Danskcolin: Thursday May 22nd 2025 "Do your fellow-air passengers make YOU feel nervous?"

Yes, friends, when flying, do your fellow air passengers ever make you feel nervous?

Have you noticed recently, when you take an airline flight there's always some "clever dick" who's messing with the plane's equipment, claiming "It's okay, I'm an industry insider"? There's always at least one of these guys seemingly, on every flight, and this morning one of these nerds actually made it to page 94 of the local Onion News for East Hampshire, which must have had the poor guy "walking on air" (no pun intended!!!!!).

Yes, you've probably guessed from my unintentional, but highly amusing, pun there, that I'm referring to the Jeffrey Evans story, no question!

And if it stresses you out, every time you spot Evans sitting by the emergency exit doors on your flight, just remember that if the pilot, co-pilot and stewardesses were all knocked out by, say, toxic fumes, you'd be pretty much dependant on a "tech-savvy" passenger like Evans to get you off the plane to safety. So don't knock it!

flight crew and attendants carrying out evacuation drills

Emergency exit doors are an essential tool if you're wanting to evacuate an airliner, and much more efficient than smashing individual windows, often too small to accommodate larger passengers anyway.

But what do you use to get out if you need to evacuate an entire country? Emergency exit doors, or even smashed windows, won't help you much in that scenario, will they!

[Good point, Colin! - Ed]

My medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I are currently watching that TV series "Families Like Ours" on BBC4, where climate change is gradually submerging the whole of Denmark. The Danish Government is basically shutting the whole country down, and all Danes have to somehow find another country that will accept them.

As it happens, Lois and I somehow find time to run the local U3A "Intermediate Danish for Old Codgers" group - "for our sins" (!), and all the members of our little group are watching this series too. The result is that we spend most of our fortnightly online meeting today talking about the series (in English!!!!), when we should be practising our grammar and conversation skills, and reading our Danish murder mystery together.

(left) Lois and me, waiting for our Intermediate Danish "old codger"

group members to log on, and (right) Jeanette, usually first to arrive,

starts off another stormy meeting, during which more English is talked than Danish

What madness !!!!!

The heroine of the series we're all talking about today is Laura (see picture above), who has just graduated from high school. She's sporting her cute Danish "high-school graduation cap", and she's just started "getting busy" in the afternoons with new "squeeze" Elias. So it's obviously annoying, and a total bore for both of them, to realise that all the university open day events they've been invited to, have turned out to be a total waste of time, because the choice they've got to make is "which country shall I move to?".

And when Laura looks in the school library, all she can find is "Which University" and "Which Career?" booklets stashed there by the careers teacher, and nothing at all on the "Which country should I evacuate to?" shelf, unhelpfully.

Poor Laura !!!!

(bottom left) Elias begs Laura to hold him tight,

and later (bottom right) Laura accommodating Elias in her room

When the call comes out from the Government to evacuate Denmark, Laura's got 3 options:

(1) go to Paris with her architect father Jakob, who's already got a job lined up there and a nice apartment they can live in, with step-mum Amalie, and herself go to the Sorbonne University, where she's got a guaranteed place for the autumn.

or (2) go to Finland with current "squeeze" Elias, who has a Finnish mum or dad (I forget which), and so is guaranteed entry,

or (3) go with your biological mum Fanny to Eastern Europe illegally, with a hand-gun concealed in your suitcase, on a small, crowded, leaky boat, being run by armed Albanian people-smugglers, who claim that, for a ton of money, they'll take you and your other fellow-passengers to Poland and then on to a final destination in Romania.

It's a no-brainer really isn't it! If you were Laura, you'd either choose option 1, Paris, if you wanted a nice comfortable life generally and a glittering future as a graduate of the Sorbonne; or, if you really liked sex more than all that, you'd choose option 2, Finland, for steamy spas and steamy nights (and days!) with new "squeeze" Elias.

On the other hand, however, if you're a TV series writer, you'd obviously make Laura choose option 3 for its scary, dangerous, but dramatic, "cliff-hanger" possibilities. And guess what - that's what happens.

Who would have thought it, eh - haha !!!!!

Here, in this scene, Laura's dad urges her not to risk it.

Of course, Laura doesn't listen to her old dad - how often does that happen, eh? Haha!!!

"Get on a people-smugglers' boat, then try to enter Poland illegally, with a concealed hand-gun and no documentation?" - what could possibly go wrong haha !!!!

Bet now you wish you were away in Finland, tucked up in a nice warm bed with current "squeeze" Elias, don't you, Laura!

Am I right? Or am I right haha !!!!!

But "It couldn't happen in the UK!", I hear you cry, because, unlike Denmark, we've got lots of hills and mountains that we could all live on, if the sea levels kept rising.

And indeed, in the small town where Lois and I have been living since January - rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire - we're surrounded by hills: we can hardly move for them, and we were walking on one of "them thar hills" (!), just this morning, doing some bird-spotting on Old Man Lowsley's Farm.

Well, maybe so, Lois and I could set up our marital tent on one of "them thar hills" - but here's another scary scenario, to which we were alerted today by another timely email from Steve, our American brother-in-law.