Oh dear - our internet goes off about 2pm, and stays off for 20 hours - what a crazy world we live in!
The day started off well enough - I expect you've been worrying about our little Honda Jazz, haven't you - you've probably realised that it's 12 months since it had its last MOT test [No, I hadn't noticed, and honestly I couldn't care less! - Ed]
When I booked the car in for MOT and annual service a couple of weeks ago, I found out that the Honda dealership in Worcester collects and delivers your car at no extra charge - how nice they are there, those guys at Startin Honda, Worcester!!
And while they're testing it this morning they ring me up to tell me what good condition it's in, despite being 11 years old now - tyres and brakes show very little wear: not surprising perhaps given that Lois and I don't use it that often. The only thing they can find wrong with it is the windscreen wipers front and rear - well we do live in the UK, so those wipers have a lot of do, don't they, so no surprise there haha!
14:00 Lois and I become hyper-excited, when the guy from Startin's delivers our car back to us.
Lois even tries to drape herself over the bonnet, but there's quite a steep incline of a Honda Jazz bonnet, so it's not entirely successful - still kudos to Lois for giving it a shot!
19:00 We get a delightful phone-call from our two 9-year-old granddaughters Lily and Jessica. Their parents, our daughter Sarah and her husband Francis, moved back to the UK from Australia a few weeks ago, and they are currently renting a house in Alcester.
Today the girls got the opportunity to spend a day at the local primary school, and meet the other children and also some of the teachers. Lily and Jessica were each assigned a new friend to show them around and explain how things worked at the school, which was nice. And at lunch-time they had the chance to try the school meals and play games with their new friends in the school-yard.
20:00 The internet's still off, so we have no option but to watch live TV - "catch-up" possibilities are out of the question. Damn!
We see an interesting programme about Florence Nightingale, who in the 19th century more or less single-handedly invented the concept of modern nursing, using her experiences in the appalling military hospitals used in the Crimean War to inspire a wider modernisation of nursing in general, in public hospitals world-wide.
Nurses had previously been employed only to do unskilled hospital work, as "carers", just because they were women, on the assumption that they could, by their nature, look after sick people much as they looked after own babies, and do it much better than men. Nurses had till then been given no training and had not been taught any particular skills, and it was left to the doctors to do anything "medical". Florence, however, turned the job into a profession, the first real profession for women in history.
Interestingly tonight we also hear tonight how complex a personality she was, to put it mildly - dedicating every minute of every day to her mission and not interested in anything else.
She wasn't your usual kind of pioneer. Despite her profound influence on the world, she'd never felt able to claim her true place within it. She was a restless woman, not in the slightest bit interested in fame, and she turned down the offer of a state funeral finally dying at age 90. "When I'm not longer even a memory, just a name,", she said, "I hope my voice will perpetuate the great work of my life."
And she never really escaped from the trauma and the dead of the Crimean War. And it's thrilling to actually hear a recording of her old woman's quavery voice near the end of her life, over pictures of the British military cemetery at Constantinople.
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