Feest Isolation Days – 24 March 2020
We are all now in lockdown. Terry and I have been here for ten days already. Our young neighbours who we don’t actually know are being incredibly helpful. They have delivered milk, daffodils, and have included us if required on a delivery from a farm shop. I was especially tickled to read her email to the shop asking if she could include a few more things for her “elderly” neighbours. There are three couples she’s helping and Terry is the eldest of them all so I guess we are elderly! I usually am the person who does the helping and the sorting and it is strange not to be doing that now.
It did make me think about words which took me to spelling and I thought I’d share a story about my great uncles. My father’s family came from Czechoslovakia on the border with Poland. The Carpathian mountains were probably their playground. After the first world war the family left, and like many people from Eastern Europe after they sailed across the sea and they entered the States in New York City at Ellis Island. There the family name was changed from Blazek. It became Blosick. The men in the family were all miners and came up from one mine travelled across the ocean and eventually went down another. They were a hard drinking, tough working lot. The mines paid them weekly and usually got the money of each young man wrong, all “Blosick”s appearing the same.. So they all changed their names further. One spelled the name with an “a” instead of an “o”, another put two “s’s” in it and still another had changed it to an “a” with two “s’s”. If Ellis Island could change their name, they reckoned they could do what they wanted to. There are headstones in the graveyards of Shamokin, Pennsylvania with different spellings of all of these brothers. There is a footballer today back in the “old country” who is called Jan Blazek. His website says his hobbies are; Děvky, chlast a prcání (hookers, booze and fucking). The site also includes many photographs of him drinking rum with cola. My great Uncles would have loved this guy!
That’s it for today, there is a lot to be getting on with and you have exercises to do and routines to develop.
If you do go out please keep your distance – if you’re reading this you are no
doubt, like me, elderly! See you tomorrow.
With Love
Kathyx
….and on the subject of words……
