Sunday June 27th 2021

June 27th - my father's birthday today: he would have been 107 if he'd lived: my god, that would have been a great age to be! 

flashback to 1979: (left to right) my mother (59), Sarah (2),

my father (65), Alison (4) and Lois (33) at St Ives, Cornwall

- happy days !!!!

08:30 Lois and I have to get up pretty early today because we have a zoom call with our younger daughter Sarah at 9:30 am (4:30 pm Western Australia time).

They have a 3-day mini-lockdown starting in Western Australia today thanks to a woman returnee from Sydney who tested positive. A narrow escape, Sarah says, because the woman shops in the same supermarket as Sarah does - yikes! I bet that woman's popular locally - not !!!!!

The mini-lockdown means that the our 7-year-old twin granddaughters Lily and Jessie will not now be able to go on a school excursion tomorrow. To compensate for the disappointment the school is organising a "pyjama party" for all the pupils on Friday, the last day of term. The children can go to school on Friday in their pyjamas, and Sarah and husband Francis have bought them a new pair of pyjamas just for the occasion, which is nice!

Jessie showcase some of her recent artwork for us

Francis says he's hoping to pick up a motor this week for the 20 foot boat that family bought a few weeks ago. In the meantime he's been doing little repair jobs and cleaning jobs on the boat - and working on the sails. 

We've just had our summer solstice here, of course, and it's still light outside after 10 pm when Lois and I go to bed. The length of days doesn't alter much in Perth, because they're so much nearer the Equator. It's been pretty cold lately they say, and one night this week the temperature at night went down to zero - shock horror!

12:00 We have lunch in the short interval between Lois's two worship services on zoom. After that, I go to bed and Lois joins me at 3 pm. We get up at 4 pm and have a cup of tea and a currant bun on the sofa.

Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent us the address of a Canadian website (Globe and Mail) that says that Lois and I don't have to keep swabbing down our groceries and "quarantining" the letters and parcels that get delivered to our door (the webpage article doesn't name us specifically - I think it's a general piece of advice haha). Apparently the risk of an infection being passed on in this way is more or less negligible. 

Gosh, that'll be a relief - but have we got the courage to stop doing it? Well, I'm going to have a try next weekend - wish me luck!

I've had a long, interesting email from Tünde, my Hungarian pen-friend. She has at last, after 1 year, been able to see her son Gábor and his family, who visited her a day or two ago. They live in Germany, so it was just a flying visit to see both Tünde and also Rita's parents.

Tünde has been watching an interesting TV documentary about the history of the Hungarian language. I must find a book about this subject for myself! She says that, although Hungarians today can't easily pronounce the English letter 'w', the sound existed in Hungarian also until about 1200 AD. 

I thought of the English 'th' sound, which many foreigners have trouble with, especially the French. It's odd, but that sound also existed at one time in France: when we borrowed the word 'faith' from the Norman French in the 12th century, we copied their pronunciation too: the way that we say the word even today in English is pretty much exactly how the Normans said it. 

What madness !!!!!

My Hungarian is very poor these days. I'm okay with the written language but I can't really speak it any more with any degree of fluency, although 15 years ago I was chatting merrily away on Skype with Tünde in Budapest, and with my other Hungarian friend Ildiko in Debrecen. It's a pity, because this week I was asked if I could be an interpreter for a Hungarian family in Cheltenham, who wanted to get their child baptized at the local United Reformed Church. Damn!!!! But it's too late now - for nearly 10 years I've been concentrating on my Danish studies, and this is the result !!!!! 

the local United Reformed Church,

where a Hungarian family want to get their child baptized - 

Lois and I used to take Sarah's twins here every Monday morning

for their toddler session, before Sarah and family moved to Australia

- sob, sob !!!!!

flashback to 2010: me and my Hungarian Skype-friend Ildiko

in an Asda superstore just outside Bristol

Note for connoisseurs of Hungarian given names:- "Ildiko is the Hungarian form of 'Hilda'", surprisingly enough.

flashback to 2008: my Hungarian penfriend Tünde (left) 

with Lois and me in the Pump Room at Bath

20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch some TV, an interesting documentary about Princess Diana, who would have turned 60 on Thursday last week, if she'd lived.

