{"id":2786,"date":"2021-07-25T20:17:58","date_gmt":"2021-07-25T20:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2786"},"modified":"2021-07-25T22:08:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-25T22:08:01","slug":"sunday-25th-july-2021-day-496","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/07\/25\/sunday-25th-july-2021-day-496\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday, 25th July, 2021 [Day 496]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was a different Sunday, as it turned out. I went and collected our newspapers and then, in place of the Andrew Marr<\/em> show, I indulged\u00a0<\/span>myself in watching a bit of Olympics action. This was the concluding\u00a0stages of the Women’s Road Bicycle Race and it turned out to be very exciting as a young,\u00a0unknown\u00a0Austrian rider broke away from the\u00a0pack (45\u00a0kilometres\u00a0out?) and eventually secured her gold medal as she built up an\u00a0assailable lead. \u00a0We had a\u00a0lunch date in Oxford with two of our oldest friends so we set off in plenty of time, got parked in a reasonably secure location and then found our way to the restaurant. We had allowed ourselves plenty of ‘getting lost and parking time’ but still arrived at the\u00a0restaurant a good half an hour early so we had a\u00a0leisurely cup\u00a0of coffee\u00a0whilst we waited for our friends who turned up absolutely on time. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about so we had a good enjoyable chat. The restaurant was a Thai restaurant which our friends had used before and we\u00a0enjoyed our food but there wasn’t very much of it. So we decided after lunch to have a coffee and a pastry in a different venue – \u00a0that part of Oxford is stuffed full of interesting little cafes so it was no problem to find somewhere and carry on chatting. As has become customary between us, we exchanged some little gifts of home made produce – our friends gave us some of their own home-made honey which is always absolutely excellent and in turn we\u00a0exchanged some of our damson gin\u00a0which\u00a0I\u00a0suggested they do not drink as such but try as a flavouring in ice-cream or yogurt. I am told by some of the recipients of our\u00a0damson gin that using it as a\u00a0flavouring gives excellent\u00a0results but that is something that we\u00a0ourselves must try.\u00a0And so it became time for us to part and we made good progress getting back to Bromsgrove in what seemed a very space of time (probably just over an hour)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When we got home, we had\u00a0received a message from our gardener who we have about once every three weeks to see if he\u00a0could come along to help to fix our ‘honeysuckle’ arch. Basically, this is a timber construction where the support posts have rotted at ground level. I am going to act as our\u00a0<\/span>gardener’s ‘gofer’ or at least a second pair of hands. The plan is to lay the honeysuckle flat on the ground, \u00a0chop away the rotten parts of the support posts and then relocate them into the ground making the while structure lower than before. Then we will try to\u00a0relocate the honeysuckle over the re-sited posts and the job will be done. All of this sounds\u00a0so easy to do in theory but I wonder how it will work out in\u00a0practice, I have some specialist post-setting\u00a0concrete (purchased earlier) so I hope this has not degraded over time as I have stored it under the eaves of the house which is\u00a0quite, but not absolutely dry. \u00a0This job has got to get completed by the end of\u00a0the morning as\u00a0tomorrow afternoon I need to drive to the Worcester\u00a0Royal \u00a0Infirmary to have a COVID test before the\u00a0investigations on me start on Friday.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the early evening, the\u00a0whole family (myself, Meg and our son and daughter-in-law) spent some time in the quiet of the evening talking about some of our knowledge of, and\u00a0<\/span>reminiscences, of the songs of the 1960’s. But a little bit of background is in order. Meg and I met at Manchester University in the mid 1960’s. The Faculty of Technology of the University (later to become its own University – UMIST) had its own Student Union facilities which was the whole of one floor (‘J’ floor) of a large\u00a0Victorian building. There they had a folk singing evening every Sunday singing songs by ‘The Seekers<\/em>‘, ‘Peter Paul and Mary<\/em>‘ and singers of a similar ilk. Meg and I used to really enjoy these evenings and occasionally we were\u00a0treated to songs\u00a0sung by Anna Ford, the president of the Owens Student Union who later went on to have a distinguished career as an ITN newscaster. To supplement this picture, I then\u00a0worked a cocktail barman in the only\u00a0nightclub in\u00a0Manchester called ‘Tiffany’s<\/em>‘\u00a0They had a resident band with an unbelievably 1950’s name (‘Ross Mitchell and Les Nocturnes<\/em>‘) However, they had two incredibly good female vocalists \u00a0– Eve Graham (brunette) and Lynn Paul (blonde) who later became part of the ‘New Seekers<\/em>‘ This group recorded the world famous ‘I’d like to teach the World to Sin<\/em>g’ and eventually represented the UK \u00a0in 1972 in the Eurovision Song Context coming in at second! So that is the connection (in fact the only connection) that Meg and I have with the world of folk\/popular singing – but that is why we know and\u00a0remember some of these songs. I must confess to a particular liking for ‘Foggy Dew’<\/em> which is a traditional English\u00a0song song first recorded in1959 but best known for the\u00a0version by Roger Whitaker.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was a different Sunday, as it turned out. I went and collected our newspapers and then, in place of the Andrew Marr show, I indulged\u00a0myself in watching a bit of Olympics action. This was the concluding\u00a0stages of the Women’s Road Bicycle Race and it turned out to be very exciting as a young,\u00a0unknown\u00a0Austrian rider […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2786"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2789,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions\/2789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}