Monday, January 14 2019

11:00 Lois and I take the bus into town and pop into Specsavers. We both had eye tests there last Wednesday, but the company's opticians were already running late with appointments, and at the end there wasn't enough time to choose frames and have them adjusted etc.

the Cheltenham branch of Specsavers in the Lower High St.

We notice the generally more relaxed atmosphere in the store, which probably the result of recent peace talks between certain large eyewear chains, which we read about recently on the influential US news website, Onion News.

According to the news site, it was a sign that tensions might finally be thawing between the bitter eyewear industry rivals LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, now that they had reportedly agreed on a prisoner exchange following several months of negotiations.

Officials confirmed that five LensCrafters officers who had been imprisoned in Pearle Vision's Beavercreek branch storeroom would be released in a bid to secure the release of seven Pearle Vision workers - including several valuable optometrists and a shift leader who had disappeared in 2009 - as a part of a rare act of diplomacy in the midst of the acrimonious conflict that has long ravaged the prescription eyeglass business.

"After extensive negotiations, we have secured the release of our team members and are eager to return them to their nearest LensCraft branches," said negotiatior Howard Elliott from LensCrafters headquarters, referring to the workers who had been forcibly detained in the Pearle Vision Columbus, OH, Tuttle Crossing Shopping Mall storeroom for over 18 months. "If we assume that our colleagues fulfil their end of the agreement, we will proceed with the immediate exchange of all the optics consultants and agents we are holding.".

Welcome news, that's for sure, and not before time in our opinion. Choosing glasses is complicated enough already without getting involved in a violent turf war between chains of opticians, no doubt about that.

11:30 Lois and I sit and wait in the local Specsavers waiting room. For me, this task of choosing glasses frames is one of life's most boring and annoying duties, and I always get confused about all the competing special offers - yikes! I always ask for "frames just like my current frames", but unfortunately I rarely get away with cutting short the process in this naive way.

Finally, I manage to choose frames for my distance glasses and frames for my sunglasses. Lois chooses them for distance glasses, sunglasses, and also for a tinted pair of glasses. We see the price tags and the price labels talking about £65, £45, £25 etc, so we begin to imagine a possible total price tag of approx. £250, in view of that fact  that we are buying 5 pairs. How naive of us !!

A typical Specsavers Special Offer

In fact, the final invoice is over £500 - yikes! This kind of thing happens every time we buy glasses. I suspect that the difference between our estimate and the final bill arises because the store always focuses on the cost of the frames and never mentions the cost of the lenses. We have been fooled again.

At such times, I always think of Woody Allen's famous phrase, "When the check comes there is much anger". But where does the phrase come from? I can never remember.

Recently I tracked the phrase down: it appeared in one of Allen's useful ballet synopses - useful because after reading the synopsis you don't need to see the actual ballet or at least not all parts of the ballet.

"The Spell" - a synopsis

The dramatic "Check Scene" from Woody Allen's Ballet, "The Spell"

I like music, including opera, but I'm not actually sure that I'm really into ballet. Lois likes it and we once saw the ballet Giselle. But I can't remember exactly where we saw it - I have narrowed down the possibilities to approx. 20 places, including Budapest, Vienna, Liverpool, Baltimore, Copenhagen and Tokyo, as well as many other places, so it's just a matter of time before I get the answer. My goodness, I'm getting old, no doubt about that!

12:00 We take the bus home and have lunch. Afterwards I go to bed and take a gigantic afternoon nap.

14:30 Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia sends me a text message on whatsapp. She writes that Shirley, her sister-in-law, has been visiting the family for the past few days, and that she and Francis, Sarah's husband, have healed their recent rift. Shirley and his husband will be flying on to Melbourne tomorrow.

But what kind of rift is Sarah talking about? I don’t ask her about this because it is already 10:30 pm over there and Sarah has a working day in front of her tomorrow. But Lois and I didn't have the faintest idea that there had been a rift between Francis and Shirley, his sister. Once again, Lois and I are out of the loop – good grief!

