Danskcolin: Saturday November 11th 2023

What a change the pandemic has made to our life here in the UK and around the world!

If only we'd realised, that Christmas long ago - in 2019 - how our world was about to change for ever. We'd heard rumours of mysterious infections but, at the time, they seemed so far away and not likely to bother us, we thought.

How wrong we were !!!

our daughter Alison and husband Ed, and their 3 children (clockwise, left to right)

Isaac, Josie, Alison, Rosalind, Ed and Lois, over Christmas Day lunch...

... me by the 2019 Christmas tree on Boxing Day...

...and our little family in Australia: our daughter Sarah, with

husband Francis and the twins Lily and Jessica on Christmas Day

Happy days!

And most surprising of all, who then would ever have predicted that the coming pandemic would bring back into prominence the profession of seamstresses, which pundits had confidently pronounced as now of "historical interest only"!

It seems crazy now, but yes, that's what pundits were saying on Onion News, and only 2 months before those happy family Christmas pictures!

You probably don't remember, because after I read the report, it was deleted from the record, as you'll see from the report - luckily I saved a copy on my laptop, so here it is - it's the only copy in the world, as far as I know!

Florence Shadewell (1808-1872) seen here at work in her London

"perspiration shop", as they called it in those far-off, more genteel days

NEW YORK—Noting that her name shall be unspoken from this moment until the end of the Earth, History decreed Tuesday that this very instance shall constitute its final mention of seamstress Florence Shadewell (1808-1872) who lived her life in the poorer environs of London, dying childless and unloved, without accomplishment or achievement aside from the workmanlike production and serviceable mending of women’s garments.

The consignment of her legacy to oblivion being therefore no great loss to either History or, indeed, to Humanity, her image and memory have already began fading from Man’s collective consciousness, all memory of her existence a guttering flame fated to fade completely in but a handful of moments. These very words flickering before you constitute the last invocation of Florence Shadewell by the Universe at large, and, once read, shall mark her true and final death as she slips eternally from the mind’s eye.

No further development is expected in this matter, as you and you alone are the final soul to see these words, and now everything Shadewell ever was or hoped to be slips silently below the dark and shadowed waves of eternity.

"Famous last words" eh? And who would have thought that, during the 2020 US Presidential Election that followed just over a year later, the name "Florence Shadewell" would once again be on everybody's lips!

Yes, Florence lives again! And all due to the shortage of graphics experts in news studios from the BBC to CNN, to Fox News, which meant that an army of seamstresses had to be hastily trained up in the so-called "Shadewell Method", to illustrate voting patterns as they came in overnight, on November 3rd 2020.

NEW YORK—Unrolling yet another bolt of quilter’s weight cotton as vote tallies poured in from across the country, CNN seamstresses reportedly worked frantically Tuesday night to update county-by-county results on the network’s massive electoral map quilt.

“Dammit, we’ve got an upset in the Adirondacks and only 25 seconds till we’re back from commercial—who has the red satin thread?” shouted senior needlework editor Marilyn Evers, 62, who used a seam ripper to tear out the blue stitches surrounding a sparsely populated county in upstate New York that had unexpectedly flipped in favour of President Trump.

“Also, it may come down to the wire, so we need to have both a red and a blue poly-blend Florida backed with fusible interfacing. Let’s have that s*** ready to iron on the map as soon as it’s decided. And let’s use some scraps of that adorable polka dot fabric Ellen brought in to appliqué a question mark on North Carolina so that Mr. Tapper will have something to point to when he announces it’s still too close to call. Oh, and by the way, if I look up at that screen tonight and see a state without properly bound edges and mitred corners, someone’s gonna lose their job. This is CNN, for f***’s sake!”

At press time, sources confirmed Evers had completed an intricate, hand-embroidered donkey in the southeast corner of Florida just in time to announce Broward County had gone to Joe Biden.

Crazy days, weren't they, looking back!

But they've also left their legacy, no doubt about that! And this weekend, of course, is the weekend of the prestigious CISMA World Sewing Contest Final. Our daughter Sarah and her twins arrived at mine and Lois's house in Malvern this morning from their rental home in Alcester, bringing a sewing machine to work on their planned Barbie outfits.

