Danskcolin: Thursday March 27th 2025 "Does the Financial Times' send YOU to sleep? Well, join the club!!!"

Do YOU find financial news a tad boring? A lot of us do, don't we!

The "FT" (Financial Times) can come across as a bit dry at times, that's for sure. And that's why I always prefer to get my daily "finance fix" from all the Oriental "organs" that "plop" through my letterbox here in leafy, semi-rural Liphook, Hampshire: the financial writing "east of Suez" is so much more poetic and joyful, even when the news is bad, to put it mildly!

Fantastic stuff, isn't it! And the sheer quality of the writing from oriental financial journalists continues to astound. My thanks, as always, to Onion News for those oriental money "snapshots", by the way!

Certainly UK markets are certain to be on the rise, however, to judge from the joyous walk I took this morning through nearby Radford Park with my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois. Nature is starting to "bloom with a capital B" (!), and put on its "spring face", no doubt about that!

"Spring is busting out all over" as my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I

walk down Locke Road to nearby Radford Park this morning in semi-rural Liphook, Hampshire

And Yours Truly is very grateful for the tiny signs of spring that Lois spots, if only because they slow her down a bit (!). I spend a lot of the day sitting around or on the computer, whereas Lois is much fitter than me.

Lois tries to do 4 to 5 thousand "steps" each day, as recommended by her online diet-and-fitness coach Caroline. However, whenever Lois stops to look at a tiny plant or something similar - a bit of blossom somewhere perhaps, it gives me the chance to get my breath back, which is nice!

We try to synchronise everything we do together, even our walking (!).

(left) a a typical group of local flatmates from East Leake who've managed

to synchronise their menstrual periods, and (right) Lois and me celebrating

with steaming mugs of hot chocolate, having at last managed to synchronise

our schedule for picking up our new "8-week" boxes of statins from the chemist's

We're trying to avoid the awful example of Tolkien, the creator of the Hobbit, his writer friend CS Lewis and CS's brother, Warren Lewis, who failed to synchronise their rambling speeds. On their walks together as three young men over the Malvern Hills, Tolkien famously liked to stroll and look at things, whereas the Lewis brothers liked to clock up the miles in as short a time as possible.

three young men with an unsolved synchronicity problem: (left) JRR Tolkien,

creator of the Hobbit, and (right) Tolkien's friends the Lewis brothers (CS and Warren)

Warren, writing about the problem later, said, " 'Tollers' [i.e. Tolkien] fitted easily into our routine and I think he enjoyed himself. His one fault turned out to be that he wouldn't trot at our pace in harness; he will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and entomological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us "ruthless walkers".

And a friend, George Sayers said of the trio's walks together, "You should have seen Jack [i.e. "CS"] trying to walk with J.R.R. Tolkien! Once Jack got started a bomb could not have stopped him and the more he walked, the more energy he had for a good argument. Now Tolkien was just the opposite. If he had something to say, he wanted you to stop so he could look you in the face. So on they would go, Jack charging ahead and Tolkien pulling at him, trying to get him to stop – back and forth, back and forth. What a scene!"

What a madness it all was, wasn't it !!!!!

14:30 After a lunch and a quick nap, it's time for our online meeting. Lois and I, "for our sins" (!) attempt to lead the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, "as you do" (!), so there's simply no time today to go up to bed for one of our standard mega-naps: busy busy busy!

Lois and me eschewing our usual afternoon in bed, attempting to lead

the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, and trying to bring

some discipline to its rambling online meetings (!)

Our little group is currently reading a Danish murder mystery, in which Danish advertising executive Dan Sommerdahl is indulging his appetite for amateur detective work, and running rings about the local police and solving murders before the useless local CID guys have even got their notebooks out, would you believe (!).

right) the Danish murder mystery that our little U3A Intermediate

Danish group is reading - Judaskysset ("The Judas Kiss") and right,

the book's Danish author, Anna Grue (67)

Dan also likes his afternoons in bed with his wife Marianne, but, as often, when he goes upstairs he finds there's already a big dog in the bed as well - Marianne is a bit of a dog-lover, to put it mildly, and she likes nothing better than to bring home a stray one, and then go to bed with it.

And as we read today in the story, "Kort efter lå han i sin seng og lyttede til Mariannes og hundens åndedrag". English- "Shortly afterwards [Dan] was lying in his bed, listening to Marianne's and the dog's, breathing".

Poor Dan !!!!!

And what madness, or "sikke et vanvid!" as they say in Denmark (!).

Danish Dan, advertising guy turned amateur "sleuth", seen here in happier times,

in bed with his wife Marianne.- and no dog to be seen, which is nice (!) -

in the TV version of the story (actors Peter Mygind and Laurs Drasbæk)

21:00 After a longish day, Lois and I finally go to bed on the first part of a fascinating Sky Arts Channel documentary about Douglas Adams, writer of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

Adams wrote of his childhood in the 1960's, "As kids we were fascinated by the future. Unlike most generations before us, we knew for sure that it was going to be different, we just didn't know what it would be. Would there be space travel? Would there be time travel? But I guess we can say that our future is, for a while, going to be dominated by technology".

And Adams basically imagined the world of the internet a decade or two before it happened.

Here, comedian-turned-celebrity-travelogues-presenter Griff Rhys-Jones recalls their years together at high-flying Brentwood School, where Adams gravitated towards the school's dramatic productions, playing, for instance, Julius Caesar in the Shakespeare play of the same name:

Yes, even at the age of 12, Adams was already 6ft tall (1.8m) and eventually grew to 6' 5" before stopping, somewhat reluctantly perhaps (!). And Griff always "looked up to him", and not just in the physical sense haha!

Both Adams and "Griff" went on to Cambridge, where they took part in dramatic productions like Sheridan's "The Rivals". Adams was already writing surreal stuff for himself, and his idols were the Beatles and Monty Python. Later he actually collaborated on some writing with one of the Pythons, Graham Chapman, but Adams hated being a "sidekick", apparently, and gave that up.

BBC producer John Lloyd recalls those days for tonight's programme:

Then, after parting company with Chapman, Adams, over a period of years, took a succession of temporary jobs, including bodyguard - I suppose he had the height for it at 6ft 5?

The idea for "Hitchhikers Guide" eventually came after his mum came and "rescued" him, taking him back home to live with his parents and his siblings in semi-rural Dorset, installing him in his old boyhood bedroom. He tired to carry on writing, on his typewriter in his bedroom, but without coming up with anything that satisfied him.

Then one day, he saw out of his window, in a field near their house a developer knocking down a disused glove factory, and it was watching this, that gave Adams the idea of aliens demolishing the Earth to make way for a Space Hyperpass. And the rest is history, as his brother recalls for the programme: