Geneva, Thursday 30 April 2020
We had a quiz the other evening via zoom. It was us against two locked down nephews aged 10 and 13 years in the UK. We were beaten by unfair tactics. Each team had to come up with ten questions. We focused on wholesome subjects with educational merit such as: Who invented the steam engine? (“James Watt” they cried.) and: How many times does the International Space Station orbit Earth in a day? (“Sixteen!” they cried.) With them having answered nine of our ten questions correctly and us being reluctantly impressed, they put theirs to us. On which planet was Luke Skywalker born? (… Duuurh!) How many Star Wars spacecraft are made by Lego? (…… Uuuurmh!) Youngsters these days!
Heavy rain has meant that we have had to move the putting mat indoors.
My wife wins on the first play-off hole. The running total: me -19, she – 10.
Yesterday evening there was a loud bang in the kitchen. We ran through to find that Boris the sourdough starter had blown the lid off his jar; small tid-bits of sourdough were sprayed onto the wall and work surface. By quite some coincidence, his namesake’s son was born yesterday. Maybe this augured well for we made a couple of delicious small loaves from his discard today.
You’ll spot my temporary desk. I have been working on a different image-making project. I’m not sure if it’s a painting or a collage. Maybe it’s a collage of bits of my lockdown paintings.
You may recognise bits of “Pigeon Love” from Day 23 of the Diary. This got chopped into squares and so we have “Pigeon Love Deconstructed coz The Boys Are Back in Town and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
South Korea and New Zealand have both reported zero new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours. These hard won achievements will not be relinquished easily. Countries that have got on top of the pandemic cannot be far from declaring a ban on all visitors until a vaccine is widely available. We were hoping to reschedule our cancelled New Zealand holiday for December.
Hoping the readers of this Diary are well, safe and surviving the lockdown in good spirits.