Danskcolin: Sunday October 22nd 2023

Well, it's Sunday again, and Lois and I wake up in bed again - and we both remember clearly getting into the same bed at 10 pm last night, so no surprise there; "the dementia" hasn't carried us off quite yet haha!

On Sundays Lois usually asks me to drive her to her church's Sunday Morning Meeting near Tewkesbury, but we decide to give it a miss today, and Lois will take part in the meeting online, using zoom.

One reason to stay at home today is that we had our COVID booster jab yesterday, and we're both feeling a bit jaded. The other reason is possible flooding on the route south-east from here over to Tewkesbury.

While we're still in bed, Warners, our usual supermarket in Upton-upon-Severn, which would be on our route today, emails me with a scary picture of the supermarket as an island amid floodwaters, and with the news that they may have to close temporarily due to the flooding. They suggest that their regular customers come along quickly and buy up some of their fresh food, which they're selling off cheap.

Is it still "Upton-upon-Severn" or is it maybe "Upton-under-Severn" now? I think we should be told, and quickly, don't you!

Warners supermarket seen here in happier times,

when it wasn't surrounded by flood water

the route we would have taken today if I had driven Lois there in person

11:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's zoom session. Numbers at the local church in Tewkesbury have been more or less doubled in the last year or so by an influx of Iranian Christian refugees. A lot of them don't speak very good English, so the church has laid on a simultaneous Google translate service, which translates the preacher's exhortation into Farsi and flashes the Farsi version up on a big screen behind the preacher's platform.

For some reason Andy, the local church's Chief Elder can't get the Google Translate to work today, so they approach instead one of the Iranians, a young teenager who's a whizz at languages and has the best English by far out of all the refugees, and she agrees to try and act as a live interpreter, translating the preacher's remarks sentence by sentence into Farsi for the benefit of the Iranians in the congregation.

And the preacher himself is addressing the meeting from Sweden, where he and his Swedish wife are staying with relatives.

How weird is that!!!!

And it's also a bit odd today for Lois, because she finds that her face is also up on the big screen, beside the preacher's and with an equal prominence - and this is because today Lois is actually the only person joining the meeting online, apart from the preacher himself, who is in Sweden, of course.

the scene in Tewkesbury this morning. Chief Elder Andy is

this week's president, and sitting beside him is the young English-to-Farsi interpreter.

Behind them, on the big screen, can be seen this week's preacher,

who's in Sweden, and Lois, who's sitting in our humble kitchen in Malvern

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

12:00 I've also received an email today from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, describing how the old paintings that UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill painted during Word War II, as a relaxation and an escape from his busy world, are now selling for millions of pounds. I guess their value now is based mainly on his continued historical fame.

The example in the article is this painting of Koutoubia Mosque in Morocco. Churchill worked on the painting during intervals of his momentous 1943 Casablanca Conference with his great ally, Roosevelt.

Churchill´s 1943 painting "The Mosque at Koutoubia"

Lois and I didn´t know that this painting was later bought by American film-star and art collector, Brad Pitt, for his then wife Angelina Jolie, but when the couple divorced, the painting was put up for auction.

17:00 What a day we've had!

And what a rain-sodden few days we've had, come to that. But at around 5pm we see a lovely rainbow from outside our front door, so maybe there's hope for us yet. And that's what we want now - an end to all this rain - because our daughter in Hampshire, Alison, will be bringing 2 of her 3 children to stay with us a bit later in the week, and it's school half-term this week in their county.

What a day we've had! The day's photos, above,

finally offering hope of drier days to come

20:00 We wind down with an evening of TV. First we see tonight's edition of the Antiques Roadshow, a programme in which members of the public come along to some local stately-home or other, bringing along heirlooms etc from their attics and have them discussed, and maybe valued by experts on antiques in the relevant field.

Lois and I often notice that the heirlooms that turn out to be the most valuable, sometimes worth half a million pounds or more, tend to come from programmes filmed in the wealthy South-East of England. However, tonight's episode, which comes from Northern Ireland, makes up for lack of auction value in terms of historical interest, no doubt about that.

Here we have a desk once owned by Lord Macartney, who came from County Antrim in Northern Ireland, and who was the UK's first ever ambassador to China, 1792-4. When Macartney came back to the UK, the Emperor gifted him 2 tea boxes - very expensive in those far-off days - and Macartney had them turned into a desk by a Lancashire cabinet-maker.

The Emperor wanted all foreign ambassadors to show a huge amount of deference to him, but Macartney wasn't prepared to do that - I guess he thought "I'm British, I don't need to kowtow to anybody!", which might have been the temptation in the 1790's, but the Chinese didn't like that of course, and Macartney didn't last long in the post.

Poor Macartney !!!!!

This woman's grandfather was one of a 5-man crew that in 1920 made the first ever attempt to fly non-stop from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, but only got as far as Tabora in modern-day Tanzania. After engine trouble the plane finally crashed at Tabora, but all the crew survived.

And tonight the woman brings along a solid-silver model of the plane, plus commemorative plaque, that was presented to her grandfather by the Times Newspaper in 1929, in order to celebrate this first attempt.

Next, fast forward to World War II, and Lois and I didn't know that Londonderry, Northern Ireland, was the headquarters of the allied campaign to defeat the German u-boats that for so long threatened merchant shipping in the North Atlantic. And, tonight, presenter Fiona Bruce shows us a statue dedicated to the International Sailor, a statue that stands in the grounds of Ebrington Square, where this programme was filmed.

The statue's inscription reads, "In memory of those from all nations who lost their lives in the Battle of the Atlantic".

Londonderry's strategic position as the westernmost port in the UK, close to the North Atlantic shipping lanes, saw it become the key operational base for the Allies, with over 140 warships and 20,00 Naval troops stationed there.

During the campaign, 4000 allied ships were sunk, and over 70,000 lives lost. By 1943, however, the introduction of aircraft-carriers to protect the merchant convoys, together with the breaking of the u-boats' ciphers at Bletchley Park, led to eventual victory.

When Germany finally surrendered in May 1945, Londonderry was the scene of the formal surrender of Germany's u-boat fleet, and nearly 60 captured u-boats were docked here on the River Foyle, which must have been quite a sight.

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

21:00 We go to bed on the first half of a documentary about the impressionist Mike Yarwood, who in the 1970's and early 1980's was the UK's biggest TV star. He holds the record of highest ever audience figures for a TV light entertainment show - a record never likely to be beaten in these days of multiple channels and so-called "streaming", and all that kind of malarkey.

And while I'm about it, may I say what a madness all that malarkey is !!!!! [No, sorry, we haven't got time for that! - Ed]

Yarwood, in any case, faded almost completely from the limelight as the 1980's wore on, and he subsequently made very few public appearances, either on TV or anywhere else.

Yarwood died, sadly, while this Channel 5 programme was being made, but we hear a lot from his two daughters, which give lots of interesting perspectives on the man.

He was unique among impressionists at the time, because he didn't just imitate celebrities' voices, but also their facial expressions, hand gestures and body-language in a way that's never been equalled since, that's for sure.

Here he is as Prime Minister of the time, Harold Wilson:

Here Mike's two daughters reminisce about their father's love of doing impressions of Prince Charles, as he was at the time, now King Charles:

Tremendous fun!

The odd thing about Yarwood was he was one of those entertainers who are painfully shy and avoid social situations, coming to life only when they are on stage doing their act.

He always felt most comfortable around his family - his wife and 2 daughters, as one of his daughters recalls tonight.

He just seemed to really crave the relief of disappearing, almost, when he wasn't performing. When he came home, he just wanted a quiet life, his daughter remembers. He just wanted to be left alone, he didn't want anybody to come to the house, he didn't want to socialise, he just wanted to be with his wife and daughters.

When about to perform, he would be in his dressing-room, quite nervous. He was incredibly shy, but his PA says that Yarwood "seemed to grow 6 inches when he walked out onto the stage. The impressions he chose to do were his "protections", his daughter says. Once he'd got his props on, the wigs, the glasses etc, he was no longer himself, he could say anything to anyone.

In after-show parties, however, his manager recalls that he never interacted with anybody. He found being himself incredibly hard. And writer Giles Brandreth who tried to interview Yarwood to help him with a planned autobiography, found that Yarwood didn't want to talk about himself.