08:00 For the first time in 5 days, Lois and I actually wake up in a warm bed in a warm bedroom, and we can start the day with a hot shower, which is nice - you would not BELIEVE exactly HOW NICE!
Our stay in our daughter Alison and family's draughty old Victorian mansion, where the central heating wasn't working, is now over, and nice though it was to spend the time with Ali, husband Ed and their 3 teenage children, it's also nice for Lois and me today, to be back at home, enjoying the heat together, you would not BELIEVE (again) !
[That's enough "triumphalism"! - Ed]
flashback to Saturday evening - Lois and I try as best
we can to keep warm in our daughter's huge draughty Victorian
living-room, before we run upstairs to get warm
under the covers - what a madness it all was !!!!!
But today is also a day tinged with regret. My dear late sister Kathy would have turned 76 today, had she lived.
Last October Lois and I sold our house in Cheltenham and downsized to a new-build home in Malvern , and in the move all our old photos got shoved into big envelopes, and it's almost impossible now for us to find the ones we want. But in honour of Kathy's birthday, here are some pictures I found of her taken in the early 1960's, with her then dark auburn hair, looking slightly moody as she normally did in those crazy far-off days, while all the while being full of life underneath, and so excited to be, at last, on the cusp of womanhood.
Of us four siblings, Kathy was the only one who ever achieved "cool" status - secretly going out on dates when she was officially too young to, at ages when we other three were still spending evenings and weekends doing our school homework. She was the one who refused to go on family holidays, when you were still doing it, even though you were older than her. In other words, Kathy was the universal "your sibling who your parents are eventually forced, reluctantly, to give up on trying to parent".
Dear Kathy, I miss you so today!
Kathy came to stay with Lois and me in the States in 1983, when I was on secondment to the US Government. Lois and I and our 2 young daughters were renting a house in Columbia Maryland, and she quickly took over one of our guest bedrooms for a few months until she found her own place.
She quickly got a job at the British Embassy (Science and Technology Office) in Washington DC, buying a second-hand Ford Mustang and commuting each day from our house in Columbia into Washington DC. Eventually she decided to settle permanently in the States.
Today, Kathy's American husband Steve sent me and my other surviving sibling Jill this marvellous picture of Kathy taken in 2003, aged 55, outside their house in Norrington, Pennsylvania, looking full of confidence and at the height of her powers, the photo carrying Steve's own tag-line.
Kathy and her American husband Steve crossed the Atlantic and visited us several times at our house in Cheltenham after we returned to the UK in 1985, but their last visit was in 2010, as far as I remember.
By coincidence, these pictures, some of the last that I have of Kathy, were taken only about a mile away from where we live now, at Malvern's Three Counties Showground, a place that Lois and I pass routinely several times a week without even noticing it, it's become so routine now. And those 680-million-year-old Malvern Hills in the background of this first picture are still there, I can today exclusively reveal!
my late sister Kathy, the redhead sitting with Lois and with Kathy's husband
Steve (centre, in the dark glasses), at the Pimm's bar at the Malvern Flower Show,
which was being held only about a mile from where Lois and I live now.
Kathy and Steve at the Pimm's stand at the Malvern Flower Show
Cheers Kathy, and happy 76th birthday! And have a Pimm's and champagne on us, won't you, wherever you are!
20:00 Lois disappears into our kitchen-diner to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down in the living-room to "road-test" the first programme in a new3-part BBC2 series on the life of Julius Caesar (The Making of a Dictator).
That's why, I think, in England we tend to forget that for hundreds of years before 43AD, the year when most of us British were dragged kicking and screaming into the Empire, Rome was, until Julius Caesar came to power, kind of a proper democracy with high ideals, and safeguards against tyranny etc, if you ignore the fact that women and slaves couldn't vote, that is.
Julius Caesar was the man who in 46 BC had put an end to all those centuries of democracy, political campaigns, and the proper voting of people into office by the electorate etc.
As the Radio Times blurb above notes, one of the contributors to tonight's programme says, "Democracy has to be constantly fought for: if you take it for granted a new Caesar will come!"
It makes me think about - you know - all the great overthrowers of democracy before World War II, like Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco etc, and how easily they seemed to do it.
some of Europe's pre-World War II dictators:
how easily they came to power!
And I wonder how many other viewers were also thinking of Donald Trump refusing to accept electoral defeat in January 2021? Trump is only mentioned once in the programme, as far as I can remember, in the context of the period when Rome was still a functioning democracy, that is, a few years before Julius Caesar seized power.
Rory Stewart is one of tonight's pundits, a Cabinet Minister under Theresa May, and a former candidate for Conservative leader when May stepped down. Stewart resigned from the Cabinet in July 2019 when Boris Johnson became leader.
In tonight's programme, Stewart talks about Cato, Julius Caesar's foremost early opponent in the Senate.
He says, "Cato and Caesar come from similar backgrounds, but they're total polar opposites. Caesar is known for his flamboyant fashion, rickety finances, bribing voters. Cato is somebody who represents the very most old-fashioned ideal of a Roman gentleman, very very austere, he actually walks around barefoot. But above all, what he stands for is the old Roman constitution.
"And he sees Caesar a bit like today you might see Donald Trump, or Bolsonaro, that is, as a populist. In other words somebody who claims to be speaking on behalf of the people, but who in fact is just using that as a way to destroy the constitution and to take power for themselves. And Cato is disgusted by this."
So there you are. We have to watch out. And don't think it couldn't happen here, or that that sort of malarkey couldn't happen in any English-speaking countries!
Rory Stewart, ex-Cabinet Minister under Boris Johnson
talks tonight about Julius Caesar's nemesis in the Senate: Cato
The US didn't fall victim to Trump in January 2021 - what were the main factors in this success? The Constitution I guess, fundamentally, but also, perhaps crucially (?), those Republicans who believed in the Constitution as a matter of principle. I'm no expert, however, [You can say that again! - Ed] and I think I should be told, nonetheless.
Answers on a postcard, please, but no doctoral theses if you don't mind - our postman here in Malvern Rise has been looking a little tired recently, poor guy haha!
21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we vote for an early bed, which is nice!
Zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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