Danskcolin: Thursday September 4th 2025 "Are YOU planning to win the lottery this week? Well, don't bother! Local man Frank's scooping the lot apparently!"

We've all done it - been so confident of a weekend lottery win that we start to spend a little too freely in advance - after all, what harm can it do: that's what people say in these parts!

Local man Frank Cantrell is a case in point, and his face was "all over" page 94 of the East Hampshire Onion News this morning - just turn to page 94, if you can bear take your hands from over your eyes, that is !!!!

Poor Mrs Cantrell !!!!!

But, at the same time, fingers crossed for Mrs Cantrell's "old man" this weekend - he's going to be a bit red-faced going into work on Monday morning if his hunch is wrong - that's for sure!!!

Having a lottery win is a good boost to any local economy, and the story puts a chuckle on to the faces of me and my light-to-moderate wife Lois this morning as we take our daily walk, this time through nearby Radford Park, here in semi-leafy Liphook, not a million miles away from Frank Cantrell over there in lovely Betty Mundy's Bottom!

me and my light-to-moderate wife Lois this morning, chuckling over the

day's news in nearby Radford Park in semi-leafy rural Liphook, Hampshire

Lotteries are very much on our minds this morning, as it's a Thursday, and this afternoon we've got our fortnightly online meeting of our local U3A Intermediate Danish group, which we lead, "for our sins" (!).

Lois and I log onto our laptop for another online meeting of the local U3A

Intermediate Danish Group, that we lead "for our sins" (!)

Our little group is currently reading a Danish 'whodunnit' together - all about a Danish marriage-scammer, romance-scammer - call him what you will, known simply as "JH". And JH 'earns his crust' by tracking down single Danish women 'of a certain age' who've just won a fortune on the EU lottery, getting into their beds - and more importantly getting into their bank accounts.

When he's emptied their accounts JH either murders them or just "moves on", onto another menopausal Danish multi-millionairess - as you do (!).

Danish romance-scammer "JH" (left) has got most of the duvet as usual (!),

and his poor menopausal victim Ursula has to hope for a "hot flush"

to come along, just to keep herself warm - what madness !!!!

Luckily, local adman and amateur detective Dan is on the case, and in this afternoon's meeting our local Danish group reads how he's decided to recruit his big sister Bente (known as "Big Bente") to be JH's latest victim. To do that, he's got to persuade the EU Lottery "bigwigs" to send romance-scammer JH a email giving him Bente's name and address etc, together with the fake news that she's just won 10 million kroner - whatever that is in real money haha!!!

local adman and amateur detective Dan, played

by Peter Mygind in the TV series

"Big Bente", luckily also, is keen to get involved, somewhat surprisingly - she's divorced, needs the sex, and she's bored by her job as a local government officer, so what has she got to lose haha!

Poor Bente !!!!!! [It's only a story, Colin! - Ed]

So watch this space! [I'm not holding my breath, given the snail's pace you group of "noggins" are getting through this book, Colin! - Ed]

19:00 Thoroughly exhausted by our afternoon keeping order amongst our fractious little online group (!), Lois and I more or less collapse onto the sofa after dinner. We decide to watch a film "The Imitation Game", all about World War II code-breaker Alan Turing, who in his determination to crack the Germans' Enigma coding machine, more or less invented the modern digital computer - and arguably Artificial Intelligence (AI) - along the way.

It's particularly interesting for me, because when I started my own government job in the same kind of work at a less exalted level, back in 1972, some of the characters in the film were still around, in the office, and rapidly approaching retirement by that time. Later in the decade I was in the same branch as Joan Clarke, who nearly became Turing's wife. She was his girlfriend, and liked him enough to want to marry him, even though she suspected (rightly) that he was gay. When I knew Joan in the 1970's, I knew she'd worked at Bletchley Park but I knew nothing about her relationship to Turing, which she never mentioned, naturally enough.

In the film we see Joan, played by Keira Knightley, getting the news that she had passed the entrance test for work at the Government Codebreaking Centre at Bletchley Park.

It's a bit unsatisfying for Lois and me to watch the film, because the makers have obviously invented loads of dramatic encounters and incidents to give the story human interest and "spice it up", so that it seems more exciting than it probably was. If the viewer realises this, they then become unsure about what in the film actually happened and what didn't, which is a pity.

It's really well done, however, and highly watchable, but I expect that, in reality, the breaking of the German codes was mostly just a load of hard work and sleepless nights.

Summing up the war, Turing says in the film, "People talk about the war as this epic battle between civilisations, freedom versus tyranny, democracy versus Nazism, armies of millions bleeding into the grounds, fleets of ships weighing down the oceans, planes dropping bombs from the sky until they obliterated the sun itself.

"The war wasn't like that for us".