15:00 I get up and we relax with a cup of tea and a biscuit on the sofa. There are now only 3 biscuits left in the box of biscuits which Lois' nephew Ian gave us as a Christmas present. It will be good from the point of our New Year's diets, to no longer have the biscuits as a temptation, that’s for sure.

We get started on reading the early pages of the first chapter of "The Further You Fall", Anna Grue’s Danish crime novel, because our U3A Danish group is holding its next meeting here on Thursday, and this novel is the group's next project.

"The Further You Fall", the Danish crime novel that is

our U3A Danish group's next project

Anna Grue, the author

The group has just been on a 2 month break, and Lois and I suddenly realise just how rusty we have become in the Danish language in the meantime - yikes! I hope there is not a mass exodus of group members this week, because I can see that Anna Grue, the novelist's author, uses a lot of difficult words in the text.

The story begins one evening with an unknown "murderer" who has planned in a very careful and almost Zen-Buddhist way, to commit his murder in 2 hours’ time. He has squeezed himself into a small cleaning cabinet in the kitchen of a large office building. He is waiting for all the staff, except for his victim (Liliana, a cleaning assistant), to go home for the day.

When the time is right, he jumps out of the closet and kills Lilliana with his little garrotte - yikes, creepy! The strange thing about the story is that the killer seems to have been feeling sorry for his victim, a cleaning assistant who gets bullied and humiliated by all the other employees – and for the moment, the author has not yet told us why. Fascinating.

After the murder, the killer stuffs his garrotte into a plastic bag and runs out of the building. He takes his blood-stained protective coat and stuffs it into the bag, with the intention of burning it all. Then he jumps up on his bike and cycles into town. Yikes - creepy !!!! But a good start to the story, I think.

This project, i.e. reading "The Further You Fall", is our Danish group's first full-length crime novel, and it will be a bit of a challenge for the group's members: I have no doubt about that. Our previous projects have been short crime stories. But sometimes I get a little fed up with always having to give them relatively easy projects. For me, I love a good challenge - but does the rest of the group have the same attitude? The jury is still out on that question - maybe it will all lead to lots of resignations from the group. We will have to see.

Sometimes I suspect that the members would prefer to just sit and chat about this and that, their grandchildren, their recent holidays etc, rather than study Danish. My god, I'm such an old killjoy, that’s for sure.

17:00 I chat a little with Lois about the crime novel. I have the idea that we members could gradually collect clues about the killer's identity as we progress through the novel week after week, and list  those clues in some web file.

For example, it is clear from this first chapter that the killer is someone in a position of authority in the company, because on the quiet he has been installing hidden cameras here and there in the offices and in the office kitchen, etc. Also, as he sits hiding in the poky cleaning cabinet, he grumbles about the staff's laziness and all the company money they are wasting. My god, what madness !!!

And Lilliana, the cleaning assistant who gets murdered in the first chapter, knows the killer well. To begin with, she is startled when he suddenly appears behind her in the kitchen late in the evening, but after she recognises him, she is instantly reassured (until he starts garrotting her of course).

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

18:15 We have dinner and spend the rest of the evening watching a bit of television. Monday night is TV quiz night for us. "Only Connect" and "University Challenge” are on.

Lois and I are always happy about the questions that we can answer, but which all the fresh young brains strike out on, because we believe it proves that we are not yet suffering from dementia, but perhaps we are deluding ourselves - the jury still out on that one.

In "Only Connect", Victoria Coren Mitchell, the quiz's host, gives the explanation of the connection between the following 4 people:

1. Patrick Stewart (Fire Brigade Officer)

2. Norman Wisdom (Ernie Crabb)

3. Prince Charles (Prince of Wales) (himself)

4. Cheryl Cole (herself)

In fact, all the two teams' 6 brains, plus Lois and I, fail to come up with the answer to this one. Victoria explains that the connection was, that they all appeared in the famous British soap opera, Coronation Street, playing the cameo roles given in brackets.