It's nostalgic to see the old film clips again, but I don't think we're any further forward in really understanding what went wrong with Charles and Diana's marriage. It's interesting that Martin Bashir's 1995 interview, which would probably have been a centrepiece of this look-back, is not, in fact, included at all in the programme, and gets referred to only as "Martin Bashir's now discredited interview".

Did the marital problems start with Charles's continuing hankering after Camilla? Or was that in itself a reaction to problems that Diana herself was already causing? She had had a disturbed childhood, with a mother who was labelled "unfit to be a mother" and who walked out on the family. Diana had disturbing bouts of bulimia, and once tried to throw herself down some stairs, even though she was pregnant at the time - yikes !!!!

We'll probably never know now what really went on between them.

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!

Saturday June 26th 2021

10:00 Budgens, the convenience store in the village delivers our groceries for next week - it's another bald guy doing it. As usual Lisa from the shop rang me about 9 am to tell me the amount due, and this time I pay it immediately online by bank transfer - last week I forgot to do this and had to apologise to the store when they rang me to query this: oh dear! Black mark, Colin!

Lois and I realise that we've forgotten to order any red wine, which is a pity because we're having a celebratory duck meal at lunchtime and we've only got a bit of red wine left - damn! 

We swab each grocery item down with disinfectant as usual - when will we be able to stop doing this? Ray Davies of the Kinks wanted us to stop immediately, in his song, "Stop Your Swabbing", which was later covered by the Pretenders.

The Pretenders cover the Kinks song "Stop Your Swabbing"

Wise words indeed, and incredible to think how prophetic! When the lyrics were first written by Davies (1964), the current pandemic was still more than 50 years in the future!

The song was later covered by the group The Pretenders, with lead singer Chrissie Hynde. According to Wikipedia,  Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders collaborated closely with the original song-writer Ray Davies of the Kinks when planning the cover version, so closely, in fact, that the couple subsequently had a baby, and you can't get much closer than that, to put it mildly! 

12:45 We sit down to our delayed Father's Day lunch - delayed because of the mistake I made when I was ordering from the local branch of Cook Shop. 

Yum yum though! It's been well worth the wait, I have to say.

We just have half the first course (the half duck becomes a quarter duck - you do the math haha!), because the remainder will make a meal for later in the week. We've been doing this more and more recently - it makes sense to us, because we're old codgers and we don't need to have the kind of quantities that young whippersnappers need, so it'll save work in the kitchen later in the week, that's for sure. Simples!

we have our delayed Father's Day "quarter duck" - yum yum! ...

but note the small quantities of red wine available, which is a pity: damn!!!

...followed by the little cheesecakes with home-grown raspberries

I look out of the window while we're eating, and I notice that the Borough Council's recycling department has already delivered the shiny new replacement brown garden-waste bin that I requested on Wednesday morning. I've got to hand it to them - that's really good service, I think. Later I get on the laptop and order some sticky labels to stick on the bin to give our address.

I showcase the shiny new garden waste recycling bin

that the Borough Council dropped off for me this morning

The mystery remains, however. Where do lost brown wheelie-bins go to? Do they get dropped into the recycling truck's grinding mechanism by mistake? Or is the council's recycling truck followed around by a shadowing truck, crewed by pirates or so-called "brown slavers", who whisk a proportion of the brown bins away, with the bins eventually ending up in Morocco, to be used remorselessly a few times by sheiks, before being tossed away like an old glove? I don't know, but I think we should be told, that's for sure! 

16:00 We have a cup of Earl Grey tea and a banana muffin on the couch. I leaf through next week's Radio Times - it looks dire as regards TV programmes next week. We've already got the FIFA European Soccer Championships being covered wall-to-wall on BBC1 and ITV, but now we've also got rugby, the Tour de France cycle race, and Wimbledon tennis starting. What madness !!!!!

It's wall-to-wall sport on TV these days -

what madness !!!!!

The Tour de France used to be ignored in the UK when I was a boy, but then at some point about 10 years ago the people trying to improve the numbers of medals Great Britain won at the Olympics decided that cycling was a sport they could throw money at and really get results in terms of medals. I'm one of the taxpayers who has been funding this, but I don't recall ever being asked whether I approved of all this subsidy. 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

20:00 We settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, an old episode of Desert Island Discs from 2010, featuring 1960's pop star and subsequent psychotherapist Sandie Shaw.

