Monday August 10th 2020

10:00 I ring Scilla, a member of mine and Lois’s U3A Danish group, also leader of the U3A Old Norse (Old Icelandic) group that Lois and I belong to. She’s staying with her son in Frome at the moment, so won’t be in Cheltenham on Thursday, the day on which we planned to hold our first Danish group meeting since the start of lockdown – planned to take place on our patio, because of lockdown rules.

Unfortunately however I now have to tell Scilla that the weather forecast for Thursday afternoon is horrendous, with thunderstorms galore. I add that I’m going to be trying to get the meeting transferred to Skype, which we haven’t used before for Danish.

Then I tell Scilla the game-changing news just revealed today by the influential American news website, Onion News: the bombshell discovery that a baby born to American parents has just been found to be speaking “textbook Icelandic”,  even though its speeches, songs and saga-narrations have hitherto been dismissed by its parents as incoherent babbling.

“Textbook Icelandic” turns up in the most unexpected places – even in alien spaceships, according to the 2008 drama-documentary “The Outlander” which I watched a few months ago. An alien spacecraft with an on-board rogue dragon/monster, “Morwen”, crash-landed in Norway in the 8^th century AD, as the film reveals.

After the crash the dragon ran off and disappeared. The Icelandic-speaking pilot got out of the spacecraft unharmed, and his vessel’s Icelandic-speaking computer then connected itself to the man’s brain. It taught him how to speak English in about 30 seconds – that’s the kind of language training I like haha!

The pilot turned out to need English in the shooting of the film, and not the 8^th century Norwegian one might have expected. This seems hard to swallow, but then most of the film’s actors were either British or American, so it saved the time, money and trouble of teaching them Old Norwegian:  it all made sense financially, at least, no doubt about that!

11:00 Lois wants to drive over and see our friend Fran, to give her some of our home-grown greengages, and collect the next novel in the series Fran is feeding her with: Jan Karon’s series about the fictional American town of Mitford.

Flashback to June 2019:

Fran (left) and Lois: we admire Fran’s “wild” meadow garden

complete with the statutory poppies

Unfortunately, our little outing has to be cancelled, after I sustain a non-serious injury, the kind of injury for which the peak age of sufferers is about 60 years younger than me – damn, I knew I should have got that one over with when I was younger!  Too late now – oh dear! Still, all is well now, and it could have been worse.

I’m currently trying to get sponsorship for my injury, like what’s-his-name from the Milwaukee Brewers, who eventually got backing from Bank of America (source: Onion News again).

19:30 Lois goes into the dining room to take part in her sect’s weekly bible class on zoom. I settle down in the living room to watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in the student quiz series University Challenge.

I find I can answer about 1 question in every 5, and I answer 3 questions that the students get wrong or are stumped over, so not too bad. Lois joins me with 10 minutes to go and answers a basic Bronte question that baffles the students, so a good evening for us both.

1.      The Galileo space mission launched in 1989 has provided the only visual evidence so far of a comet colliding with a planet. Which planet?  (Students: “Saturn” ; Colin: “Jupiter”)

2.      The larger part of the Lesser Sunda Islands lies in which island country? (Students: “Sri Lanka”; Colin “Indonesia”.

3.      Which capital city is traversed from south to north by the Almendares River, which enters the Straits of Florida, west of the bay on which the city stands? (Students: “Caracas”; Colin “Havana”

4.      In which Bronte novel do we see the minor characters Adele Varens, Mr Brocklehurst, Miss Scratcherd and St John Rivers? (Students: “Wuthering Heights”; Lois – “Jane Eyre”.

A good enough result for us – we feel somehow confirmed as non-dementia sufferers, which is nice.

Reading get “creamed” by the way  – final score: Reading 50, Birkbeck 295.

Poor Reading !!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!!