A nasty rainy day, and the weather seems to affect the quality of the zoom broadcast when Lois tries to log on to her church's 2 Sunday Morning meetings. The sound is intermittent or muffled, but she perseveres and does her best with it - what a woman!
Apart from the meetings, all Lois and I have to do today is to make sure the pets are fed: the dog, the two cats and the tropical fish.
There's no encouragement for us from the weather today to bother venturing out of the house, so we can mainly just consort with each other most of the day, which is nice. We're spending 2 weeks here in Headley, Hampshire, house-sitting and pet-sitting for our daughter Alison, husband Ed and their 3 teenage children, who are on a railway adventure holiday in Europe: they're in Milan today, then next stop Florence, after that Geneva, and then home to England on Sunday.
Later she sends us pictures of the sight-seeing they do today.
However, isn't it the most awful feeling when you're hundreds of miles away overseas and you suddenly realise you've left the iron switched on in the laundry room?
It's not quite as bad as that, but Alison texts us this afternoon from Milan to say that Ed has just realised that he left his electric bike plugged in, over in one of this crumbling Victorian mansions many out-buildings somewhere out in the extensive 6.5 acre grounds. Oops!
We log this little excursion into the grounds as a "success", but unfortunately, by mistake, we leave the light switched on in the "games room", and we only realise this in the evening when it's dark outside and we can see from the living-room windows that the light's still on, so we have to make a second expedition out into the extensive 7.5 acre grounds, this time with an electric torch.
What madness !!!!!
And today, apart from all that, Julia ("Jules") comes as usual this morning about 10 am to take Sika the dog out for his walk and work-out on the common. She's glad it's wet today - it's been too humid for days, and this aggravates "the change" for her: when she gets her hot flushes, it's like a bomb going off she says, and Lois sympathises - she's still getting the occasional hot flush even though it's been over a decade.
And there are an unusual number of interesting articles on the quora forum website, when you discard all the rubbish, that is.
[A recent FT article] expresses it this way:
Consider for a moment
what Donald Trump gives to his average follower. Membership in a vast
nationwide communion of like-minded people. A paternal figure in a confusing
world. The frisson of transgression: middle-aged whites don’t often in life get
to play the rebel.
"Whilst that probably rings true, it also feels a little overly simplistic. I am not sure that all Trump supporters can be so easily swept up into a single three-line bucket.
"The article then goes on to explore some deeper themes about motivation and drive. It sort of suggests that for many who throw their weight behind Trump, they tend to do so not in expectation of electoral success, but in relation to a more primeval sense of identity. Or as it puts it: ”…there must be lots of Trump fans who know, deep down, that DeSantis or Nikki Haley would do better with the national electorate in 2024. No matter. Neither confers on them the sense of tribal belonging that he does. Neither upsets the liberals as much.”
"I always remember back in 2015 meeting a Trump supporter when that was a Quixotic thing, and nobody seriously expected him to win the Republican nomination much less the Presidency. To her that almost seemed like a plus. She hated politics and hated politicians. Supporting Trump in the expectation he would not win felt good to her - she saw him a disrupter, and someone who would say in a very public way things she wanted said but no other mainstream figures would say.
"That of course explains why DeSantis has tried so hard to outflank Trump to his right (without much success).
"Last quotes from the article: “But once people took sides, around 2016, that group membership started to mean more to them. (As in a long-running war whose original cause is lost on the belligerents.) … I am no longer sure that populist voters want to win the culture war. Just being in it gives them meaning. If anything, there is more group identity in losing, more solidarity under siege than in triumph.”
"I honestly think he has grasped the nettle of it. Trump
supporters for the most part aren’t part of a rational cohesive body of
political thought or ambition. They are just looking for a hill to die upon
whilst screaming at the world. Together."
And what Riegels says on quora sort of rings true from my perspective too.
Fascinating stuff !!!!
19:30 Lois and I wind down for bed watching an old episode of "Hancock" from the 1950's, shown again this week on BBC4 on Tuesday.
Hancock and his sidekick Sid James are on a Mediterranean cruise - it doesn't seem like the sort of thing Hancock would normally do, but apparently Sid has convinced him that Englishwomen lose all their inhibitions once they get on a cruise liner, so he's hoping, during the voyage, to somehow "score" (in 1950's terms haha!).
His efforts to "score", however, are slightly undermined by his determination to wear clothes suitable for England in October rather than the Mediterranean in October, so we see him sitting on a deckchair all muffled up with his coat and his trademark Homburg hat, which seem to put the women off - I can't think why haha!
Yes, what mysterious places "abroad" and "Europe" were to most Brits in the 1950's. It wasn't till the 1960's that coach holidays to Spain and other warm countries became inexpensive enough to become popular, and after that there arrived the cheap charter flights.
But how set in our ways we were in those days. Surely, you remember haha !!!!!
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