07:00 Lois and I wake up and find ourselves in bed - no surprise there! On our minds is our winter flu jab this morning at our local doctors surgery - our appointment is for exactly 9:49 am: intimidation by the use of precise minutes, Lois calls it!
Do you remember in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", how eccentric teacher Jean Brodie gets a curt note from the headmistress asking her to report to the head's office at 4:15 ?
“'I hope it will be convenient for you to see me in my office this afternoon at 4:15."
Eccentric teacher Miss Jean Brodie gets a curt note
from the headmistress
Brodie comments, "4:15. Not 4:00, not 4:30, but 4:15. She thinks to intimidate me by the use of quarter-hours.”
On the whole, though, Lois and I are pleased by the appointment's precise time - it suggests that they're going to be pushing us local old codgers through some sort of 'sausage machine', and it could mean that this will be a quick visit - let's hope so!
09:30 Our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica have been staying her with us overnight, and Sarah's been telling us about the burden of excessive homework that the twins' teacher Mr Palmer has been giving them. She says they come home tired from school in the afternoon, and then have to knuckle down and do their homework, a burden which tends to spill over into the weekends as well.
A couple of months ago the family moved back to England after 7 years in Australia, and the twins aren't yet used to the greater volume of homework that kids get here.
flashback to May 4th: I pick up Sarah and the twins, newly arrived
from Australia, outside Sarah's old workplace in Evesham -
after 7 years' absence she's returned to her old accountancy job there
Sarah tells us that the twins are struggling at the moment with a project their teacher Mr Palmer has given them on the history of their town, Alcester. And she thinks it would make it more interesting for the twins if they could include some photos of the town, which is really old - it was founded as an army town by the Romans in around 47 AD, during the early stages of their 400-year-long occupation of Britain.
The family hasn't yet invested in a printer for their computers, so Sarah asks me if I can print out some photos of the town's masses of old Tudor etc houses, photos that the twins can cut out and stick into their projects;
09:45 Lois and Sarah take the twins over to "The Leap", the playground area on our new-build estate here in Malvern, while meanwhile I go upstairs and print out pictures of some of Alcester's historic buildings for the twins to take back home with them later today.
Oh to be ten again haha!!!!
flashback to me, at the twins' sort of age,
with my little sister Kathy on the somewhat tamer swing
in the back garden of our home in Kingsbury, London
- happy days !!!!!
10:00 I show the twins the pictures that I have printed out of their little town of Alcester - 8 pages altogether, and this is one of them.
One of the most fascinating things to me about Alcester is the fact that the Roman Army had a massive grain store in Alcester that was used to feed the army in this whole region. And now, the spot where the grain store stood is a Waitrose Supermarket - how's that for continuity of use haha !!!!
flashback to August 26th: we park in the Waitrose Supermarket
car-park in Alcester. By a fluke we choose a spot where the red line
on the tarmac indicates the line of defences that the Roman Army
built for the town and their grain store
- what are the chances of that happening, eh?!!!!
What utter utter utter madness!!!!!
I say to Lois, that I bet everybody now will get there super-early, no matter what their appointment time is, and this in itself will probably make the parking into a problem which wouldn't otherwise have arisen.
What utter utter utter madness (again) !!!!!
our local doctors surgery, seen here in happier times,
when there weren't "droves" of old codgers milling around
Incidentally, does anybody know what the correct collective noun for old codgers is? I used the term "a drove of old codgers" above, but has anybody got the authoritative answer? Maybe it's a "sounder of old codgers".
I wonder....! Answers on a postcard please, as usual, if you've got the time.
Anyway, after we park, we see the two massive queues snaking their way into the building, one for each "clinic". Unfortunately, after you sort out which queue you're supposed to be joining, it's a bit chilly standing in line outside until you get inside the building, but when you do, you're hit by a comforting wave of heat, which is nice!
we eventually get inside the building and continue
queuing behind a massive "drove" of old codgers
snaking their way round the corridors
[Don't you mean "other old codgers" ?!!! - Ed]
11:15 Lois and I drive home, to find that Sarah and the twins are out shopping for clothes.
Lois and I hadn't realised how tough the family would find the English climate, and it's only September, isn't it - winter isn't for another 2 months !!!!!
During her 7 years in Australia with husband Francis and the twins, Sarah has completely forgotten what it feels like to be cold, and we can see that she registers temperatures as "cold" which Lois and I would call just "mild".
What a crazy planet we live on !!!!
