Another wet and windy month did not stop us enjoying three holidays and of progress being made on The Hayling View house and gardens but Diana, Debbie and Della all suffered ill health although family life and investments and work were going well apart from Daniel’s mis-behaviour. My new video recorder followed it all. South Africa featured most in the news as apartheid was in its death throes but there were lots of other crashes and disaster, with the French leading the way on train crashes, The Japanese with a huge air crash and Manchester with its plane fire. Still and the Ira was still bombing but an intransigent Thatcher government was turning conflict into an art form interfering with the BBC, encouraging union breaking and persecuting miners such that there was not much good news nor historical lessons learnt on this 40th anniversary of Hiroshima
And so ends another month. Summer is fading away and both July and August have been disappointingly wet, cool and windy, but we have managed three holidays: cruising on The Great Ouse on The Lady, a beach holiday in Mundesley and visiting Freda of which I enjoyed the boat and Norfolk ones the best when we took a walk down memory lane for me with visits to Horsey and Wroxham. We meet up with Sam and his new partner and visit them at their new house in Aylesham but hear poorer news of his ex-wife Celia who has split up with her second husband. The riverside gardens are completed in their present phase and look beautiful after a lot of work and plant purchases. The established lawns, carefully planted shrubs and rose beds together with the laying of paving stone paths have combined the two front aspects into one, as well as giving an excellent vista to the river from the house and the house to the river. Much work needs to be done to the back gardens, where we begin to think of a new swimming pool and patio, and the land to the side of the riverside gardens could yet yield a games lawn and extended river frontage. There was plenty of scope for my video photography and I was amazed by how much better our modern JVC is compared with our Canon bought for £1400 a year ago
http://www.broadfamilyvideos.com/year.php?year=1985
The house alterations should start soon and, with luck, be finished by Christmas, but we have yet to see the formal contract to sign. Our Wills have been prepared and are ready to sign and only await a letter of directions for the trustees. There have been lots of family visits to and from both sets of our parents and the family is fit and well after both Diana, Debbie and Della had suffered ill health but now with Della now knowing her father well, but Daniel has let us down badly this last week by taking money from my wallet and spending it but he is punished and I hope he will learn lessons from it. There were even two or three occasions where Diana and I found time to make love. My collecting and gardening hobbies had been proceeding well, but I have relaxed this last month away from computer industry affairs. Next week sees the resumption of meetings and I make a speech the week after. I will work for the BMMG this winter, but they are on their own thereafter and my retirement will be complete before my 40th birthday. Then, as now, I will also give due time to our investments, which continue to fare well. This month’s industry news was of Acorn loses money bigtime and Clive Sinclair first loses his backing from Maxwell and tries to go it alone but his wacky C5 project crashes and burns. Richard Branson’s latest love, Virgin’s Atlantic Challenger, sank but he will stop the project foundering and will built a bigger and better boat. The South African regime is defying democracy and black rights by ever more violent repression, which kills up to a hundred demonstrators and peacefully-striking schoolchildren during the month . The white landowners start selling up and the country’s financial markets there are in full collapse by the end of the month with the Rand being devalued and the stock and foreign exchanges have to close. Bishop Tutu’s son is arrested for voicing his views about the arrest of schoolchildren and deaths continue as a march to Mandela’s prison is prevented close and there is more shocking news of South African police attacking peacefully-striking schoolchildren with a further 13 killed. South African authorities supress hospital casualty figures which feature casualties from whips, shotgun pellets and tear gas and also prevent an EU fact-finding mission from seeing Nelson Mandela. Back home, The IRA is active with a bombing campaign and another train bomb in Belfast injures 9 police and civilians. Journalists are active against government censorship on TV programmes as it is revealed that MI5 has been vetting BBC executives and vetoing appointments but the BBC restores its authority and undertakes to broadcast the disputed documentary on the IRA. UK unemployment keeps rising with Maxwell moving printing from Fleet Street to Wapping and then orders his Manchester plant to print the whole nations newspapers as he closes the Fleet Street works entirely. Tory support in the Polls drops to the lowest level for over three years. They are still persecuting miners after Orgreave and the police killing of a 5-year-old boy John Shorthouse by ‘accident’ during a house search and the subsequent imprisonment of his father causes a riot. Now a train strike is all set over the imposition of so called reforms even as a guard helps 200 people to safety during a train fire when single-manning of trains is on the agenda. There are mounting casualties in the latest French rail crash with 43 dead after earlier disastrous train crashes in France and the US. The Japanese 747 air crash kills more than 500 people but four survive after a poorly-repaired cracked pressure dome implodes. The cause of the Manchester aircraft fire is revealed as checks on Pratt and Whitney engines on other 737’s reveal large combustion chamber cracks. The anniversary of the Hiroshima conflagration is commemorated 40years after the first nuclear bomb is dropped. A car bomb in Beirut kills and injures scores and a Sikh leader who signs a reconciliation with Ghandi is shot dead in a temple. The New Zealand Government are homing in on the French security services for sinking the Rainbow warrior as they re-float it this month. The Queen Mother celebrates her 85th birthday.