My goodness, what madness !!!

As a footnote, Ernie Crabb was a pensioner who, in an episode of the soap opera, bought Jack Duckworth's exercise bike in order to prepare for the upcoming "Inter Pub Bowls Challenge" - a great event in the soap’s saga for the soap opera's real aficionados, no doubt, but perhaps not for the general viewer.

As for Patrick Stewart, the role of fire officer in 1967 was his 3rd television role - at that time he was a struggling young actor at the start of his long career in television and film.

My goodness, what a crazy world we live in !!!!

22:00 We go to bed - I read about 10 pages of my bedtime book before I fall asleep - zzzzzz !!!!!

Danish translation

11:00 Lois og jeg tager bussen ind i byen og smutter ind i Specsavers optik. Vi fik begge to øjenundersøgelse sidste onsdag hos dem, men firmaets optikere var allerede sent på den med at foretage sine undersøgelser, og det var ikke nok tid til at vælge brillerammer og få dem justeret osv.

Specsavers optik, Cheltenham

Vi bemærker den mere afslappede stemning i butikken, der resulterede fra nylige fredeforhandlinger mellem nogle brillebranchekæder, som vi for et par år senere læste om i den indflydelsesrige amerikanske nyhedswebsted, Onion News.

Ifølge nyhedswebstedet var det tegn på, at spændinger endelig kunne optøes mellem de bittere brillebranche-rivaler, at LensCrafters og Pearle Vision angiveligt havde aftalt en fangebytte efter flere måneders forhandlinger.

Tjenestemænd bekræftede, at fem LensCrafters-ekspedienter, der var blevet fængslet i Pearle Vision's Beavercreek-afdeling ville blive frigjort for at sikre frigivelsen af syv Pearle Vision-arbejdere - herunder flere værdifulde optometriste og en skiftleder, der var blevet forsvundet i 2009 - som en del af en sjælden eksempel på diplomati midt i den akrimatiske konflikt, der længe har hærget mellem de receptpligtige brilleforretninger.

 "Efter omfattende forhandlinger har vi sikret frigivelsen af vores teammedlemmer og er ivrige efter at sende dem tilbage til de nærmeste LensCrafters filialer", sagde forhandleren Howard Elliott fra LensCrafters hovedkontor med henvisning til de arbejdere, der er blevet tvangsfuldt tilbageholdt i lagerrummet til Pearle Visions Columbus, OH, Tuttle Crossing indkøbscentrets butik i over 18 måneder. "Hvis vi antager, at vores kolleger opfylder deres del af aftalen, vil vi straks fortsætte med at foretage  udvekslingen af alle de optikkonsulenter og ekspedienter, vi holder".

 1:30 Lois og jeg sidder og venter i det lokale Specsavers Optiks ventesal. For mit vedkommende er denne opgave, at vælge brillerammer, en af livets mest kedelige og irriterende pligter, og jeg bliver altid forvirret over de konkurrerende specielle tilbud – yikes! Jeg beder altid om ”rammer der ligner mine nuværende rammer”,  men desværre sjældent slipper jeg af sted med at begrænse mig på denne måde.

Til sidst lykkes det mig at vælge rammer til mine afstandsbriller og rammer til mine solbryller. Lois vælger dem til afstandsbriller, solbryller, også til et tonet par briller. Vi ser prismærker og prisssedler, der taler om 65£, 45£, 25£ osv, så vi begynder at forestille os en mulig total prismærke på ca. 250, i betragtning af, at vi køber 5 par. Hvor er vi dog dumme!!

 et typisk Specsavers-tilbud

Faktisk er den sidste faktura over 500£ - yikes! Denne slags ting sker hver gang vi køber briller. Jeg mistænker, at forskellen på vores vurdering og den sidste regning opstår på grund af, at butikken altid sætter fokus på bekostningen af rammerne, og siger ikke noget om bekostningen af linserne. Vi er blevet narret igen.

På sådanne tidspunkter har jeg for vane at tænke på Woody Allens berømte udtryk, ”When the check comes there is much anger.” Men hvor kommer udtrykket fra? Jeg kan aldrig huske.

For nylig opsporede jeg udtrykket: det dukkede op i en af Allens nyttige balletsynopser – nyttige fordi man derefter ikke behøver at se selve balletten eller visse dele af balletten.

”the Spell” – en synopsis

”regningscenen” fra Woody Allens ballet, ”The Spell” (Trylleformularen)

Jeg kan godt lide musik, herunder opera, men jeg er ikke helt sikker på, at jeg virkelig er til ballet. Lois kan lide den, og vi så engang balletten Giselle. Men jeg kan ikke huske, præcis hvor vi så den– jeg har begrænset mulighederne til ca. 20, inklusive Budapest, Vienna, Liverpool, Baltimore, København og Tokyo, samt mange andre steder, så det er kun et spørgsmål om tid, før jeg kommer med svaret. Du godeste, jeg bliver gammel, ingen tvivl om det!

12:00 Vi tager bussen hjem og spiser frokost. Bagefter går jeg i seng for at tage en gigantisk eftermiddagslur.

14:30 Sarah, vores datter i Australien sender mig en sms på whatsapp. Hun skrever, at Shirley, hendes svigersøster, har besøgt familien de seneste nogle dage, og hun og Francis, Sarahs mand, har bilagt deres nylig strid. Shirley og hans mand skal flyver videre i morgen til Melbourne.

Men hvad for en strid taler Sarah om? Det spørger jeg hende ikke om, fordi den allerede er kl 22:30 derovre og Sarah har en arbejdsdag for i morgen. Men Lois og jeg har ikke den fjerneste idé om, at der har været et eller andet skænderi mellem Francis og Shirley, hans søster. Engang til er Lois og jeg ude af loopet, lader det til !

15:00 Jeg står op og vi slapper af med en kop te og en kiks i sofaen. Der er nu kun 3 kiks tilbage i den kasse med kassen med kiks, som Lois’ nevø Ian forærte os som julegave. Det vil være godt for vores nytårsslankekur, ikke længere at have kiks som en fristelse, det ved vi med sikkerhed.

Vi går i gang med at læse de tidliger sider af den første kapitel af ”Dybt at falde”, Anna Grues krimiroman, fordi vores U3A danske gruppe holder sit næste møde hos os på torsdag, og denne roman er gruppens næste projekt.

”Dybt at falde”, den krimiroman, der er vores U3A danske gruppes næste projekt

Anna Grue, krimiromanens forfatter

Gruppen har lige haft en 2 måneders pause, og Lois og jeg bliver pludselig klar over, hvor rustne vi er blevet i det danske sprog i mellemtiden – yikes! Jeg håber på, at der ikke er en masseflugt af gruppemedlemmer denne uge, fordi jeg kan se, at Anna Grue, romanens forfatter, bruger en masse svære ord i teksten.

Historien begynder en aften med en ukendt ”morder”, der har planlagt på en meget omhyggelig og næsten zenbuddhistisk måde, at begå sit mord om 2 timers tid. Han har klemt sig ind i et lille rengøringsskab i køkkenet af en stor kontorbygning. Han venter på, at alle de ansatte, bortset fra sit offer (Liliana, en rengøringsassistent), er gået hjem.

Da tidspunktet er rigtigt, springer han ud af skabet  og dræber Lilliana med sin lille garrotte – øv, uhyggeligt! Det mærkelige ved historien er, at morderen virker at have ondt i forvejen for sit offer, en rengøringsassistent, som alle de andre ansatte mobber og ydmyger – for tiden har forfatteren ikke endnu fortalt os hvorfor – fascinerende. 

