Friday 12 July 2019

05:00 Lois and I both wake up early but stay lying in bed - we're currently sleeping in our 42-year-old daughter Sarah's old double bed. Her old room overlooks the backyard: we can keep the windows open without the risk of traffic noise, which is nice. There are only the sounds of nature to be heard, especially bird song - and I read 20 pages of my bedtime book.

The view from the window of our daughter Sarah's old room

It is unfortunate, but true, that many people in our neighbourhood fail to enjoy the early morning sounds of nature, mostly due to poor planning, or for various other reasons. A local mother, Laura Maloney, recently hit the world's headlines after she made this kind of unfortunate mistake, having stayed up to 9 pm the previous evening, apparently mesmerised by the latest episode of a popular TV quiz (source: Onion News).

Noticing  that she had somehow managed to sleep through both the birds’ dawn chorus and her neighbourhood's early morning waste collection, 53-year-old local mother, Laura Maloney, confirmed to the press that she didn't wake up until after the sun had risen.

"Oh my gosh, it's already light!", said Maloney, adding that she couldn't believe how late it was, and that she had to go to work inside less than three hours. "I am so angry with myself. This will throw my whole routine off, and make it impossible to fall asleep at a reasonable time tonight.

Maloney continued her impromptu press conference by acknowledging to journalists that she should have known better than to stay awake to see all 60 minutes of "The Chase Celebrity Special" the previous night.

Good grief, what madness !!! Lois and I usually turn off the television after the first 10 minutes of this show - as soon as it becomes apparent that the evening's competitors are a bunch of self-absorbed idiots who are never going to win any serious money, I have to say, which is almost every Sunday ha ha ha!

09:30 We talk on the phone with Sarah - a few days ago she checked herself in to the local hospital in Joondalup, a suburb of Perth, Australia, with a suspected appendicitis, but the doctors' diagnosis is currently diverticulitis in the gut, not requiring surgery, which is soothing.

At first, when she was hospitalized, she was not eating anything because the doctors were preparing her for a possible operation, but she has now been taking regular doses of antibiotics and painkillers for a few days now. The result is that she has difficulty eating normally – and she has thrown up several times.

She has to stay in the hospital for at least another two days - they will not discharge her before Monday, she says. Poor thing !!!

Sarah in happier times - Christmas Day 2018 - along with

Francis and their (then) 5 and a half-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie.

a Christmas Day Skype-call

11:00 We drive over to Bishops Cleeve to buy some things at the local Coop supermarket. Afterwards we pop into the town's post office to send 2 copies of "Peter Rabbit" children's magazine to Lily and Jessie, our grandchildren in Perth, Australia. We come home.

12:00 We have lunch on the terrace and afterwards I go to bed and take a gigantic afternoon nap. Meanwhile, Lois rushes into the kitchen and cooks a lot of beetroot - one of my favourite vegetables, although it is not to everyone's taste, I have to admit. Yum yum!

15:00 I get up and start mowing the lawn in the front yard, and also the one that is immediately behind the house. I'll leave the remaining lawns till tomorrow. Lois has hung the laundry out to dry over the washing line, or to be precise, our rotary dryer, and she doesn't care for me to cover her lovely clean laundry with miniscule green grass-particles, which is understandable, I have to admit.

our rotary dryer in happier times

17:00 I dig out my shiny new tablet - we've been so busy the last few days that I haven't had a moment to try it out and get used to using Windows 10, also to using the tablet's annoying flat keyboard without making too many typos ha ha!

I decide on a shiny new project to help me master the tablet. Our U3A Danish group is currently reading a Danish crime novel, "The Further You Fall" by Anna Grue, and during our regular fortnightly meetings the group's members tend to be constantly speculating about who the killer is and that kind of stuff. But we are all old crows and we find it hard to remember what happened in the previous chapters lol lol!

I decide to use my shiny new tablet to create a brand new website where I will write notes on each chapter we read, a brief summary of each chapter, also a list of the tracks the author reveals about the killer's identity and the like. I can give the team members the address of the site and invite them to contribute their own comments and suchlike - brilliant!

18:00 We have dinner and spend the rest of the evening listening to the radio, an interesting programme in the series "The Last Word".

Lois and I have got into the habit of hearing this program every week because we want to find out if anyone in the past 1-4 weeks has died or not (I have noticed that most weeks there are only 4- 5 deaths, which is somewhat comforting, to put it mildly). The host of the program is the charming Matthew Bannister.

Sadly, Christopher Booker, the satirical magazine Private Eye’s first editor (early in the 1960’s), died recently.

The "Guardian" newspaper said Booker pursued iconoclasm to the point of extraordinary and often eccentric excesses. In his weekly Sunday Telegraph column, he regularly annoyed and frustrated scientists, climatologists and doctors with his claim that asbestos was not dangerous, speed cameras caused accidents, fossil fuels were necessary, global warming was a hoax and Darwinian evolution was not proven.