The premise of this series is an interview with a celebrity who talks about their life and chooses the 8 "gramophone records" they would choose to have with them if they were ever marooned on a desert island.

I haven't heard Sandie's voice in such a long time, but it's always a pleasure - she's so feisty, and direct. She doesn't mince words, talking about one of her businesses going "tits up" - she makes me laugh out loud, and more than once tonight.

She was the singer who won the UK its first ever Eurovision Song Contest Winner, in 1967, with the song "Puppet on a String", which Sandie always hated. After winning the contest, she refused all invitations by her entourage to party. She just felt exhausted and went back to her hotel and up to her room, carrying a big bottle of champagne, and wearing her lynx coat (because it was okay to wear fur then). But she somehow locked herself out of her room, so she just lay down on her fur coat clutching the big bottle, which she couldn't open, and she just fell asleep there on the floor of the hotel corridor - my god, some celebration!

She's certainly feisty - one of her nicknames is "The Dagenham Diva", and we learn tonight that she did actually work at Dagenham's enormous Ford car factory, although only for about 6 weeks. That's something she's got in common with 1980's pop star Billy Ocean, although he worked there a bit longer than 6 weeks, I believe.

I suppose that Dagenham is the UK's answer to Motown in the USA. But no Dagenham singer that I've ever heard about has ever come up with a song as haunting as Whitney Houston's poignant "Where Do Lost Brown Bins Go?" (1988).

21:00 We switch off the radio and watch a bit of TV, an interesting Channel 5 documentary on the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton.

Let's hope that nothing stops Kate becoming queen in due course, because whether by luck or by judgement William has certainly picked the right woman for the job: she seems as perfect as Queen Elizabeth, who's kept the UK going through thick and thin for nearly 70 years. 

From the fashion angle, Kate has also been very influential, and the programme compares her influence to that of Jacquie Kennedy in the 1960's.

Kate at Prince Philip's funeral

It's not surprising that she wasn't so good at her role to start with - who would be? But she obviously made up her mind to watch others, study it, think about it, and perfect it. She's not a natural extrovert, and doesn't seek the limelight - she maintains an element of intrigue. And unlike Meghan she knows how to handle the press: by smiling, chatting to people she meets but not saying too much to the press, never reacting to articles, concentrating on her speeches for charities,  never complaining, never explaining, just like the Queen herself would.

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!

Friday June 25th 2021

11:00 The car has been standing on our forecourt since last Friday, which isn't good - it needs some exercise haha. 

a rare picture of me behind the wheel of our car this morning

And Lois also wants to hand over a basket of our garden fruits and vegetable to a friend in her 80's, who lives on the other side of Cheltenham. 

Lois's poor friend is reluctant to go out and shop because she's afraid that her daughter, recently discharged from hospital after liver/kidney problems and now temporarily lodging with her, will take the chance of being alone in the house to sneak herself an alcoholic drink or three - what madness !!!! It was alcohol which landed her in hospital in the first place. 

Lois chats to the 80-year-old on the doorstep - as expected, she doesn't want us to come in, what with the coronavirus and all, but the news from her overall seems to be good. She seems very happy - her daughter is eating well, and putting on weight. Lois and I think that both mother and daughter were basically lonely, and that living together is making things better for both of them, which is nice.

I've read this before, and I think it's become a bit of a truism, that if nothing else,  heavy drinking among family-members can make Christmas gift-buying dilemmas somewhat easier (report, Onion News).

SIESTA KEY, FL—Saying that it was simple and straightforward to locate a gift that their mother would enjoy, the children of alcoholic Alison Cassidy confirmed Friday that she was pretty easy to shop for.

“It’s cool that we don’t have to get stressed out running around to a bunch of different shops when we can just duck into the liquor store and arrive at her house with the perfect present,” said Lance Cassidy, 24, telling reporters that he knew his mother would love anything he picked out with an ABV of 20 percent or higher.