Sarah also wants to buy some stuff for wearing to the office so that she's not only warmer at work, but also looks smarter and more "business-y" - most of her work clobber is years old.
12:00 They come back from their shopping trip with masses of new stuff.
some nice new warm slippers for the twins....
...a bunch of new sweaters for the office
...smart, warm trousers for the office....
... and some new smart shoes, again for the office
And Lois and I want to hop into bed. We're feeling okay so far, but it's just in case of any early side-effects of the flu-jab that might crop up: aching upper arms, lassitude, feverishness, etc, you know the kind of thing. We've had all of these symptoms at various times in the past - oh dear!
Lois and I bid a tearful farewell to Sarah and the twins,
and then we hop into bed
And it's been so nice to see the twins really tucking into their food - with the massive bowls of Cheerios that they have for breakfast and everything else they devour. Even though they've only been with us since 7 pm last night, Lois and I realize after they've gone that we're almost out of milk - something that normally never happens to us.
My goodness, and the next delivery by our milkman isn't till Monday morning - yikes!!!!
Picasso's first mistress in Paris, the beautiful artists' model
Ferdinande Olivier
But he soon "blotted his copy-book" here when, after Ferdinande proved unable to have children, the couple adopted a 13-year-old girl, Raymonde, from a local orphanage. But guess what - Picasso was soon drawing and painting Raymonde in "intimate" poses, although there's no suggestion that he ever did anything physical with her.
But that still says it all about the guy, really, doesn't it - that he could have thought that it was okay to do this with a 13-year-old orphan girl who's now under his protection and who has had a pretty sad start in life. And eventually Ferdinande decides to send Raymonde back to the orphanage, for the girl's own protection.
Philippa Perry, psychotherapist and author, and wife of artist Grayson Perry gives her comments:
For "problematic" in Philippa's comments, read "shabby" or "shameful" - that's what Lois and I say!
However, Picasso was certainly a man who could charm people. And in a fascinating, and touching clip from a 1950's French TV documentary, we see Ferdinande, now an old woman, revisiting the slum that she lived in with Picasso, and knocking on the door to their old flat.
So there you have Picasso in a nutshell, don't you.
But then, we also hear about Picasso's lust for fame, and his frantic efforts to be the art world's "top painter", and "the painter that everybody's talking about".
His arch-rival Henri Matisse had just come out with his sensational new painting "Le bonheur de vivre" (1906), taking the art world by storm, which really piqued Picasso. He responded by trying to grab the headlines back with a bunch of new ideas - the use of African art styles, themes from popular culture and the cinema, weird perspectives and the new style of cubism that he developed with his friend Georges Braque, where things were drawn as collections of cubes.
What madness !!!!
In his new-style cubist paintings, however, his granddaughter says tonight that he always put some normal elements in the picture, to give people an "in" into the weird world of the crazy cubes.
He even puts his live-in lover Ferdinande into many of his cubist style paints, which is touching, although maybe not too flattering!
However, you can see why he's doing all this new stuff - because the new attention he garners is also making him suddenly super-rich, and it propels him quickly from living in the Parisian slums with Ferdinande, to being the darling of the Parisian art-world and the friend of rich patrons and literati, like American expat Gertrude Stein, for example.
Unfortunately, he then obviously also started to feel that he needed a different mistress, to go with his changed circumstances, and we see him take up with a beautiful Ukrainian ballerina, Olga Khocklova, 25 years old, and 10 years younger than him. And, to satisfy the rich, intellectual circles Picasso was now moving in, the couple had a proper marriage ceremony in 1918, at a Russian Orthodox church in Paris.
Aside from the hoop-la surrounding their wedding, it was an anxious time for Olga, because of the Russian Revolution the year before, and many of Picasso's paintings of his wife seem very much to show that anxiety - it's something we tend not to think of today, but it must have been a time of great uncertainty for any Russian expats who had family back home in Russia.
Have you noticed how, often, in countries that have "popular" revolutions, normally followed by dictatorial regimes, that the families of the country's expats abroad are made to suffer for it, quite irrationally?
On the plus side, Picasso and Olga were becoming what today we would call a celebrity couple, with celebrity friends like Coco Chanel, and they were soon employing servants: a driver, a cook etc, which didn't please Picasso's former Bohemian pals, to put it mildly.
And it has to be said that when the couple started having children, Picasso seemed to develop a genuine love of his children, which is nice, as so many of the contributors to this programme are his grandchildren, and they obviously have happy memories of the old man.
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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