09:00 A ring at the doorbell and yes - they're here! Our daughter Sarah and her twin daughters Lily and Jessica, have arrived from Alcester for the weekend once more, and almost at once Lois and I find our little new-build home in Malvern suddenly filled with the girls' soft toys and arts and crafts materials.
Boom - it only takes a few seconds!
Sarah and Lily, seen here today on our sofa, with just a small
selection of their thousands of soft toys ["thousands?" - Ed]
our dining-table today: the twins doing artwork, and
Sarah doing some catch-up work from her accountancy job
Lois has done us the most marvellous meal, of roast chicken and potatoes
with roast parsnips and carrots - yum yum!
Lois and I often say to each other how lucky we are that the twins, these two little rays of sunshine, arrived in the UK at the end of April this year from 9000 miles away, and are now able to brighten up our lives after their 7 years in Perth, Australia.
flashback to April 29th: on our phones, Lois and I track Sarah and
her family's progress from Australia to Dubai, and Dubai to London Heathrow
flashback to May 4th : I drive to Evesham to pick up
Sarah and the twins, in part of the car-park belonging
to the accountancy firm where Sarah has been offered her old job back
Back in May, when I drove to Evesham to pick them up, the twins were talking full-on "Australian", but all that's gone now. They've settled into their class in their delightful village school near Alcester, made lots of friends, taking part in lots of activities, and they've got that iconic kind of teacher - Mr Palmer - you know, the type of teacher you remember all your life: for good reasons, needless to say haha!
flashback to September 6th: the twins about to go off
for their first day ever at an English school
Not only do the twins talk fluent "British" now, they've also started to learn about British history, and as far as their home-town of Alcester is concerned, they've got nearly 2000 years to cover, so it makes sense to start early on this doesn't it!
Sarah shows us some of the video clips of the twins' class, this one
showing the children re-enacting scenes from British history
The Romans founded Alcester nearly 2000 years ago, in 47 AD - it was a military camp, and hence the "-cester" ending for the town's name. The "Al-" bit of the name "Alcester" comes from a local river, the Alne, which like almost all our British rivers, has a Celtic name: this one means "bright".
When the English first came to England in the 5th century AD, I think they got quite exhausted in thinking up names for all the villages they started up, and they couldn't be bothered to think of new names for the rivers too, and so they just copied the existing names, which is fair enough I think: call me indulgent if you like, but you've got to feel a bit sorry for them, haven't you haha!
Some of the rivers they saw for the first time they simply called "the Avon", which is just the Welsh word for 'river', but the English may have been feeling tired that day, so we can't really condemn them for that, can we. "Cut them a bit of slack!", that's what I say!
Four hundred years before the English arrived, however, the Roman Army had built a big grain-store in Alcester, to feed all their troops for miles around - and today there's a Waitrose Supermarket on the same site - how's that for continuity of usage?
flashback to August: 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 nearby grain store
map of Roman Alcester: I've ringed the Army Grain Store,
positioned just outside the "defended", or fortified, part of the town,
and now the site of a Waitrose Supermarket,
Alcester as it is today - showing the location of the Waitrose
and with a handy inset to show you where to park, which is nice!
Some things are better left alone, Lois and I say!
Unfortunately the book was out on loan, Lois discovered, so she got this one instead:
She is now one happy bunny, to put it mildly!
British values, as listed on the twins' school's website
a quick check of the values taught at the twins' old school
in Australia suggests they're not terribly different, which is nice!
But can you check them for yourselves and let me know please!
[That's enough "values" ! - Ed]
21:00 Sarah and the twins go to bed. They're all tired, and they've have got stinking colds. They're going through the remainder of mine and Lois's pandemic stash of boxes of Kleenex tissues like nobody's business, but hopefully they're not infectious by this stage....
... but the jury's still out on that one, so watch this space!
21:15 After Lois finishes reading the twins a chapter from their bedtime story - what a woman she is! - she can at last take her apron off, and finally relax on the couch.
the 90th anniversary edition of "Wind in the Willows"
by Kenneth Grahame (1908), the bedtime book
that Lois is reading to the twins
At least during this morning's trip to the local County Library, on the back of Lois's library card, the twins authorised Lois to get one book, while they came away with the other 11 of Lois's 12-book entitlement. The twins are both voracious readers, which Lois and I are very glad to see, to put it mildly, so we don't mind at all about that.
We've been watching a lot of TV programmes about William Shakespeare recently, as it's the 400th anniversary of the "First Folio" of publication of his plays. Lois was looking for James Shapiro's "Who Wrote Shakespeare?"-style epic. Shapiro was a big contributor to the BBC series "Shakespeare - Birth of a Genius", and we used to have the book, but we gave it away to charity as part of our downsizing last year.
flashback to earlier today: Lois showcases her
latest borrowing from the local County Library:
Anthony Holden's book on the great man's life and work
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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