Dear reader, have you ever had a so-called "watered-down" phone call with anyone, say, typically with one of your parents? It's a bit unsatisfying, isn't it, to put it mildly, like what happened to local Bell End resident Ian Miller the other day, as reported on Onion News' teatime headlines. Do you remember?
And I remember in the old days, before speakerphones etc, how Lois would be having a long, animated phone-call with some friend or relative, and then in the middle, she'd say, "I'll just put Colin on the line to you for a few minutes while I just pop to the loo!", or something similar. Of course, I could never think of anything to say during these "few minutes": minutes that, to me, seemed to last an hour or more. If you were one of our phone-buddies in those days, I bet you remember how your heart would sink whenever I picked up the "blower", so that Lois could go to the loo. Go on admit it!!!!
Those tortuous "few minutes" could certainly have been described as "a bit watered down", as I expect you recall !!!!
flashback to 1971 - me as a gauche young foreign language student,
having a "watered-down" conversation on a public pay-phone
outside a department store in Tokyo
The reason I ask is that this morning Lois and I had a two-hour - yes two hour! - very much "watered-up" phone call with Ruth, who's married to Lois's cousin Brian. She and Brian are both well into their 80's now, and the last time we saw them both was at their 60th wedding "do", surrounded by their enormous family of descendants, down at Bournemouth back in 2019, just before the pandemic.
these are just some of Ruth and Brian's enormous family of descendants -
children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc,
all gathered at the church for the couple's 60th wedding anniversary
Riveting stuff, and theoretically 3-way because of the speaker-phone. However, over the course of 2 hours, I personally didn't contribute a lot to the conversation. This was partly because Lois had appointed me as the designated "call stenographer" - writing down, in the first 90 minutes of the call, a total of 5 pages of close-written notes in my "junior cub-reporter-style notebook".
My goodness !!!!
.jpg)
As it turns out, although Lois does the chair-yoga on zoom with Molly, as scheduled, the outing to the meeting-room for the Bible prophecy doesn't come about. A young woman was supposed to come and pick Lois up in her car, but she didn't confirm to say she was definitely coming until she was literally 5 minutes away from here, by which time Lois had given up on the excursion plan, thinking it "wasn't going to happen".
Another fascinating programme in the series. Tonight Alice is surveying last year's excavations etc in the south of England.
just some of the 5 pages of closely-written notes
that I've already made from Ruth's call,
and it isn't even over yet. Yikes !!!!!
We find out so much news during the marathon 2-hour call, you would not BELIEVE!!!!
Ruth and Brian have a huge family of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc, mostly living nearby in the Bournemouth area, which is nice. You see, they were rash enough in the early years of their marriage - I expect they got a bit "carried away " - rash enough anyway to have 5 children, not all at once obviously, but anyway it's by now it's turned into quite a clan.
Ruth and Brian are a religious couple, and about 18 months or so ago, they moved into a flat in one of their church's local care-homes, mainly for Brian's benefit, as he's had a number of different health problems.
.jpg)
Ruth and Brian, a religious couple. Flashback to August 1959
and their wedding at the Oxford branch of their church. Also
pictured are Lois (13) and her fellow bridesmaids, plus best man Terry
Lois and I didn't know, but Ruth apparently moved out of their church's care-home last February, leaving Brian in there on his own. Maybe she didn't tell us because she thought Lois, as Brian's cousin, would be critical of this? I'm not sure, but anyway Lois and I aren't that sort.
Ruth can "talk for Britain" and she must have found it very stifling to be confined to the company of a bunch of old codgers, many of them with dementia etc. She tells us today, how she felt "imprisoned" there. Plus, to compensate, she is visiting Brian in the care-home 3 days out of every week, so that's nice too.
And, in Ruth and Brian's huge family tree of descendants, there's always something going on, hence the reams of notes I'm recording today in my junior-reporter's notebook. We hear, for example, about two teenage brothers in their family, one of whom is currently "transitioning" to becoming a woman, adopting long fingernails and applying makeup etc and signing up to the NHS waiting-list for "the operation", while his brother, on the other hand, has recently come out as gay.
So you can tell they're quite an interesting bunch as a family, to put it mildly!
some average NHS waiting-times for gender clinics:
the key takeaway from this seems to be: go and live
in the Scottish highlands if you possibly can
- oh, and avoid Northern Ireland like the plague!!!!
