For Lois and me the second full day of our stay at our daughter Alison's house in Headley, Hampshire. And for us it's another half-day at least of "keeping out of everybody's hair", just doing a bit of local shopping, while the family - Alison, Ed and their 3 teenage children make final preparations for their big trip to "Scorchio-land" (Spain and Italy).
[That's enough "scorchio" weather forecast pictures! - Ed]
We don't mind too much because we know their taxi's coming for them at 1:30pm. After that we'll have the house to ourselves and we can spend the afternoon in bed, here in "Drizzle-o Land" so that's nice!
12:30 The odd thing about this morning is the family's pets: Sika, the Danish dog, Dumbledore the Danish ex-alley-cat, and Otto the well-brought-up English cat. They all seem to be able to tell that something weird is going on in the house with all the packing and assembling of belongings etc, and they start cosying up to Lois and me, as if they know that we're soon going to be "the new management", and their new source of food etc.
As if he knows the family are going away, Otto the cat starts to cosy up to me,
having totally ignored me for the previous 36 hours - what madness!!!
awwww! Little Otto, cosying up to "Poppa" - awwww (again) !!!!
(left to right) Alison, Josie (16), Rosalind (15), Ed,
Isaac (12) and Lois
13:15 The taxi to take the family to the Eurostar Terminal in London will shortly be arriving, so everybody makes the final touches to their backpacks and then they all pose for a final photo-call.
They'll be spending their first night in Paris, and then travelling on to Barcelona in the morning.
To Lois and me, it looks like an awful lot of stuff they're taking. We try to remember when we took our two daughters Alison and Sarah, to the Baltic coast of Germany for a couple of weeks in 1992, when they were in their mid-teens. We easily fitted all our belongings into the boot of our little Vauxhall Astra, but in those days kids didn't have all the stuff that kids have today, electronic devices, chargers etc, not to mention probably taking a bigger selection of clothes than kids would have done 30 years ago. What a crazy world we live in!!!
Weissenhauser Strand on the Baltic, where we stayed
with our daughters Alison (17) and Sarah (15) in 1992
Lois playing "crazy golf" - it was total mini-golf-madness !!!!
me outside the souvenir shop in Peenemunde
Lois and Alison on the beach
Sarah, as we queue to view the U-boat exhibit at Peenemunde
Happy days !!!!
13:30 The taxi arrives and Lois and I wave them all off from the door, as it's drizzling like crazy. What a shock it'll be for them when they arrive in those hot countries - my goodness, yes, no doubt about that!!!
20:00 We wind down by watching a film, "The Young Victoria", about the early years of the young queen's reign in the late 1830's to early 1840's.
We see too many dramas and films about "Old Victoria", glum and dressed in black, after she became a widow far too early in life. So it's always nice to see her, as we do in this film, as an attractive and passionate young bride in the early years of her marriage to her German husband Albert.
But who knew that the custom in those far-off days was for the Queen's ladies-in-waiting to be replaced whenever there was a change of government? [I expect Lois knew that! - Ed]
It seems crazy but when Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister, and the Liberals were in power, the Queen was assigned one set of ladies-in-waiting, but after the Conservatives won a general election and Robert Peel became Prime Minister, the country expected Victoria to appoint a new set of ladies-in-waiting. It seems crazy, because, after all, what's political about being a lady-in-waiting?
Luckily Lois is on hand to explain it to me. Under Lord Melbourne, the ladies-in-waiting were all Liberal Party appointees - many of them were wives of Liberal MPs. And I guess one of their functions of these "liberal" ladies-in-waiting was to pass on to the party any bits of political gossip they picked up from the Queen.
So naturally when Robert Peel became Prime Minister, he wanted to install a bunch of Conservative ladies-in-waiting to provide the same service for the Conservative Party.
The Queen, however, had become attached to her "liberal" ladies and didn't want to change them, and this caused public uproar, not just in the House of Commons but also in the country at large, and there were big protest demonstrations outside the gates of Buckingham Palace.
top-hatted demonstrators outside Buckingham Palace -
whatever next !!!!
See? It's all starting to make a kind of weird sense now isn't it! [I wouldn't put it that strongly! - Ed]
21:30 We go to bed on an amusing sketch show from the 1990's, imagining what the UK's Breakfast TV shows might look like, if they were staffed exclusively by immigrants, from the Caribbean and the Asian subcontinent. Their show is called "What! time you call this Britain?".
Oh dear - you'd never have seen Nick Owen and Ann Diamond behaving like that on GMTV's "Good Morning Britain" now, would you!
The show's weather forecast is thoroughly professional, however, which is something of a relief!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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