Christopher Booker in Private Eye magazine's earliest days

along with Richard Ingrams (left) and Willie Rushton (right)

But he certainly gave the newspaper's readers what they wanted to hear: that bureaucrats and social workers were meddlers, that the EU was a dangerous and irresponsible bureaucracy, and that experts was conspiring to pull the wool over their eyes. And the fact that he did it with resolution, brio and absolute certainty in his own rightness as against an apparent official silence, just reinforced all their prejudices about the world. He enjoyed the perversion of taking the opposite view, a perspective that also inspired his satires.

Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s current editor, said "no one ever agreed with Christopher all the time, including Christopher himself".

Such people are very stimulating and amusing, in my opinion, as long as they remain there where they belong, in other words, not in power - when they come to power they become a little scary to put it mildly (no names no pack drill ha ha ha).

Christopher was the cousin of my former Latin teacher, Michael "Mick" Booker. Mick was my Latin teacher when I was in high-school in Bristol in the early 1960’s. Mick's lessons were one of my most nostalgic memories of my schooling:  on Friday afternoons, he taught us how to write Latin in hexameters and pentameters, and other poetic meters. Our textbook was Gradus Ad Parnassum - and I inherited the school library's ancient copy, published in 1856 and originally owned by some Victorian person named E.Stockdale.   [Who he? - Ed.].

Happy times !!!!!

Norwoods, the building where I learnt to write Latin verse 1962-4:

our classroom was on the right, upstairs on the 1st floor

my ancient Victorian copy of Gradus Ad Parnassum,

our Latin Verse primer

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz !!!!!

Danish translation

05:00 Lois og jeg vågner begge to tidligt op men bliver liggende i sengen – vi sover for tiden i vores 42-årige datter Sarahs gamle dobbeltseng. Hendes gamle værelse har udsigt over baghaven: vi kan holde vinduerne åbne uden risikoen for trafiklarm, hvilket er rart. Der er kun naturens lyde til at blive hørt, især fuglsang – og jeg læser 20 sider af min sengetidbog.

Udsigten fra vinduet i vores datter Sarahs gamle værelse

Det er uheldigt, men sandt, at mange mennesker i vores nabolag ikke formår at nyde den morgentidlige naturlyde, for det meste på grund af dårlig planlægning, eller af forskellige andre grunde. En lokal mor, Laura Maloney, ramte verdens overskrifter for nylig, efter hun begik dette slags uheldige fejl, efter at være forblevet oppe til kl 21,  tilsyneladende hypnotiseret af den seneste afsnit af en populær tv-quiz (kilde: Onion News).

Da hun bemærkede, at hun på en eller anden måde formåede at sove gennem både fuglens daggry og hendes nabolags morgentidlige affaldsindsamling, bekræftede den 53-årige lokale mor, Laura Maloney, at hun ikke vågnede mandag til efter at solen var steget.

"Åh for helvede, det er lyst allerede!", sagde Maloney og tilføjede, at hun ikke kunne tro, hvor sent det var, og at hun skulle på arbejde indenfor mindre end tre timer. "Jeg er så sur på mig selv. Dette vil ødelægge min hele rutine og gøre det umuligt at falde i søvn på en rimelig tid i aften. Jeg vil sikker være stadig oppe indtil kl 21."

Maloney fortsatte sin impromptu pressekonference ved at erkende til journalister, at hun burde have vidst bedre, end at holde sig vågen for at se alle 60 minutter af ”The Chase Celebrity Special” den foregående aften.

Du godeste, sikke et vanvid!!!  Lois og jeg plejer at slukke af for fjernsynet efter de første 10 minutter af dette show – så snart det bliver åbenbart, at aftenens konkurrenterne er et bundt selvoptagede idioter, der aldrig kommer til at vinde nogle alvorlige penge, det må jeg nok sige, hvilket er næsten hver søndag ha ha ha!

09:30 Vi taler på telefon med Sarah – hun indlagde sig selv for et par dage siden til det lokale hospital i Joondalup, en forstad til Perth, Australien, med en mistænkt blindtarmbetændelse, men lægernes diagnose er for tiden diverticulitis i tarmen, som ikke kræver nogen operation, hvilket er beroligende.

I begyndelsen, da hun først blev indlagt, spiste hun ikke noget, fordi lægerne forberedte hende på en mulig operation, men hun har taget regelmæssige doser antibiotiker og smertestillende midler i et par dage nu. Resultatet er, at hun har svært ved at spise normalt – hun har kastet op flere gange.

Hun må forblive på hospitalet mindst endnu to dage – hospitalet vil ikke udskrive hende før mandag, siger hun. Staklen!!!

Sarah i lykkeligere tider – juledag 2018 – sammen med

Francis og deres (dengang) 5,5-årige tvillinger, Lily og Jessie.

Vi taler med dem på Skype

11:00 Vi kører over til Bishops Cleeve for at købe noglte ting på det lokale Coop-supermarked. Bagefter smutter vi ind i byens postkontor for at afsende 2 eksemplerar af ”Peter Rabbit”-børnemagasinet til Lily og Jessie, vores børnebørn i Perth, Australien. Vi kommer hjem.

12:00 Vi spiser frokost på terrassen og bagefter går jeg i seng for at tage en gigantisk eftermidagslur. I mellemtiden skynder Lois sig ind i køkkenet og koger en masse rødbeder – en af mine yndlingsgrøntsager, selvom den er ikke til alles smag, det må jeg indrømme. Yum yum!

15:00 Jeg står op og går i gang med at slå græsplænen i forhaven, også den, der ligger umiddelbart bag huset. Jeg overlader de resterende græsplæner til i morgen. Lois har hængt vasketøjet til tørre over tørresnoret, eller for at være præcis, vores roterende tørrestativ, og hun holder ikke ret meget af, at jeg dækker hendes dejlige rene vasketøj med miniskule grøne græspartikler, hvilket er forståeligt, det må jeg indrømme.

vores roterende tørrestativ i lykkeligere tider

17:00 Jeg graver min spritnye tablet frem – vi har haft så travlt de seneste få dage, at jeg ikke har haft et øjeblik til at prøve den og vænne mig til at bruge Windows 10, og at bruge tablettens irriterende flade tastatur uden at lave for mange typofejl ha ha!

Jeg beslutter på et spritny projekt for at hjælpe mig med at mestre tabletten. Vores U3A danske gruppe er for tiden i gang med at læse en dansk krimiroman, ”Dybt at falde” af Anna Grue, og under vores regelmæssige fjortendagsmøder har gruppens medlemmer tendens til at spekulere konstant om, hvem er morderen, og den slags. Men vi er alle gamle krager, og vi har svært ved at huske, hvad der skete i de tidligere kapitler lol lol !

Jeg beslutter at bruge min splinternye tablet for at skabe et spritny websted, hvor jeg vil skrive notater om hvert kapitel vi læser, et kort resume af hvert kapitel, også en liste over de spor, forfatteren afslører om morderens identitet og lignende.  Jeg kan give gruppemedlemmerne adressen af webstedet, og inviterer dem til at bidrage med deres egne kommentarer og den slags – brilliant!

18:00 Vi spiser aftensmad og bruger resten af aftene på at lytte til radio, et interessant program i serien ”Det sidste ord”.

Lois og jeg er kommet i vane med at høre dette program hver uge, fordi vi ønsker at finde ud af, om nogen i de seneste 1-4 uger døde eller ej (jeg har bemærket, at der i de fleste uger kun sker 4-5 dødsfald, hvilket er lidt trøstende, for at sige mildt). Programmets vært er den charmerende Matthew Bannister.

Christopher Booker, det satyriske magasin Privat Eyes første redaktør (først i 1960’erne), døde desværre for nylig. ”Guardian”-avisen sagde, at Booker forfulgte ikonoklasma op til ekstraordinære og ofte ekscentriske overskud. I sin ugentlige Sunday Telegraph-søjle irriterede og frustrerede han regelmæssigt forskere, klimatologer og læger med sine påstand om, at asbest ikke var farligt, hastighedskameraer forårsagede ulykker, fossile brændstoffer var nødvendige, global opvarmning var en hoax og darwinistisk udvikling blev ikke bevist.

Christopher Booker i Private Eye-magasinets tidligste dage,

sammen med Richard Ingrams (til venstre) og Willie Rushton (til højre)

Men han gav bestemt avisens læsere det, de ønskede at høre : at bureaukrater og socialarbejdere var geskæftige, at EU var et farligt og uansvarligt bureaukrati, og at eksperter konspirerede for at stikke en blå i deres øjne. Og dét, at han gjorde det med fasthed, brio og absolut sikkerhed i sin egen retfærdighed i sammenligning til den officielle tilsyneladende tavshed, forstærkede blot alle deres fordomme om verden. Han nød perversiteten i at tage en modsat holdning, et perspektiv, der også inspirerede sine satirer. Ian Hislop, Private Eyes nuværende redaktør, sagde, at "ingen var hele  tiden enig med Christopher, inklusive Christopher selv".

Sådanne mennesker er meget stimulerende og morsomme, efter min mening, så længe de forbliver dér, hvor de tilhører, med andre ord, ikke i magten – når de kommer til magten bliver de lidt skræmmende for at sige mildt (no names no packdrill ha ha ha).

Christopher var fættere til min tidligere latinsk-lærer, Michael ”Mick” Booker. Mick var min latinsk-lærer, da jeg først i 1960’erne var i højskole i Bristol. Micks timer var en af mine mest nostalgiske minder om min skolegang: han lærte os om fredag eftermiddagen hvordan man skal skrive linjer på latinsk i hexametre og pentametre, og andre poetiske metre. Vores lærebog var Gradus Ad Parnassum - og jeg arvede skolebibliotekets ældgamle eksemplar, udgivet i 1856 og oprindeligt ejede af en eller anden viktoriansk person, der hed E.Stockdale [Hvem ham? – red.].

Lykkelige tider !!!!!

Norwoods, den bygning hvor jeg lærte at skrive latin vers 1962-4:

vores klasseværelse var til højre, ovenpå på 1. sal

et gammelt viktoriansk eksemplar af Gradus Ad Parnassum,

vores latinske poetiske lærebog

22:00 Vi går i seng – zzzzzzzzz!!!!!