Worcestershire is where it's all happening again today! Since young ace junior cub-reporter Phil "Scoop" Wilkinson-Jones joined the local newspaper, "slow news days" are a thing of the past - that's for sure!
flashback to the Worcester News newsroom, seen here in
happier times - when "every day was a slow news day"
Today "Dynamite Phil" has grabbed the local (and not so local!) headlines with some more of his funny local place-names that people pronounce wrong.
Worcester News's cub reporter Phil Wilkinson-Jones, the guy
who's shaking up the paper at last! And more power to his elbow!
Where does he get the energy from, that guy! I sometimes get the impression that everybody else at the paper is just "sitting on their backsides" waiting for "that young whippersnapper Phil" to come up with a story - it seems like that some days, doesn't it!
What a crazy county we live in !!!!
09:00 It's another day (6th day running) of not having to go out for Lois and me - isn't that a great feeling! Not so great for poor Lois, because she has had a cold for a week, but we think it's on the wane now, which is nice.
I would normally be taking Lois to Tewkesbury this morning so that she can attend her church's Sunday Morning Meetings, but she's not really up to it yet. Plus, Storm Isha is on the way in from the Atlantic with 55mph winds, driving rain etc, and who would want to brave that if they didn't have to?
Admit it. You'd stay indoors too, wouldn't you, if you had the chance!
11:15 Lois logs in to the meetings on zoom. From 12 noon till 12:30pm there's a break between the two meetings, so we have our packed lunches in the living-room.
13:00 I go to bed for my afternoon nap and Lois joins me after her second meeting finishes.
So quiet, and lovely and warm, with the electric under-blanket turned up to max, and the bedroom radiator pumping out the heat. It's almost like living in a warm country, And there's nothing happening in the street outside our bedroom window, no people around, no cars driving past. Everybody's hunkering down inside their houses.
Paradise !!!!
16:00 We get up and have a cup of Earl Grey and a jam sandwich on the couch. No news from our daughter Sarah - did the family go north and did they see some snow, as they had planned? Or did they find it was rain and wind there, just like everywhere else? Well, we'll find out tomorrow, perhaps. Last May, the family came back from their 7 years in Australia, and 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica are gagging to see some real snow. We haven't even had so much as a flurry so far this winter in Malvern.
flashback to last January: Lois and I chat on zoom with Sarah, Francis
and the twins in the last few months of their 7-year-long "Australian adventure"
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch tonight's edition of Antiques Roadshow, the series in which members of the public bring along their family heirlooms and other treasures from their attics, to have them discussed and maybe valued by experts in the relevant field. In tonight's programme, the team are in Northern Ireland.
Lois and I didn't know about some of the extraordinary precautions that the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the War Office made to try and maximise the chances of success for the D-Day landings into German-occupied Europe in June 1944.
the D-Day landings into German-occupied France in June 1944
You've probably heard about all the devious misinformation that was fed to the Germans which led to the Germans expecting the landings to be in the Calais area - which you'd think would be the obvious choice anyway, with a sea passage of only 18 miles.
But that's not all. Somebody in the Admiralty even had the bright idea of asking Brits to send in their holiday snaps from pre-war Continental holidays, so that they could firm up their intelligence about what sort of terrain the troops would encounter after they'd made a successful landing.
And just in case the Germans got suspicious, they asked people to send in anything they'd got from a huge area - from the northern coasts of Norway right down to France's border with Spain. Just asking for pictures of Normandy or any other specific place would have been a bit of a giveaway, now, wouldn't it. You've got to admit that!
Some section or other in the Admiralty was apparently given the job of making a collage of hundreds of thousands of holiday snaps that were received.
The programme's World War II memorabilia expert, Mark Smith, has always known about this initiative by the Government, but until now, he had never seen any concrete evidence of it. But this is Mark's lucky day, because this woman has brought in not just a 1939 holiday snap of her grandmother which was sent into the Admiralty in 1944, but also the thank-you letters etc that the family received back from the Admiralty.
The programme's venue today was a former British Army barracks that was a hive of activity during World War II, and the team was expecting some wartime memorabilia, but not this particular relic, masquerading as a typewriter.
These machines are quite rare, and this man picked it up at an ordinary car-boot sale, so he has no clue as to how it came to be there. He bought it as a birthday present to himself.
This story resonates with me. Way before my time obviously [I'd like some proof of that statement! - Ed], but when I first started work in 1972, there were still some older guys around in the office who'd worked on Enigma at Bletchley Park.
Incredible stuff, though, isn't it !!!!
flashback to 1998: Lois and I visit Bletchley Park
with a group of "professionals"
Happy days !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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