Unfortunately the sewing machine proved to be an Australian one with an Australian plug, so the contestants had to resort to old-fashioned "sweatshop" methods, sewing by hand, as the world's seamstresses have done for millennia.

flashback to Spring 2023: the annual CISMA Grand Sewing Contest

is officially opened in Beijing by Chinese President Xi Jinping

The twins happen to be finalists in this globally prestigious contest, and by coincidence they'll be sewing up against their former "besties" back in Australia: Samara and Djanna. By tradition the chief judge is normally a mum, and this year I think it's Clarissa, who is mum to Samara and Djanna.

Judging will take place tomorrow morning, on zoom, which is exciting!

And as the day progresses, I'm fortunate to be in a position, apart from when I'm upstairs having a nap, to see the new Barbie outfits slowly taking shape, which is a real privilege.

17:30 Finally the two outfits are finished, and ready for tomorrow's world final...

Jessica's "red dress Barbie"...

...and Lily's "gold dress Barbie", both in with

a good chance of carrying off the title, I think

And topically, the creation of new Barbie outfits has been given a new urgency by reports of an upcoming housing crisis affecting Barbies in this part of the world. Did you see it?

UPPER WICK, Worcestershire —According to 5-year-old Janie Wright's mean older brother, Dave, 8, if unsuitable borrowers Ken and Barbie continue to default on their high-risk subprime mortgages, it could spell the worst doll-housing crisis to hit the plastic couple since someone threw their dream home's roof out a window.

"[Ken and Barbie] were dumb and ugly so now they're going to lose their home and it's going to wind up in the garbage," said the big jerk, who predicted that since the dolls have not made a single payment, he might just have to cut off all of Barbie's hair to sell it for extra money. "Maybe they can move into a shoe box that they barely fit into. But it won't have any windows so they'll suffocate and die."

The nasty older sibling added that since Ken and Barbie never insured the dollhouse, they would have no recourse in the event of fire, flood, or stomping.

That report's a bit worrying, you've got to admit!

[That's enough Onion News stories ! - Ed]

18:00 The Barbie outfits are all finished, but the dining-table in our kitchen is still littered with "seamstress detritus", so Lois and I decide to do something young and trendy that we've never done before - go online and order a Domino's pizza delivery, a large, or large-ish, 13.5 inch one.

The local Domino's team is even offering a discount for orders over their £25 threshold, so we realise that if we also order some chocolate "dough balls" it makes the pizza cheaper than it would have been on its own, which is weird.

What a crazy world we live in!!!!

us tonight, enjoying the first course of our "domifeast"

20:00 Everybody's tired, and a bit keyed-up ahead of tomorrow's grand sewing final, so Sarah and the twins disappear up to bed soon after 8 pm.

As usual Lois helps to settle the twins down by reading them a bedtime story, and when she comes downstairs again, the two of us settle down on the couch by ourselves to watch a documentary on the life and work of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

A fascinating retrospective, giving Dylan's life-story, unusually doing it in reverse order, starting with his death in 1953 and working back to his birth in 1914.

Lois and I get the impression that Dylan, despite his reputation as a hell-raising, hard-drinking, sponging womaniser, was, in reality, a quiet man, underneath all that image stuff.

He loved nothing more than to spend his days quietly writing poetry in his garden shed in the quiet seaside town of Laugharne in South Wales and sometimes going out in the evenings and having a quiet half pint of beer in the local pub, Brown's Hotel, with his more extrovert wife Caitlin. He didn't normally drink whisky, and his "death by the over-drinking of spirits in a Manhattan bar" was probably caused by an unwise dose of morphine administered by his so-called physician.

However, Dylan must have decided at a fairly early age that he needed to project a false image of himself as a "wild Welshman", just to get the attention he needed for the poetry he was writing.

See? It's all starting to make some sort of crazy sense now, isn't it!

flashback to last Thursday: Lois and I see a documentary

about Dylan Thomas's "writing shed" in Laugharne in Camarthenshire

Dylan had a happy, charmed childhood in Swansea, a childhood that he never really grew out of, nor ever saw any reason why he should grow out of it.

Tonight, presenter Nigel Williams revisits Dylan's childhood home in a leafy, affluent suburb of Swansea, where his father, a schoolmaster, used to read Shakespeare to him from an early age , despite the protests of Dylan's mother, who said, "Oh don't read Shakespeare to a 4-year-old child, he won't understand it!", to which his father replied, "Oh he'll understand it, it'll be the same as if I were reading some ordinary thing!".

And his mother used to say, "Oh you had no trouble entertaining him, give him notepaper and pencils. He'd go into his own little bedroom and he'd write and write!".

And tonight programme presenter Nigel Williams visits that bedroom where the very young Dylan used to "write and write", and work on his earliest poems.