Friday August 21st 2020

07:00 I must have made some awkward movement in our bed, because Lois wakes up. Unfortunately she has woken at the crucial moment in her recurring dream, and not for the first time:  the dream where she is on holiday with our friend Gillian and Lois has to cross an unusually wide carriageway to get to Gillian’s car – it’s at least 500 yards wide, Lois says. And then the dream continues with the two women arriving at a B&B, where the owner asks Lois to explain how it was that a Dutchman became our king in 1689, in partnership with his wife Queen Mary: i.e. as the famous joint monarchs William and Mary, and to explain to her what exactly was the pair’s claim to the throne.

Lois gets to the point where the Earl of Clarendon comes into the story, but so far she has never been able to get beyond this sticking point. And I feel awful because by making some stupid movement in the bed I have halted the dream yet again at this crucial point. I must find some way of getting her past this critical phase of the classic version of the explanation in this all-too-common recurring dream, but how?

I can’t think of a good way at the moment – damn!

the Earl of Clarendon – his entry into Lois’s recurring dream

has proved a sticking-point yet again – damn!

Maybe if she can beyond Clarendon’s part in the story, it will stop the dream coming back – but we can only hope! And I don’t think she’s the first history buff to have this problem, that’s for sure!

11:00 I read a bit more of Byock’s book on the Old Norse language – I’ve got to Lesson 2. One of the good things about the book is that it isn’t just teaching the language: it also tells a little of the story of the Vikings in the North Atlantic in the medieval period.

A Viking called Bjarni missed his chance of becoming the first European to discover America. His father and mother had already moved from their home in Iceland to make a new home in Greenland, and Bjarni decided he would join them.

On his way from Iceland, Bjarni unfortunately lost his way in a dense fog, and his ship apparently drifted towards the coast of what today we would call Canada. Sadly he didn’t bother to land there, but instead managed eventually to find his way to his parents’ new home in Greenland.

After this incident Bjarni was roundly criticized inside the wider Viking community, and generally thought of as “a bit of a wuss”.

Bjarni – widely regarded in Viking circles as

“a bit of a wuss” – poor Bjarni !!!!

It was then that Leif Eiriksson decided to do the job properly and settle in the new continent with a bunch of Viking homesteaders – and to add insult to injury he bought Bjarni’s ship off him and sailed to the new lands in that. Bjarni must have felt like a complete wimp.

Poor Bjarni !!!!!

Leif Eiriksson managed to carry off his project, but sadly the settlements didn’t last long term. The Scandinavian population in the New World was basically too small to survive amongst a hostile population of Native Americans, Inuit peoples etc.

the historic moment when Leif Eiriksson spots the new continent

for the first time

19:45 We settle down in the living-room and listen to the radio, the fifth and final part of an interesting drama series about the birth of the “I Love Lucy” sitcom on American TV in 1951, which more or less invented the modern TV sitcom. The series starred Lucille Ball as Lucy, and Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz as her husband, Ricky Ricardo.

It’s been an enjoyable series about an event which at first sight seems an unpromising subject for a radio serial.

Lucille, the star of the show, had become pregnant during the interval between the first and second season, and the producers wanted to feature this event in the second season, sync’ing the actual giving birth as far as possible with the story in the TV show.

At first the sponsor, Philip Morris, head of a cigarette manufacturing company, objected to Lucy announcing that she was pregnant, saying that the word “pregnant” was on the “indecent list”. Desi and Lucille sent him a robustly worded rebuff, and Morris came back with “To whom it may concern: don’t mess with ‘the Cubans’”. And the line “Ricky, I’m pregnant” went into the script.

They had planned to shoot two versions of the episode in which the baby is born, one if it was a boy, and another it was a girl. But in the end they decided this was over the top, and “decided” that as far as the show was concerned, the baby would be a boy. True to form, Lucille “followed the script” like a true pro, and gave birth to a boy by caesarean on the agreed date. The scriptwriters sent her a congratulatory telegram – “Lucille, you can now take the rest of the day off”.

The event aroused incredible interest in the country with ratings of 98.6% of the audience share, and the new of the birth even interrupted the pre-inaugural party at the White House for the next president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, when an announcement about Lucille’s baby boy was made to the assembled guests.

Lucy and Ricky, with little Ricky Jr.

Accepting an Emmy for the show later in the year, Desi paid tribute to his wife, Lucille Ball. He said, “Without her, we’re all in the shrimp business”.

What a crazy world it was back then!!!!!

21:00 It would have been nice for Lois and me to get to bed on this happy ending, but instead we watch a scary programme about the locust plagues in Kenya – bad choice for a pre-bed experience, although we feel desperately sorry for the poor farmers, who are getting their crops stripped bare by the massive swarms, the worst for 70 years apparently.

We hear a lot of scientific stuff at the start of the programme - about the science of locust swarms, the government's anti-locust spraying efforts from aircraft etc. So it's a bit of a shock to suddenly see a bunch of villagers and farmers kneeling down and praying. Yikes!

We see the local pastor giving a service, in which he reminds the local farmers and villagers that locusts were one of the 10 plagues which God visited on the Egyptians by the hand of Moses. 

The local congregation take the message that the plagues were sent because of sins and disobedience, although Lois comments that in the book of Exodus it says it was actually just meant to persuade the Egyptians to let the Israelites go.

And certainly it was a common theme in the words of later Hebrew prophets, the belief that various nasty happenings were the result of sin and disobedience among the Children of Israel, and this kind of idea has certainly been taken up with a vengeance by the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition. It’s still very much alive today, no doubt about that!

22:00 We go to bed with horrible images in our heads, pictures of clouds of millions of big yellow locusts– damn! Let’s hope it doesn’t give us bad dreams – oh dear!  Still, it’s better than dreaming about the Earl of Clarendon, I suspect!

Zzzzzzzzzz!!!!