Morderen propper sit våben ned i en plastpose og løber ud af bygningen. Han tager sin blodplettede beskyttende lag tøj og propper den ned i posen, med den hensigt af at brænde det hele. Han hopper op på sin cykel og cykler ind mod byen. Yikes – uhyggeligt!!!! Men en god start på historien, synes jeg.

Dette projekt – at læse ”Dybt at Falde”, vores danske gruppens første kriminalroman i fuld længde, vil være lidt af en udfordring for gruppens medlemmer: det har jeg ikke nogen tvivl om. Vores forrige projekter har været korte noveller. Men af og til bliver jeg lidt ked af, altid at skulle give dem forholdsvis nemme projekter. For mit vedkommende elsker jeg en god udfordring – men har resten af gruppen den samme holdning? Det er juryen stadig ude om – måske vil det hele føre til  masse opsigelser. Vi får se!

Nogle gange mistænker jeg, at medlemmerne hellere kan lide at snakke om dette og hint, deres børnebørn, deres seneste ferie osv, end at studere dansk. Du godeste, jeg er sådan en gammel lyseslukker, ingen tvivl om det!!!!

17:00 Jeg snakker lidt med Lois om krimiromanen. Jeg har idéen, at vi medlemmer kunne gradvist samle spor om morderens identitet, mens vi gør fremskridt igennem historien uge efter uge, og liste sporene i en eller anden computerfil.

For eksempel, er det klart fra denne første kapitel, at morderen er nogen i overordnet stilling i selskabet, fordi han har i smug installeret skjulte kameraer her og der i kontorerne og i kontorbygningens køkken osv, og mens han sidder og gemme sig i det trængte rengøringsskab, piver han over personalets dovenskab og alle de selskabets penge, de spilder. Du godeste, sikke et vanvid!!!

Og Lilliana, den rengøringsassistent, der bliver mordet i den første kapitel, kender morderen godt. I begyndelsen bliver hun forskrækket, da han sent på aftenen pludselig dukker op bag hende, men efter hun genkender ham, bliver hun øjeblikkeligt beroliget (indtil han begynder at garottere hende selvfølgelig).

Sikke en skør verden vi lever i !!!!!

18:15 Vi spiser aftensmad og bruger resten af aftenen på at se lidt fjernsyn. Mandag aften er tv-quiz-aften hos os. De viser ”Only Connect” og ”University Challenge.

Lois og jeg er altid glad for de spørgsmål, som vi kan besvare, men som alle de friske unge hjerne har problemer med, fordi vi tror det beviser, at vi ikke endnu lider af demens, men måske vildleder vi os – det er juryen stadig ude om!

I ”Only Connect” giver Victoria Coren Mitchell, quizzens charmerende vært, forklarelsen af forbindelsen mellem de følgende 4 personer:

1.      Patrick Stewart (brandvæsenofficer)

2.      Norman Wisdom (Ernie Crabb)

3.      Prins Charles (prins af Wales) (sig selv)

4.      Cheryl Cole (sig selv)

Det mislykkes faktisk alle de to holds ”hjerner”, samt Lois og jeg, at komme med svaret. Forbindelsen var at de alle 4 medvirkede i den berømte britiske sæbeopera, Coronation Street, spillende de cameoroller, der bliver givet i parentes.

Du godeste, sikke et vanvid!!!

Som fodnote, var Ernie Crabb en pensionist, der i et vistafsnit af sæbeoperaen købte Jack Duckworths kondicykel i forberedelse på den kommende ”Inter Pub Bowls Challenge” – en stor begivenhed for sæbeopera-specialister måske.

Og for Patrick Stewarts vedkommende var rollen som brandvæsensofficer i 1967  hans 3. tv-rolle– han var dengang en ung skuespiller i starten af sin lange karriere i tv og film.

Du godeste, sikke en skør verden vi lever i !!!!

22:00 Vi går i seng – jeg læser ca. 10 sider af min sengetidbog, før jeg glider over i søvnen – zzzzzz!!!!!