Danskcolin: Tuesday April 7th 2026 "Have YOU voted yet in the big Winchester Zoo contest? Time's running out haha!!!"

Yes, Friends, have YOU voted yet in the big Winchester Zoo contest? If not, better 'get your skates on', to put it mildly!!!! The local Onion News for East Hampshire has more.....

Yes better hurry - from the picture, Ashley looks like she's 'ready to pop' at any moment (!), and good luck to her and Bobo, or whatever haha!

The news about the contest, however, brings a knowing smile to the faces of me and my wife Lois this morning, here in leafy Liphook, Hampshire, not a million miles away from that gift shop over at Winchester, to put it mildly (again) !!!!

my wife Lois and me - a recent picture

Contests, whether at Winchester Zoo or wherever, are very much on our minds, because the big news today is that, finally, our local U3A "Intermediate Latin for Old Codgers" course is going to be re-starting in 2 weeks' time, after a 3 month break occasioned by group leader Joe's recent operation.

Not only that, but for our very next group meeting, possibly the world's oldest beauty contest will be on the agenda, courtesy of Roman poet Ovid (43 BC to 17 or 18 AD, nobody's quite sure!). We'll be looking at Ovid's account of "The Judgment of Paris", where poor Paris, the Prince of Troy, was manoeuvred into deciding which of the three goddesses Venus, Juno or Minerva was 'the fairest'.

Here's an early picture of the contest's iconic 'No Swimming Costume' section, when Paris awards the much-prized 'Golden Apple' to the victorious goddess:

three Greek goddesses compete in the iconic 'no swimming costume'

section of the world's first ever beauty contest

Well, good luck with that one, Paris old man haha!!! Greek goddesses were, even in those days, known for being 'bad losers', and the outcome of this - possibly the world's earliest beauty contest - wasn't a good one, leading, in the end, to two very angry goddesses, and to one of the earliest known conflicts, the Trojan War no less!

Why beauty contests, especially between feisty goddesses, weren't, as a consequence, officially banned for all time by the UN, or by its predecessor the League of Nations, is a complete mystery to Lois and me, but, "it is what it is", and I guess we're stuck with them, more's the pity !!!

And now, 4 thousands years later, Lois and I have to spend a lot of our, frankly limited, time getting back 'up to speed' with our Intermediate Latin, a task which we're just going to have to somehow fit in to our busy 'old codger' schedule. What madness !!!!

(above) Roman poet Ovid's poem about the world's first ever beauty contest, and (below)

our Latin group leader Joe, seen here in happier times, before his recent operation

Having said that, Lois and I are, underneath it all, very much looking forward to the resumption of Joe's meetings, but there's no getting away from it. Ovid's epic poem is about 14 lines long, which will certainly give us both a ton of work to do, which we could certainly do without!

Like many pensioners, Lois and I often wonder how we ever had the time to go to work back in the day, to be brutally honest!!!!

flashback to last summer when we first became members of Joe's 'old codger' Latin group

And the weird thing is, that, looking back to our own parents' old age, they seemed to have had literally nothing to do all day, so there's obviously been some sort of big 'step change' in the last 20 to 30 years, that's for sure!!!! I wonder what's caused that.....!!!!

Even the weather is against us today, turning suddenly oddly warm and sunny, meaning we have to somehow squeeze in as much as thirty minutes of weeding in the vegetable beds in our tiny back garden - whatever next !!!!

Just our luck! A nice day makes us do a bit of weeding, on top of all our other duties!!!!

[Stop moaning, Colin! You ought to have my job! - Ed]

"Well at least we don't live in China!", is what Lois and I say this evening as we watch the first programme in TV adventurer Ben Fogle's new series about that massive country!

All the time that Lois and I are watching the programme, we're wondering about what Ben and his team's official Chinese Government minders are letting him see, or letting him report on, which is a novel experience!

Those minders obviously don't want Ben to film in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, scene of the infamous massacre of anti-government demonstrators back in 1989, but they do it anyway on these tourist bikes that they've rented. There's trouble, however, when one of Ben's team arouses suspicion and a policeman asks to check through the man's bag.

Yikes! Somehow Ben and his interpreter Chang, seem to get away with it, and ride on into the square, but at least one member of Ben's crew gets turned away by police. And career TV adventurer Ben, who's travelled in some of the wildest parts of the world, says that the level of tension there in Tiananmen Square is something he's never before experienced in his travels anywhere.

There's annoyance later, however, when Ben tries an experiment to check the usefulness of the information available on his phone apps. To do this, he tests out the Chinese equivalent of ChatGPT with a simple question about Tiananmen Square: