05:30 I get up and make a cup of tea and bring it up to bed for Lois. Our plan is to leave here at around 8 am so as to hopefully miss the forecast heavy thunderstorms on our trip to Headley, Hampshire to see our daughter Alison and her 3 teenage children Josie (16), Rosalind (15) and Isaac (13). Our son-in-law Ed is away in Devon doing Duke of Edinburgh Award duty supervising a group of local applicants for the award who are on a camping trip in the area this weekend.
And our plan works - but only just; about 5 minutes after we take our stuff into Alison's house, the heavens open with some of the loudest thunderclaps Lois and I have ever heard in the course of our long lives. Nice when it works out that way, isn't it!.
Also I find it's a real pain loading up the car and unloading it when we arrive. If only I were as strong - or "strong-ish" at least - as I was even a decade or two ago. Yikes !!!!!
Lois and I settle in our room, which is really Isaac's room, but which has a nice double bed overlooking "the grounds".
20:00 We settle down in the new revamped lounge to watch a bit of telly. In honour of Ed's visit this weekend to Devon, Ali suggests we watch an old Sherlock Holmes film, the Hound of the Baskervilles, on one of the family's many movie channels - it might have been Netflix, but I'm not really sure.
The lounge is quite a big room so everybody's quite far apart, and although it's a big-screen telly, with mine and Lois's eyesight it's still quite hard from a distance reading the occasional flashes of text, newspaper headlines or letters etc, so we get Josie, who's sitting nearest to the screen, to read them out for us - what madness!!!
But it's an old film, with no clever graphics etc, and the kids are soon engrossed in their iPads etc again.
21:00 We go to bed on an interesting documentary about the Bee Gees.
Lois and I had forgotten that the Gibb Brothers were born in Manchester, England, but that their whole family moved out at an early age in the 1950's to Australia. They were some of the original "£10 Poms", attracted by the Australian Government's offer of £10 tickets, an offer made to strictly white-only British people willing to go out there to settle.
Apart from that, however, I find that I'm still much the same as I was when I was about two and a half years old, back in 1948. As the great Paul Simon once wrote:
flashback to 1948, me aged 2 and a half - just the same wasn't I haha!
I'm pictured here with my little sister Kathy, and our father,
in his uniform: he remained in the Army until 1952
10:30 We arrive at Ali's house to find that Isaac has been having about a dozen of his friends over for a pre-birthday sleep-over last night. It seems that they were all up till about 3 am in their tents in "the grounds", and as Isaac always wakes up at 6 am on the dot - he's got some sort of internal alarm-clock - he didn't really get enough sleep to put it mildly. So soon after we arrive we're not surprised to see that he goes off upstairs for a 6-hour nap.
Poor Isaac!!!!
our daughter Alison (centre), with Rosalind (left) (15) and Josie (16)
Isaac (12) is upstairs having a 6-hour nap. Poor Isaac !!!!!
The family live in a crumbling Victorian mansion on an extensive 6.5 acre plot of land, built in about 1870 by one of Queen Victoria's vice-admirals - you know the one! Yes, it was Vice-Admiral John Parish (1822-1894), who "ruled the waves" of the western Atlantic and the China Seas etc, you know, the way the Navy used to do in those far-off days!
part of the house's extensive 6.5 acre grounds,
pictured herd on an earlier visit we made, in 2021
highlights of Vice-Admiral John Parish's career in the Royal Navy
Basically this is a big and really old-fashioned house, now lived in by a modern family with all their electronic gadgets etc.
And when Lois and I unpack, I suddenly remember to my dismay that I've forgotten once again to bring any adaptors or extension leads so we can plug any of our own stuff in. Every socket in Isaac's room is occupied with something we haven't got the courage to unplug anything, in case, for example, it has the effect of closing down their internet or something even worse. What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
18:30 Everybody settles down in the kitchen to have dinner. Our son-in-law Ed isn't here but Ali shows us on her phone the picture Ed sent her on one of his hikes today over Dartmoor, Devon, near one of the county's neolithic stone circles, the Nine Maidens, which Lois and I remember visiting once when staying overnight in the nearby town of Okehampton, on our way down to Cornwall.
Ed has sent his greetings from Dartmoor, where he's hiking
with a bunch of young Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme candidates
It's the old black-and-white 1939 version, starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes.
We three grown-ups all enjoy the film however. We see "the hound" attacking people, but we suspect it's all being done in fun really in front of the camera, but with horrible "fierce dog" noises just being added on the soundtrack, to give it the impression of being a savage attack. But what a crazy world they lived in in those far-off days !!!!
The idea of the cheap tickets was to boost the white English-speaking population there. The scheme was conceived out of fear of what the Japanese or Chinese might do to the underpopulated land-mass of Australia if they started getting expansionist ambitions.
The three Gibb boys became child singing stars in Australia in the early 1960's, and it's fascinating tonight to see pictures of them from the Australian TV of the time.
Barry Gibb, on TV in Australia, in the early 1960's
Barry's younger brothers, twins Robin and Maurice
the Bee Gees as a trio
The boys moved back to the UK in the late 1960's, attracted by the Sixties Scene over here, determined to begin big stars. And Lois and I didn't know either, that their first bit hit over here, "New York Mining Disaster 1941", was inspired by the awful disaster in the Welsh coalfields at Aberfan in 1966, when a colliery spoil tip collapsed and buried buildings, including the school, in a Welsh village.
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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