Danskcolin: Sunday June 18th 2023

09:00 First job of the day is to open my Fathers Day cards and presents - I've already opened Lois's in bed. In the photo below you can see a collection of items from Alison, our daughter in Headley, Hampshire: salted-caramel brownies, a packet of "Tea Pigs" tea-bags, and a book of jumbo cryptic crosswords. Bless her, she knows me well, that's for sure.

Under the ever-watchful eye of "Floppy Dog", I open

our daughter Alison's Fathers Day card and presents:

brownies, "Tea Pigs" teabags, and a book of jumbo crosswords

10:00 An extra Fathers Day present from Lois: she lets me off from driving her to Tewkesbury - I had promised to drive her there today so that she could take part in her church's two Sunday morning meetings: her first chance to take part since our other daughter Sarah and her little family came back from Australia at the beginning of May.

flashback to May 4th: Sarah, Francis and the twins,

having their first meal with Lois and me after their return from Australia

Sarah plus husband Francis and the twins, have been staying every weekend with us since the beginning of May, while waiting to move into their rental home in Alcester, and Lois has found it impossible to attend her Sunday meetings, even online, because of the consequent disruption to our life - oh dear! This weekend, for the first time, Sarah and family haven't been with us, having travelled down to Devon on Friday to attend the interment ceremony for Francis's late mother Anne at Topsham.

However, although it's only 10 o'clock, both Lois and I are already feeling hot and sweaty after our morning so far, and thunderstorms are predicted starting from one o'clock-ish, so Lois says she'd rather stay here and take part in her church's meetings on zoom, a decision which comes as a relief to both of us, actually. My goodness, yes!

Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in

her church's Sunday morning meeting online

It's a bit of a disappointing experience for Lois this morning, however. The first meeting is the "Bible Hour", and David, a science/engineering schoolteacher from Birmingham is due to give a talk on something like how the creation of matter works, starting with atoms - from the living-room I can hear him starting to talk about things like hydrogen atoms etc, in a chatty, down-to-earth, not-too-scientific way etc.

David has been given a big build-up by Alf, this morning's president. It turns out that David is the sort of schoolteacher who isn't content to just sit behind a desk and teach, and that's obvious this morning - oh dear! He's on his feet all the time, Lois says, walking around, involving the congregation, asking them questions and seeking their input.

You know the kind of thing - I expect you had teachers like that when you were at school, didn't you! Sometimes a bit annoying, if, like me, you wanted "just the facts, ma'am" (phase copyright "Sgt" Stan Freberg: St George and the Dragonet, 1953).

And that's all very well, because a lot of people like David's kind of a presentation, but it means that David isn't spending much time sitting behind the microphone at the speaker's table at the front of the village hall where the meetings take place. This makes it difficult even for people present in the hall to hear everything he's saying, as it turns out - acoustics in the hall aren't great to start with, and David's address is already being made more complex by the need for Farsi translations: there are even more Persian Christian refugees there than normal, Lois tells me later.

This is all on top of the occasional barked "comments" from the six or so dogs that tend to be present (bringing their owners with them haha!), and today also a little Downs-syndrome child of one of the Persian women, who - bless him - can't help himself from making random interjections.

flashback to March: I take Lois to Tewkesbury to take part in person

in her church's Sunday morning meetings: this is the lunch-break -

one of the troupe of dogs can be seen on the right, and a group of Persians on the left

Oh dear !!!! Lois doesn't know much about atoms, even less than I do, and the problems with the acoustics are making it impossible for her to follow what David is saying.

I go upstairs to try and find our headphones for Lois, the set that's gone mysteriously missing since our move from Cheltenham in October last year, in the hope that these will help her to hear the speaker's remarks. However, in the end not only Lois but also almost all of the other half-dozen or so online participants give up and log off.

What a pity! But Lois logs in again a bit later for the communion part of the proceedings, and all that goes fine, because the president, and the members giving the prayers, are all speaking from the platform at the front of the hall, and are getting the benefit of the microphone.

12:00 We have lunch, and, even before we finish, I get a text from Sarah to say that they left Topsham this morning and are within a few minutes of arriving at our house.

Yikes!!!!

Yes, yikes (again) !!!!

We weren't expecting them till late afternoon, but we've got used to getting surprises like this - Francis is a "spontaneous" kind of a guy, plus he tends to postpone decisions till the last possible moment, a bit like my dear late mother used to do. And spontaneous people are all part of life's rich tapestry, aren't they - be fair! Wouldn't life be boring if everybody was just like me haha!!! [You can say that again! - Ed]

And Sarah is very concerned to see me on this Fathers Day and give me her good wishes in person this year, after the family's 7 years in Australia, which is sweet too!

And an extra "surprise", which isn't actually a surprise because Lois and I had sort-of half-guessed it, is that the family arrive in their "new second-hand" 7-seater Land Rover Discovery. They had been tight-lipped when I texted them on Friday to ask if they were going down to Devon in their tiny electric Mini Cooper, so I suspected that they had got hold of the Land Rover and were planning to "surprise" us with it today - and so it proves!

Our son-in-law Francis pulls in outside our house in Malvern,

with Sarah and the twins in their new second-hand Land Rover,

after the 135-mile journey from Topsham, Devon

Sarah steps inside and gives me her Fathers Day

good wishes in person, the first time for 7 years....

...followed by our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica - awwww!!! -

and they're carrying their shiny-new "squishy marshmallow" soft toys

- awwwww (again) !!!!

We hear all about the family's couple of days in Devon.

It turns out that they're all pretty tired today. Shirley, Francis's sister, organised this family gathering of Anne's 2 daughters and son, plus all the grandchildren - and Shirley is the kind of person who schedules everything to the minute, Francis says, and she filled the whole of yesterday up with event after event - bang, bang, bang - till late in the evening. And then, after that, poor Sarah, who took Friday off work, had to do some more of her unpaid weekend overtime, staying up with her laptop till 3 am.

Poor Sarah!!!

And what a madness !!!!

13:30 Sarah and family depart again, for the rental home they moved into last weekend in Alcester. And Lois and I disappear upstairs for our "Fathers Day nap", which is nice!

17:00 Gin-and-tonic time. I've been looking forward to this - Lois gave me a bottle of Gordon's as one of her Fathers Day presents, and it's been standing on the sideboard for a couple of days. Morrisons erroneously delivered it complete with "security tag" - what madness (again) !

As always, however, Lois manages to pull it off, just like Barry McKenzie (aka Barry Humphries) used to do, when he moved to London - remember that? And I remember that Lois and I saw the film-of-the-book, "Barry McKenzie Holds His Own", in the cinema, back in the 1970's.

But what a woman I married!

I have my Fathers Day gin-and-tonic

my Fathers Day present of Gordon's Gin -

complete with security tag, as delivered by Morrisons

Tremendous fun !!!!!

18:00 Time for Fathers Day dinner, but we just have something that doesn't need a lot of oven time - a chicken-and-ham pie with spinach and potato. We're hot enough already sitting here in our kitchen-diner, and pretty tired after the day's excitements. And it's still pretty humid - the forecast thunderstorms and heavy rain haven't arrived yet, although they're not far away, as it turns out.

hot and tired, but satisfied, we sit down for our

Fathers Day dinner

20:00 As the thunderstorm gears up outside, we wind down on the sofa, with, unusually for us, a look at this weekend's Isle of Wight pop festival on the Sky Arts Channel.

We don't usually watch pop festivals, because we don't know anything about pop music or pop singers since our 2 daughters grew up and left home back in the 1990's, but there's a chance tonight to see how Debbie Harry of Blondie is doing.

We didn't know, till I googled Debbie tonight, that she's actually a year older than us - she'll be 78 in a couple of weeks' time. And it turns out that she's still going strong, running and jumping around on the stage, on her stocky little bare legs.

And we hear all the old favourites. Lois and I used to have a cassette tape of the band's greatest hits, that we put on, to keep ourselves, and also our daughters Alison (then 9) and Sarah (7), amused, as we motored round the States in the early 1980's - happy days!

And even the youngsters at the Isle of Wight Festival tonight seem to know the words of the songs, which is heart-warming - I guess they must have heard them on their parents' records.

Debbie just keeps going, which is an inspiration to us again tonight - after all, she's "not the kind of girl, who gives up just like that", ("The Tide is High").