08:00 I take Lois a cup of tea in bed, and then get back in with her. We've got our daughter Sarah and her twin daughters, Lily and Jessica, staying with us, and we usually stay hidden under the covers while they wash, dress, and then go downstairs and have breakfast - bed is the safest place to be, we've discovered haha!
09:00 By the time Lois and I get downstairs, our endlessly inventive 9-year-old twin granddaughters have embarked on some sort of fantasy game, having already made a cardboard car with movable wheels and movable steering-wheel out of an old egg-box (see picture below). And Sarah is seated in the kitchen at our dining-table, doing more unpaid online weekend overtime for the accountancy firm she works for in Evesham.
Poor Sarah!!!! But it gives Lois and me the excuse to have our breakfast outside on the patio, so as not to disturb her. Meanwhile the twins talk upstairs in their bedroom to their friends Samara and Djanna in Perth, Australia, on zoom, a wonder of modern technology that they take completely for granted, needless to say. My goodness!
early morning here in Malvern: photo showcasing our twin granddaughters'
home-made cardboard "car": and, behind it, our daughter Sarah,
still in her dressing-gown, already started on more unpaid online
weekend overtime for the accountancy firm she works for in Evesham
Lois and I have our breakfast toast and tea out on the patio,
to save from disturbing Sarah - poor Sarah !!!!!
And this weekend Ed has taken a short video clip of the house they were renting for their first few years over there. - after they left this house to move into a neighbouring house, their first house became the Benin Embassy. How many people can say that now haha!
11:00 Lois had asked me to drive her to Tewkesbury this morning so that she could attend her church's two Sunday Morning Meetings, but she's been a little bit under-the-weather this weekend, so she has decided to take part online instead. I take the equipment up to one of our guest-bedrooms, the one that the twins have been sleeping in since they arrived on Friday, so that she can listen uninterrupted upstairs.
16:15 It seems to be a day for news of people finding long-lost possessions. An email arrives from Steve, our American brother-in-law in Pennsylvania, with a charming picture of my dear late sister Kathy, which he's come across in an old folder - one of the best pictures I've seen of her.
But it's no longer an embassy, Ed reports today on social media, and it seems to be just an ordinary residence again.
a "still" from our son-in-law Ed's short video clip showing the carport of the
house in Copenhagen where he and our daughter Alison
moved into with their 3 children in 2012
flashback to February 2013: I took this photo on the first visit that Lois and I
made to Alison and Ed's house in Copenhagen: the carport at that
time held the bike-and-baby-car combination (what's the word for that?)
that Ali used to wheel little Isaac (2) around in
during the great Danish snows of that winter - brrrrrr!!!!!
photo-souvenirs of the visit Lois and I made with Ali, Ed and family,
to the Louisiana Art Museum at Humlebæk, just north of Copenhagen
Out on the patio - as Sarah is still working on the dining-table in the kitchen - Lois and I have lunch in the interval between Lois's 2 meetings, and then I go upstairs for a nap.
15:00 Sarah's husband Francis arrives to pick Sarah and the girls up and take them back to the rental home in Alcester they moved into a couple of weeks ago.
Sarah shows him the 2 stamp albums she discovered in one of our drawers upstairs in the guest bedroom she's been sleeping in here. Francis was overjoyed to hear that she'd found the albums - they belonged to Francis's late father, Frank, and they are of great sentimental value to Francis. He was afraid that the albums had been thrown out in error or otherwise lost during the family's many house moves in Australia between December 2015 and May 2023, when they were all living over there.
the stamp album that our son-in-law Francis feared had been lost
somewhere in Australia - the boyhood album that belonged to his father Frank
Francis agrees to leave the 2 albums with me temporarily so I can look through them - they're of great interest to me too because I used to collect stamps myself when I was a boy.
I think Francis is secretly hoping that I'll spot a stamp there that's worth millions, but I'm not as knowledgeable as he thinks, actually! I suppose I could look up any likely candidates on the internet, but it's a bit of a long shot isn't it. Young Frank was a little boy growing up in a small town in Yorkshire 80 years or so ago. How likely is it that he'd have been "sitting on" a stamp worth millions - answers on a postcard please haha!
16:00 The family depart for Alcester.
