Hurrah! It's the end of winter! At last! And at least it wasn't too long this year, which is nice!
I go out onto the street to greet the end of winter
- and to bid farewell to the last bit of snow on
the tops of our 700-million-year-old Malvern Hills
I think the smile on my face here says it all, doesn't it. Lois and I congratulate ourselves. We have survived another winter, even though we're both 77 [You really must stop telling us that! - Ed]
flashback: the start of our 2023-4 winter - remember?
When winter started - and it seems like only yesterday, doesn't it, [That's because it was! - Ed], the anxieties came flooding in: remember? "Have we got enough food in the house, if we get 'snowed in'?" etc etc
To be sure, I have to move our car into the sunshine this morning to save having to de-ice the windscreen etc, and there's still a bit of snow on the very tops of the 700-million-year-old Malvern Hills (see photo above), but it's all gone by this afternoon, which is nice!
In the kitchen, Lois is singing Shakespeare's anthem to springtime "It was a Lover and his Lass", as she boxes up the cake and the trifles she's been making for "the Persians".
flashback to yesterday: Lois preparing the
ingredients for her ginger mango trifle
The cake and the trifle - these are the two dishes Lois has been making this week for her church's contingent of Iranian Christian refugees. She and Lucy are on the "Iranian lunch rota" this week, and I think Lucy's been making them some vegetarian patties or something similar for their first course.
flashback to October: Brother Alf baptises an Iranian
Christian refugee in Chief Elder Andy's garden hot-tub:
here we see the "candidate" pinching her nose before "going under"
Those Iranians are always gagging to get their Sunday lunch at the church's meetings. They're being accommodated in local bargain-basement, "no frills" hotels by the Home Office while their applications for UK residence are under consideration. And the silly old Home Office thinks that because they're Iranians and come from some hot country or other, somewhere to the right on the world map, that they'll be sure to like Indian food - curries especially, which Iranians actually detest.
What a madness it all is, isn't it !!!!!!
I sit down at a table near a radiator but keep my coat,
scarf and gloves on as a precaution. And I sit down
under the Village Hall's portrait of our late Queen
so she can "watch over" me, just like she did when
she was on the throne, which is nice!
But you may know all this - I find later that the story has already "broken" in the local press (source: Onion News Worcestershire Desk).
To tell the truth, I'm getting a bit fed up with providing the local Onion News Worcestershire desk with these heart-warming "human interest" stories without getting the fame I surely deserve!
But tell me what YOU think!
Lois and I might to be too old to appear in Onion News "headline pics" any longer, but we're fully "on the ball" generally as regards modern technology. You should see us in bed when our phones are "diddling" and "beep-beeping" under the bedclothes - it's like "busy time" at your telephone exchange!
[I think that telephone exchanges and all that malarkey have all been automated now by the way, though only for about the last 50 years. Just saying! - Ed]
11:00 And it's no surprise this morning, when Lois and I take our seats inside the Village Hall where her church Sunday Morning Meetings are held, to see that the app comes up with a chilly 60.5F reading (about 15C I think) inside the hall, even when we're sitting next to the radiator .
Brrrrrrrr!!!!
11:15 The first meeting begins. Here in this next picture you see Brother Richard (left), today's president, kicking off the "Bible Hour" by introducing this week's visiting preacher, Brother Joe from Shirley, which is a suburb of Birmingham.
Brother Richard, today's president, kicks off the Bible Hour
by introducing today's visiting preacher,
Brother Joe from Shirley, Birmingham
Joe starts his address, subject "The Hope of Israel"
Joe turns out to be an articulate and intelligent young preacher, who enunciates his words well, and doesn't mumble, which pleases Lois and a lot of the other old fogeys in the hall, I'm guessing!
And just in case you get the wrong impression, I'm not saying that that's unusual by the way haha!
Joe's subject is "The Hope of Israel", which is all to do with the return of the Jews to their ancestral lands. Joe has some interesting slides, including a picture from the early 1900's of a group of returning Jews gathering on a bare hillside to celebrate their founding of a settlement which later became the great city of Tel-Aviv.
flashback to 1909: the official "foundation" of
the future city of Tel-Aviv...
... and here's a busy street in Tel Aviv just 6 years later
and still a few years before the British Mandate for
Palestine, established after World War I by the League of Nations
Joe also has slides of British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and his famous "Balfour Declaration" of 1917.
But golly, that declaration by Balfour certainly kicked off a lot of things, didn't it! I wonder if he fully realised what he was doing - my goodness !!!!
It's no surprise that the BBC, being a non-profit-making "public service" broadcaster, has been under constant pressure since its inception in 1922, mostly pressure from busybodies in the Government expecting the organisation to manly "support the Government's view" and minimise coverage of opposition policies.
14:00 Lois and I go home and get into bed to warm up with the electric under-blanket turned up to "max", like we did last Sunday. This could become a habit - my goodness! [Who do you think you're kidding? It's been your "habit" for donkey's years now for "yonks" even!, you couple of "noggins"! - Ed]
21:00 We get ready to wind down again and get back into bed again with a fascinating new addition to the BBC's "portfolio" of programmes about its own history, "How the BBC Began", on BBC4 this evening.
And have you noticed? Governing political parties tend miraculously to change their view on this thorny subject whenever they suddenly find themselves suddenly in opposition. I wonder why!!!!
The BBC has mostly weathered these challenges to its declared charter of "impartiality", Lois and I are glad to see. But it doesn't do Winston Churchill's reputation to hear how much he tried to pressure the BBC to give only the Government's view during the General Strike of 1926. As newspapers were on strike at this time, the BBC had an extra duty to publicise all points of view on the crisis, needless to say.
Lois and I didn't know that until 1926, the BBC was allowed to get its feed of news stories only as dictated directly from the newspapers bosses themselves - this was a scheme instituted in 1922, designed to allay the fears of newspaper owners when the broadcaster first started operations. What madness !!!!
However, there are some shocking stories as well that we hear tonight. The thing that Lois and I find the most shocking is the realisation that as recently as the 1960's the BBC's Northern Ireland Headquarters was staffed exclusively by Protestants, and that they carried enough "clout" within the BBC to successfully block any programmes that showed the sectarian divide there and in particular the viewpoints of the Roman Catholic community in the province.
No wonder that young people like Lois and me back in the 1960's were so astonished when the sectarian unrest in the province and all the riots etc burst upon us in the news, and I can remember asking, "Where's all that come from, eh?? "
So it was the 1926 strike that really kicked off the BBC's first steps to becoming a fully independent news broadcaster, which is interesting.
And mostly, tonight, this theme of defending editorial independence is a good news story, because by and large, the BBC in its subsequent history, successfully stood up to pressure from governments, whether Conservative, Liberal or Labour.
In the late 1950's the BBC had sent their then top "current affairs" reporter Alan Whicker across the Irish Sea to do a "background" story on Northern Ireland, a part of the country that rarely appeared in news bulletins.
But when the BBC's Northern Ireland office and the Northern Ireland Government at Stormont heard about it, they were all up in arms and they tried their very best to stop it being aired.
Fascinating stuff, though!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!
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