Danskcolin: Monday July 10th 2023

For Lois and me, today is the second full day of staying with our daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire with husband Ed and their 3 teenage children Josie (16), Rosalind (15) and Isaac (12).

Isn't life busy these days for parents if you've got 3 teenage kids - my goodness! Luckily Alison keeps a handy chart on the freezer door that tells her who's doing what on any particular day. Today Josie is having another "introduction day" at the school she'll be starting in the sixth form at in September, St Catherine's at Bramley, Guildford, where as part of today they'll be divided into groups and will learn about making videos, producing some "shorts" and some "?longs?". What madness!!!!

St Catherine's School, Bramley, Guildford

Isaac is at his normal school in Liphook, but he won't be doing normal lessons - he'll be taking part in the "technical" rehearsal for Peter Pan the Musical, in which he's playing one of the lead parts, that of young John Darling. It's been decided that the Darling children, for health and safety reasons, won't now be "flying" through the air during the performance: the scene will have a black backdrop and stage-hands dressed in black will be holding the children up so they appear to be flying, without doing it for real. What madness (again) !!!!

Alison will be doing her job for most of the day - a classroom assistant at a school near Haslemere, and Ed will be driving home today from his weekend on Dartmoor, where he's been helping to supervise a group of youngsters hiking across the moor and doing what's called "wild camping". What madness (again again) !!!! [No more madness today, okay, or I'll have to send you to bed early again! - Ed]

flashback to Saturday evening: Alison shows us a picture of Ed

on her phone, wearing his shiny-new "Dartmoor hat"

this afternoon: a shattered but satisfied Ed, comforts Sika, the family's Danish dog,

after a gruelling weekend hiking and "wild camping" on Dartmoor.

Poor Ed !!!!!

But mainly today it's just been Lois and me in the house, with the company of the ever chatty Rosalind, who's got the day off from school today, prior to doing 4 days' work experience at a law firm in London.

This is nice for Lois and me, because we can have some nice chats with Rosalind in the morning. And then in the afternoon, while Rosalind's doing her zoom sessions with tutors, we can spend a couple of hours in bed - we're so tired after yesterday's excitements - you would not BELIEVE !!!!

16:00 Lois and I tumble out of bed, somewhat rejuvenated, and we have a look at the puzzles in this week's Radio Times.

We get a bit of help from Alison on the quizzes, which is nice. She knew about the Lion King film, in the Popmaster quiz, for instance, which Lois and I didn't have the faintest idea about.

And how nice to find out, from Susie Dent's dictionary corner, that the first recorded use of the word "cricket" - the game, not the insect - was in 1598 in nearby Guildford, where Josie spent today and the rest of us, apart from Ed, spent yesterday. It's a small world!

19:00 Everybody's here for dinner, which is nice.

After dinner, what did we do? Nothing much, no television for once, just chatting with Ed about his experiences with the kids on Dartmoor, and about yesterday's surprise visit from Alison's sister Sarah and her family.

A very enjoyable evening. I can't remember much about it now, though.

I personally have always had an interest in the world's best laconic diary entries.

"Forgot what did", as Katy wrote in one of Susan Coolidge's classic novels.

That quote was also the English poet Philip Larkin's favourite diary entry. Larkin embraced ordinariness, as Douglas Murray writes in an article sent to me this week by Steve, my American brother-in-law. Although Larkin "conjured up the divine" in his poetry, he had a very ordinary life as a librarian in the grim city of Hull, Yorkshire, and lived in a supremely unattractive house there, drinking cheap supermarket port. How different from the life of those other poets, the Brownings, when you think of the exotic life that they chose to lead in exile in sunny Italy with lots of nice wine etc etc.

Other short diary notes that I remember include one that Lois and I read in a Danish murder mystery that was one of our U3A Danish group's projects: the diary entry for the day in question read simply "Stuffed girlfriend in freezer".

In 1916, Hubert Parry was asked to compose a melody for Blake's poem "Jerusalem" to boost the country's morale at a difficult time in the war, and Parry managed to compose a piece that has been called "the song of the century."

But in his diary on that day, Parry just wrote, "Wet and very cold, wrote a tune".