Wearing a smart pair of trousers, I mean a pair without those ubiquitous tea-stains (!) can do a lot for a man's efforts to appear somehow "debonair" and "sophisticated", can't they!
But did you know that your trousers may also be sending out messages about your general level of confidence? A recent study by local researchers over at nearby Worcester University has come up with some surprising results, to put it mildly [Source: Onion News] !!!!!
me and the Father's Day gifts I open this morning:
including... trousers from Lois, a book token from
our daughter Alison, and gin from our daughter Sarah
- everything I'm going to need today haha!!!
Later in the day, after we come home and go to bed for afternoon "nap time", we get up and I eventually get the chance to "revisit" my shiny-new trousers, so I'll be sporting them for the evening at least, which is nice.
It's 5:30 pm and at last I get the chance
to show off my shiny-new trousers
What do you think? Are they natty or are they natty haha!
my sample 'mock-up' for a proposed set of
commemorative stamps that I've suggested to new
Post Office boss, Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky
[That's enough about trousers! - Ed]
But I expect you're wondering how Lois's two Sunday Morning meetings went earlier today.
[Not me! - Ed]
Well, seeing as you ask (!), the meetings went quite well, and nobody seemed to notice my tea-stained jeans, as far as I could tell. The visiting preacher today was David, a Cornish guy whom Lois and I first met over 50 years ago, when he used to visit my parents' house in Oxford. He's the guy who taught both Lois and me, who were not married but just "courting" at the time, the meaning of the Cornish dialect word "boughten" (i.e. shop-bought) which we've been using ever since.
And it's a nice informal feel to this morning's two meetings, when David shows his versatility by doubling up as both preacher and keyboardist. The keyboard had been placed next to the preacher's table, so he could readily jump from one role to the other, which was a nice touch.
Like Lois and me, David had actually arrived early this morning to "limber up" and "stretch his fingers" for this morning's 3 hymns, with renditions of the iconic "Chopsticks", and a few other practice pieces.
Here's the picture of David that I took while I was waiting for Lois to emerge from the kitchen. She had been displaying her flapjacks to best advantage, she later tells me, ready for the Iranians and others to gorge themselves on during the lunch break.
visiting preacher David turns up a bit early to the Village Hall
outside Tewkesbury where meetings are held, to "limber up"
and "stretch his fingers" with a rendition of the iconic "Chopsticks"
at the hall's keyboard - this morning he's going to be both
preacher and keyboardist for the 3 hymns, which is a nice touch
me this morning, waiting for Lois to finish displaying
her flapjacks to best advantage in the hall's kitchen
- note the portrait of our late Queen: still not replaced
by the Parish Council - what madness !!!!!
Lois and I are both history buffs, so we turn with relief to the next episode in the fascinating PBS America channel's series on World War II, seen mainly from the perspective of ordinary Americans in 4 'average' towns and cities across the country.
Another fascinating programme in the series, all about the early years of the war, with the sub-title "The Worst is Yet To Come". Very interesting to Lois and me, because it's brought home to us what a strange thing just the concept of being at war was to most Americans, made even more puzzling to the large numbers of recent immigrants, like the mother in Waterbury, Connecticut, who couldn't speak a word of English but who found that her teenage son was suddenly being drafted to serve in the Pacific.
Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Germany was the main priority amongst their Axis enemies, but had decided to postpone a D-Day-style landing in France as being premature, opting instead for a campaign against Rommel in North Africa.
It sounds like this was a good decision, because the US forces were definitely showing their lack of experience and were clearly suffering from poor local leadership in the early stages of the North Africa campaign.
However the consensus seems to be that this was fortunate in the end, after the US military leadership reacted amazingly fast to the setbacks and treated their early failures as a wake-up call, bringing in General Patten as the new local commander. And the results were swift, with the allies eventually bottling Rommel up on a cape in northern Tunisia, forcing a final Axis surrender in North Africa, on May 12th 1943.
Lois and I hadn't realised the extent of the massive economic and industrial activity that "took off" in the US, all the result of efforts to maximise production of war materials after the country's entry into the war in December 1941. Hundred of factories were converted to military production - both vehicles and aircraft, like the car factories that more or less stopped production of cars: the industry had produced 3 million cars in 1941, but after that less than 200 were made during the whole of the rest of the war. And the US 7-day-a-week production effort completely dwarfed that of the Axis powers, and became a huge factor, maybe the decisive one, in the Allied victory.
A woman who was living in Mobile, Alabama, described the massive influx of workers into the city to take up all the new jobs, pouring into town, many living in tents on vacant lots, and in boarding houses crowded with men, often sleeping 6 to a room. And not just men - by 1943, six million women had joined the workforce, half of them in military production. This was a new thing for the US, and we hear about the children surprised to suddenly find themselves spending the day in nurseries, to be picked up by their mothers at the end of the working day. And just like in Britain, people in the US were reporting a new, and strange (!) sense of national unity.
campaigns for state-sponsored child care in World War II
We also hear graphic accounts of ordinary Americans finding themselves in Japanese internment camps in the Philippines, like Santo Tomas, and suddenly having to interact at close quarters with the Japanese, a people of whom they had no previous experience or knowledge; and having to accustom themselves, with little or no warning, to a their captors' totally alien culture, with its barbaric disdain for the humanity, or indeed the lives, of their prisoners. And it must have been the same for the Brits captured in Malaya, Hong Kong, Borneo etc.
Terrifying to try to imagine, isn't it.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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