Tomorrow will be a big day for them, because the bulk of their belongings will finally be arriving from Australia at last, after the long sea-voyage from Fremantle, Western Australia to the docks at London.
flashback to May 27th - the bulk of the family's belongings, being shipped
by the "Seven Seas" shipping company, had reached the Bay of Biscay
on the long sea journey from Fremantle, Western Australia to London
The picture was taken in 1990 during a trip Kathy and Steve made to Steve's brother Paul, his wife and their 2 daughters, out in the wilds up north in Vermont, near the Canadian border. Paul had bought a 40-acre piece of land there, and had half-built what Steve calls "a modernized log cabin", sinking a well on the land and running electricity from dirt-road poles a quarter of a mile away.
flashback to 1990: my dear late sister Kathy (42), with her brother-in-law Paul,
somewhere up north in the wilds of Vermont, near the Canadian border
My first question is - when was the album itself published? There's nothing on the fly-leaf etc so I have to hunt for clues in the brief summary descriptions of each country that all stamp albums used to include in those days, descriptions which I used to find so educational myself, as a young lad stamp-collector growing up in London's north-west suburbs in the 1950's.
I know that this was Frank's boyhood stamp album, and that Frank was born in 1932, our son-in-law Francis has told me.
Aha! Look at the description for Czechoslovakia!
But, when the album was published, Poland was still free, according to the description on the Polish page: but the Poles were said to be feeling that their freedom was being threatened, and they had "asked, and accepted, guarantees from Britain and France". And as we know, Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, which was the start of World War II.
And it's interesting that the writer of the description highlights the possibility of a war of serious proportions breaking out between Poland and Lithuania as being the biggest threat. How wrong can you be in such a brief description as this - my goodness!
And that's the way you do it haha! And I foresee many hours of pleasure for myself browsing the pages, but only if I can find the time. Oh dear!
20:00 Lois and I realise how much we must put into these stays by Sarah and family in our cramped little house, because however nice and enjoyable the visits are - and they are - we always just collapse in a total heap after they go.
Tonight we just plonk ourselves down on the sofa and try to watch a bit of TV, but we doze off from time to time.
We see the last part of Michael Portillo's "Great British Railway Journeys", that was broadcast on Friday evening.
In this final episode of his latest series, Michael travels from Norwich to Cambridge, via Brandon and King's Lynn.
And there's a prime example of this discussed when Michael visits the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he talks to Anglo-American structural biologist Venki Ramakrishnan, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009, about the ground-breaking 1950's work on DNA and genes carried out here by American biologist James Watson and British physicist Francis Crick.
It's fascinating to see a replica of the physical model of DNA that the two men created. They had to build a physical model, because in those days, of course, there were no such things as computer graphics.
Let's just hope that the Laboratory got the replica the right way up - I certainly wouldn't be able to tell if it was upside-down, for instance, that's for sure!
And we hear Ramakrishnan describing how Watson and Crick achieved their results by bringing together scientific results from many sources, but mainly the fact that they relied in particular on the x-ray diffraction patterns of the DNA molecule produced by British chemist Rosalind Franklin, who worked at King's College, London.
This is where Lois starts to get a bit cross, because she knows what's coming - oh yes!
Everybody knows that Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962, but Rosalind Franklin did not. She sadly died very young, in 1958, and she had never even been told by the two men that they had relied heavily on her results.
And Venki Ramakrishnan draws a sensible conclusion from the affair, which is: don't always go by who wins the prizes, which we think is a fair inference to take from this episode, and not just in the world of Nobel prizes either - that's what we say!
21:00 We prepare for bed by watching an old episode of the comedy sketch show "The Fast Show", which was advertised like this in the Radio Times for Friday evening.
Still, it doesn't make any difference does it, in the grand scheme of things. Oh dear, but we're sleepy though - my goodness !!!!
Lois gets a bit cross all over again now, because of the blatant sexism that you see in so many of these old comedy shows. Women only appear in the sketches to look sexy, they're not considered capable of being funny in their own right, is what Lois says, and you can't argue against that, can you.
Take this scene, extracted from a supposedly Spanish TV gardening programme, when two gardeners are surprised by the sudden appearance of a topless woman pushing a wheelbarrow.
"Nice dimmocks", the programme presenter's sexist verdict,
is a reference to the BBC's gardening show department's
"sex symbol" of the era, the often bra-less Charlie Dimmock.
Oh dear, those sexist millennial years: my goodness!
By the end of the show, the final score gives the victory to the women, we think, But what do YOU think? Do let me know, won't you, and DON'T FORGET like you did last time haha!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
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