“Of course, all of us kids try and find some special booze that she has an emotional connection to, but at the end of the day, I know she’d be just as happy with a huge plastic bottle of Popov as some finely aged small-batch bourbon as long as it came from us and will get her absolutely shitfaced.”

Cassidy added that he and his siblings faced significantly greater challenges shopping for their father who almost always exchanged whatever they gave him for cash to feed his gambling addiction.

Anyway, it looks like now that our 80-year-old friend, happily, will have more of a gift-buying dilemma this Christmas than anything else, and that she and her daughter will be having a lot more wholesome fun, something which Lois and I are, needless to say, very happy about!

14:00 Lois goes out for a walk on the local football field, and I wait in because we're expecting my Father's Day meal to be delivered by CookShop some time this afternoon. I ordered the meal and dessert last week to come in time for Father's Day, but I must have had some sort of "senior moment", because I apparently asked for it to come on June 30th, which doesn't make any kind of sense. I rang up the local CookShop and asked for it to come today instead, so that we can have it tomorrow at lunchtime.

14:15 A bald guy from CookShop delivers the food - I've been salivating about it for 9 days - for the food, not for the bald guy or for the delivery, although I don't tell the bald guy this. I don't want the shop's staff to get too cocky haha! Needless to say, we ordered the cheesecake "portion for 2", not the one for 10-12. We're not that greedy haha!

16:00 Tea and muffins on the sofa. It's our granddaughter Rosalind's birthday today - she's turned 13: yikes! Her brother Isaac will be turning 11 in a month's time, on the same day as our twin granddaughters in Australia, Lily and Jessie turn 8. And our other grandchild, Josie, will be turning 15 in September. 

Our daughter Alison, Rosalind's mother, has put a couple of charming photos up on social media.

As Lois and I always say, you know you're getting old when some of your grandchildren start to become teenagers haha!

It's been a big week for Alison and family. A couple of months ago they moved into a large rambling Victorian house in rural Hampshire, in much need of repairs, modernisation and refurbishment, and on Wednesday this week the builders finally arrived to start the renovation work.

Alison's house this week - it's in quite a state, to put it mildly!

20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch some TV, the latest programme in Andrew Marr's new series on "The World's Greatest Paintings". 

It's interesting that this week's paining, Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" (1642) which features a Dutch town's volunteer militia, is so popular that people will even pay to watch it through protective screens, being renovated - my god!

Rembrandt is believed to have "painting-bombed" his own painting, as can be seen from this detail of the huge work, which depicts a bit of his own face.

What a showman !!!!!

It's a bit sad that in 1715, when the painting was moved to its new home in a council chamber, it didn't quite fit, so builders lopped several square feet of it off so that it would fit the space between two doors. How crazy - and art connoisseurs say that many important features that gave the painting meaning were just thrown away by this process, and they've never been found !!!!!

Connoisseurs have emphasised their disquiet at this, however, producing some examples of other famous artworks, showing how vulnerable many of these are to this "cutting back" process, and thereby  sounding a timely warning to other so-called "builders".

Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa"

Edvard Munch's "The Scream"

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!

Thursday June 24th 2021

10:00 Lois and I haven't been out to restaurants for about 15 months now, but maybe the lockdown is going to be eased in the next few months, and we might find ourselves being served a meal before too long, who knows?

I like to be popular with waiters and waitresses, and I've got myself a new set of socks to help with that - waitresses in particular tend to notice the socks their male customers wear, I've always found. 

But fashionable socks may not be enough. So, as preparation for so-called "Freedom Day", I've been studying the latest guide to the secret list of "Things Customers Do That Waiters Hate The Most" (report, Onion News).

It's not so difficult when you look at the list is it! It's pretty simple actually, and I think I've memorised the list now.  Right, I'm ready to party - bring it on !!!!

12:00 Lois's sect has attracted a bunch of young Iranian refugee immigrants: this is because Iranian Christians don't accept the doctrine of the trinity - God in three persons, and all that. And Lois's sect plus Jehovah's Witnesses agree with the doctrine of the trinity either: hence the attraction.