Ruth is a deeply religious person, obviously worried by these plans for a sex-change, and she thinks that the biology you're born with is what should matter. Lois, on the other hand, takes not exactly a "woke" attitude, but anyway a "less un-woke" attitude, pointing out her view that in practice there's a continuum between "ultra-masculine" and "ultra-feminine" and everybody has their own position somewhere on that line, whatever the sex that they were born with.
It must be genuinely distressing for Ruth and Brian, however, whenever their descendants stray from the principles that I'm sure they've all been brought up with. And there are few parents in the world who, if they live long enough, don't get challenged by having to accept some of the things their descendants get up to.
Do you remember that documentary this week about Hugh Hefner and his massive world empire of nightclubs etc, based around his successful "girlie" magazine, Playboy? I wonder how his parents felt about his lifestyle. His father was an accountant and his mother a teacher, and they were both staunch Methodists. Hugh's mother wanted young Hugh to become a Methodist missionary.
flashback to 1934: little Hugh Hefner (second from right) with his
parents Glenn and Grace, and younger brother Keith
excerpts from this week's Channel 5 documentary
on Hugh Hefner and his Playboy "Empire"
13:00 As the call with Ruth ends, my hand is beginning to hurt from all the note-taking, and Lois dives into the kitchen to make a scratch "main meal" of baked potato, tin of minced beef and some frozen sweet-corn. We're having to have our main meal at lunchtime today, because Lois has one of her online "chair-yoga" sessions with her great-niece Molly at 5:15 pm, and then somebody from the local church is allegedly going to pick her up around 7:30pm to go and listen to a talk on Bible prophecy by Chief Elder Andy, who studies these things.
The church is expecting the Second Coming, an imminent event, they believe. They've been fired up by the recent Hamas revolt in Israel/Palestine, and Andy says most of the laid-down precursors or signs of the imminence of the Second Coming have now been fulfilled, or at any rate "ticked off the list".
So Lois is going to have a full evening, it seems. Busy busy busy!!!!!
one of yoga-teacher Molly's popular
"Twist and Shout" sessions in Leeds
What madness !!!!! And how quintessentially "Generation Z"!!! But it's also quite sweet in a way, isn't it haha! Young people don't realise that it takes an old codger a long time to get ready to go out anywhere.
Lois tells the young woman not to worry about picking her up, and later Lois logs into the prophecy talk online, so that's all right.
21:00 When Lois emerges from her zoom session, we watch tonight's TV programme in Prof Alice Roberts' new series "Digging for Britain", which gives a digest of the most significant archaeological discoveries made in the UK over the last 12 months.
In the North Kent marshes, Steve, a self-confessed "mud-larker", a complete amateur who scours river banks and foreshores for washed-up historical relics, has turned up the oldest leather shoe ever found in the UK, carbon-dated to the late Bronze Age, between 888 and 781 BC.
The guy also found a similar smaller shoe, obviously a "child's size". How interesting that so long ago, back in the Bronze Age, the local shoemaker, whoever he was, the spiritual forerunner of today's "Shoe Locker" chain, was obviously already equipped to cater to whole families, satisfying "all a family's footwear needs" in one place, which must have been nice!
The mudlark guy also found what's thought to be the UK's earliest bag - there's no proof, however, that it was the very "shopping bag" that the shoes were taken home in, but interesting nonetheless.
In the Medway Valley of Kent, meanwhile, excavations have been going on near Swanscombe, where a skull was once turned up in a bunch of gravel, a skull of a primitive species of human that's been estimated to be 300,000 years old.
Excavation-leader Letty Ingray (crazy name, crazy gal!) is keen for her team to go down a bit more, and I don't blame her!
Extraordinary stuff, isn't it !!!!!
That's the kind of technology you want really, isn't it, not the modern sort that goes "obsolete" after a year or two.
I bet that, when that Stone Age guy in the Medway Valley contacted his supplier to complain that there was something wrong with his stone hand-axe and that he couldn't cut up his meat, he didn't get the answer, "Sorry mate, that's a model 2.4 you've got there. We don't maintain those any more. Would you like me to get you our latest iteration, the model 5000.8? It's a real 'doozy" ! "
What a truly crazy world we live in !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment