Dear reader, are you also a parent, as well as being a reader? I think it's a case of "once a parent, always a parent", isn't it, even when you're 77, like Lois and me are.
flashback to last weekend: Lois and I enjoy an increasingly
rare moment of leisure amid our unbelievably busy lives
And don't think it's too late to become a parent. These days you can get pregnant in your 50's or even your 60's.
And what's more, once a parent, you never ever STOP being a parent, even if you're much older than 77, even over 100 say.
In case you're already looking ahead and wondering what life will be like when you're 120, for example, I've got news for you - things don't change much even then - oh dear!
I always think of poor 120-year-old Nathan and Celia Ginsburg, who couldn't even have leave town to celebrate their 98th wedding anniversary without their daughter Ruth, in their absence, trashing the family home in Alexandra, Virginia, by holding a wild, alcohol-fuelled party there with her fellow Supreme Court justices. Do you remember that news story, which "went viral" 10 years ago?
It seems like just yesterday, doesn't it! But then time "speeds up" as you get older, doesn't it, as Einstein famously discovered in one of his famous "Laws of the Universe".
Not to be, though, sadly!!!
Like at most weekends, we've got our 46-year-old daughter Sarah staying with us, plus her 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica. And before Lois and I even get out of bed, I have a foreboding - I've heard Sarah coughing intermittently in one of our 2 guest bedrooms during the night, and yes, we find out later that Sarah had a disturbed night.
Sarah has a tough workload - she's now the most experienced accountant at the firm she works for in Evesham, where for the last 6 months she's been putting in extra effort to re-acquaint herself with the firm's current customers and their accounts, after the family's 7 years' absence in Australia.
She's the family breadwinner. Her husband Francis is househusband during the week, taking on the main burden of looking after the twins and getting them to school etc during the daytime. However the twins still tend to gravitate to Sarah in the evenings and at weekends, when Sarah wants to relax.
It's the old story of "the working mother" the world over, isn't it.
flashback to 2015: Sarah (second from right) joins her colleagues
for a photo call, as they meet to celebrate the accountancy
firm's 80th birthday. Less than 3 weeks after this picture
was taken, Sarah and family were on the plane to Australia
And to me, it's already a foregone conclusion. Lois always puts her daughters' needs above her own, bless her, so, to support Sarah, she decides to stay in today and not go to church. And not only that, but she's going to do a main meal at lunchtime for all 5 of us, so that she won't even be able to join the meeting online.
Lois, in her lovely red "meeting dress", stays home from church today
to prepare a meal, including dessert, for all 5 of us:
including our daughter Sarah and twins Lily and Jessica
What a woman. What a trooper. And what a mother.
15:00 Sarah and the twins leave to drive back to their temporary rental home in Evesham, and an exhausted Lois and I get straight into bed - well, wouldn't you if you had the chance?!!!
Despite the work, it's been great fun having Sarah and the twins with us again, bringing us their non-stop chat and laughter, no doubt about that. But it's also lovely now to be in bed, and when we get up, we find we've once more got the strength to take up more of the neglected tasks on our respective to-do-lists.
For me, that's my task to write 5 vocab lists for the next meeting of the local U3A Danish group that Lois and I lead.
And after that my job is to write about 50 Christmas cards and put the stamps, airmail stickers, address labels and all that malarkey on the envelopes. For some reason, no doubt for their own convenience, Royal Mail seem to have made all their postage rates for simple Christmas cards to foreign countries the same price, at £2.20, whether it's to Mongolia or to Dublin - what madness!!!! And what daylight robbery at the same time - my goodness!!!!
I find I've got 5 to send to the USA, 1 to Japan, 2 to France, 1 to Hungary and 1 to Ireland.
What madness to have to pay £2.20 to Dublin when you only have to pay about 75p or so to Northern Ireland, which is bad enough anyway.
flashback to happier days - the 1930's - when you
could send a postcard to Ireland for only 3d (one penny today)
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
21:00 We sit on the couch and wind down for bed by watching the first programme in a new series by Lucy Worsley about crime writer Arthur Conan-Doyle.
What utter madness !!!!
Conan Doyle was delighted that his Sherlock Holmes stories became so popular but at the same time he hankered after winning prestige as a serious writer. The upshot was that he tried to kill Sherlock off after 6 years or so, when Conan Doyle himself was still only in his 30's. But of course Sherlock was by then so popular that he had to be "brought back to life" by popular demand.
Conan Doyle was just like Arthur Sullivan of "Gilbert and Sullivan" fame, who sort of despised the immensely popular tuneful songs he wrote for all those light operettas, and yearned to be taken seriously as a composer.
Or crime writer Dorothy L Sayers, who eventually started to hate the Lord Peter Whimsey stories that made her name and fortune.
22:00 In bed again, Lois and I try to think of some other examples of these stifled geniuses, but we decide to put that aside for now, and think about it another time. Well, wouldn't you, if you had the chance haha!
Can YOU think of any other "stifled geniuses"? Do let me know if you do, won't you! And if you're writing from abroad, remember it'll only probably cost you about £2.20 in your own money, or something similar, so well worth it haha!!!!
Zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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