The sect is doing its best to cope, I sense, with this sudden influx of young Iranians, many of who don't speak much English, and who are also fighting for the right to stay in this country. There's a group of them in the Gloucester area and the sect is hoping to start a weekly meeting with the Iranians and a handful of British sect-members, at a coffee shop on Thursday afternoons from 5 pm to 7 pm, which is not a good time for Lois, or for other old-timers, I suspect. 

the Gloucester coffee-shop where the sect hopes to

hold meetings for their Iranian Christian friends

Lois's friend Hilary texted her this morning offering to give her a lift over there this week, if she would like to take part, but it's a bit short notice, and Lois has put Hilary off, but tells her that she'll come next week. 

Rather her than me: two hours with people who may not speak much English sounds like a bit of an ordeal to me - call me a softy if you like! [All right! - Ed]

14:30 Lois rushes out to the kitchen and bakes a batch of banana muffins, using a recipe she finds on the Good Food website.

16:00 The muffins are out of the oven, and we can enjoy one each with a cup of Earl Grey tea.

we enjoy the muffins with a cup of Earl Grey tea

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, an interesting documentary about Countess Alexandra Tolstoy and her Russian partner, the billionaire oligarch Sergei Pugachev, and their 3 children. Alexandra is the daughter of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant cousin of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer.

This is a repeat, first shown last year, although Lois and I are sure we didn't see it at the time. There isn't much to watch on TV at the moment, what with the Euro soccer matches, and coming soon, cricket, Wimbledon tennis, the Tour de France cycling race - you name it! What madness !!!!!

This is a strange documentary, because it starts off with the couple, in their nice home in Chelsea, London, being clearly persecuted and threatened by Russian agents. By the end of it, however, i.e. about 5 years later, the couple are estranged from each other: Alexandra is still in England, living in the Oxfordshire countryside, while Sergei lives in the south of France. Sergei is being harassed by Russian agents as before, but Alexandra seems to have a reasonable relationship now with the Russian authorities and visits Russia apparently without any problem. How weird is that!

Lois and I find it particularly interesting to see an excerpt from a Russian TV news bulletin, which pulls no punches, to put it mildly!

excerpt from a Russian TV news bulletin - my god!

What price impartiality eh haha!!

It's remarkable to us that, even after all this time, after decades of trying communism and then getting rid of it, Russia still hasn't succeeded in creating a free society with genuinely unbiassed news media. The poor Russian people are in many ways still worse off, democratically speaking, than penniless peasants were in medieval England. And Putin is considerably worse, even than Henry VIII - my god!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!!!

21:00 We continue to watch a bit of TV, a new series by Carol Klein on "Great British Gardens".

Coton Manor's owner Susie Pasley-Tyler, found herself 30 years ago suddenly in charge of a 17th century 10-acre garden. It was comforting to see that she has managed to make it look so nice, because our daughter Alison and her family recently moved into a neglected Victorian mansion with 6 acres of land, so she's got a similar problem, except not quite so big a one, plus Ali has a job to do 5 days a week. And Susie has a huge team of gardeners of course!

Lois in front of part of our daughter Alison's 6-acre garden

Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10) playing tennis

(left to right) Lois, Alison, Rosalind, Isaac, Ed, and Josie (14)

Tonight, as we watch the programme about Coton Manor's 10-acre garden, Lois enjoys all the different flowers and plants, while I concentrate, characteristically, on presenter Carol's accent. I look her up on Wikipedia and I find out that today, by coincidence, is Lancashire-born Carol's 76th birthday, so she's a year older than us, and doing very well on it - my god!

The writer of the Wikipedia article doesn't fully understand British accents, I see. He or she writes: "Klein has been described as having a 'weather-beaten face, forthright manner and fruity accent – mainly West Country but with hints of her native Manchester'".

What nonsense! There isn't a trace of West Country in Carol's accent - it's pure Lancashire. Whoever came out with that quote obviously doesn't realise that the English West Country accent and the Lancashire accent have one thing in common, but one thing alone - that they're the two final bastions of "rhotic" speech in England - i.e. the only English accents where post-vocalic 'r's are pronounced, just like they are pronounced also all over Scotland and Ireland.

What madness - wake up, Wikipedia !!!!

Is it coincidence that the rhotic areas are in the west? Did rhotic speech disappear in the east due to the influence of all the Danish immigrants, as Danish is a non-rhotic language? I don't know but I think we should be told haha. 

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!