

in a world of his own, looking at his phone - awww, bless him !!!!

15:00 Francis, Sarah and the twins come back to collect some of their remaining belongings and head off to their new home in Alcester. While they were at the dog show, they bought Lois and me a couple of grandad/grandma mugs, which was a nice thought. Part of the motivation was that they may not be with us next Sunday for Father's Day. They're hoping to travel down to Devon for the interment of the ashes of Francis's mother, who sadly died a few years ago, soon after Sarah, Francis and the twins emigrated to Australia, which was particularly sad for Francis.

Despite all that, it's nevertheless especially nice for me to get a "Best Grandad" mug, because my former much-cherished Danish "morfar" cup, which I bought in Copenhagen during the residence there of our other daughter Alison between 2012 and 2018, unfortunately cracked badly recently and had to be thrown away. Lois still has her original "mormor" mug: she's looked after it better, seemingly. Oh dear!

The Scandinavians, as I expect you know, have different words for maternal and paternal grandparents: a maternal grandfather, for instance, is a "morfar" (literally mother-father), and a maternal grandmother is a "mormor" (literally mother-mother). All three languages, I think, used to have words more or less identical to the English words "mother" and "father" or to "muddah, faddah" (Copyright: Allan Sherman), but being busy people, they decided in the end that they didn't have time to pronounce the "th" or "d" in the middle, so they cut that bit out, which makes sense to me. Life's too short to mess about with little things like that, isn't it haha!

15:00 Sarah, Francis and the twins come back from the dog-show, hastily grab a few more of their possessions, hand over the grandad and grandma mugs they bought us today, and rush off to the supermarket, which under the UK's special Sunday store-opening hours, have to close at 4 pm or so - it's going to be the family's first evening together in their new home, and they haven't got much food, Francis says. So fair enough!

So it's bye bye twins, bye bye Sarah, bye bye Francis - sob, sob!

Lois and I wave them all goodbye, and then come back indoors and collapse in a heap for the second time today - what madness!!! But you see, we ARE really really REALLY old now haha!

16:00 We do our best to recover our strength on the sofa with a couple of mini-cakes and a cup of Earl Grey tea using our shiny new "Grandparent" mugs, which is nice.

Lois with her shiny-new "Special Grandma" mug...

... and me with my shiny new "Best Grandad Ever" mug.

Go on then, have one of my mini-cakes! You know you want to haha!!!

20:00 We wind down with a bit of TV, last night's airing of programme no.2 in Alice Roberts' new series, "Ancient Egypt by Train".

Is it just me, or are documentaries about "Ancient Egypt" getting a bit less informative these days? There have been a lot of such series on TV, and we can tell that, after a couple of centuries of archaeological work, there aren't a lot of game-changing discoveries being made on a month-to-month or even year-to-year basis any more, are there. Be honest !!!!

The most strikingly surprising fact, to me anyway, to come out of this programme tonight, was to hear that Egypt was the second country in the world, after Britain, to have a railway - built by British engineers like Robert Stephenson.

Egypt - why on earth....? But also, how amazing at the same time. My goodness!

a clip from an early black-and-white film of an Egyptian locomotive

an exhibit in Cairo's Railway Museum

Be that as it may, Alice's programmes are always fun, so always worth watching - she takes a genuine delight in seeing all the ruins and relics during this, her first ever visit to Egypt.

Alice grew up in Westbury-on-Trym, on the north side of Bristol, the city where Victorian archaeologist Amelia Edwards is buried in a local churchyard. And it was Amelia's book "A Thousand Miles up the Nile", which initially inspired Alice to take an interest in archaeology.

The suburb where Alice grew up was next door to the suburb of Redland, where my siblings and I grew up in the 1960's. Alice went to Red Maids School (founded: 1634) in the city centre, and I remember how we boys in the city's Grammar School (founded 1532: nah nah nah nah nah nah!) always used to think how striking the Red Maids looked in their red uniforms and Handmaid's Tale-style ceremonial dress.