This week’s mistake – I realize that when we were online yesterday
I accidentally ordered 6 packs of 6 pork
& black cracked pepper sausages, weighing altogether about 7 lbs. Of course
what I really wanted was just one
pack of six sausages. Oh dear!
Waghornes, the local butcher, who bring us
7 lbs of sausages this morning – yikes!!!!
Still, not too much of a problem for us, because both Lois and I
are crazy about sausages, and we have also got our daughter Alison, plus Ed and
their 3 children, visiting us next weekend. But what madness!!! Luckily the 6
packs of sausages are just in paper bags and not in hard containers, and so
they can easily be slipped inside the cracks and crevices of our freezer
drawers – thank goodness for that!
11:00 I read another chapter of Byock’s book on “Viking Language”,
the start of an interesting poem about Thor and his famous hammer, the
Mjollnir.
I translate this opening verse of the poem as follows:
Thor was
feeling very annoyed when he woke up - his hammer was missing.
His beard
started to shake. His hair started to shake.
He immediately
checked all his pockets.
I sympathize with Thor – it is
annoying when something you use a lot goes missing, and I think Thor’s hammer
was his must-have tool. And in those days people didn’t have tool-belts, so I
suppose they had to keep their most essential tools in their pockets, although I
wouldn’t have wanted to go to bed with a hammer in my pajama pocket sticking
into me, to be perfectly honest.
But what a crazy world they lived in in those days!!!!
Thor with his trademark hammer (now missing)
14:00 Lois rushes into the kitchen to make 10 lbs of plum chutney,
using 2 lbs of onions, and about 5 lbs of our own home-grown black plums
(reduced to about 4 lbs after they’ve been stoned).
Lois’s plum chutney recipe
14:15 Meanwhile I go to bed and take a gigantic afternoon nap.
When I wake up I stay in bed and listen to an interesting and amusing radio programme
telling me everything I’ve ever wanted to know about Stonehenge, plus a bit
more, and there are a lot of laughs along the way.
A long long time ago, when I was at school, they used to teach us
about the mysterious “Beaker People” who invaded the British Isles in the 3rd
century BC and brought all sorts of new-fangled beakers with them – not plastic,
just ceramic I think. But these beakers were the latest thing and everybody
wanted them, and respected the waves of
incoming Beaker people for their obviously superior taste and manufacturing
capabilities.
Then in the 1970’s or thereabouts a lot of clever-clever
historians decided that this idea was a load of rubbish – there was no such
thing as “Beaker people” invading Britain. It was just that we imported a lot
of beakers because they were the latest thing from the Continent, and we otherwise
carried on as normal.
This new theory reigned for decades, and was asserted very very
confidently by all the experts. But I hear this afternoon, that historians have
now gone back to embracing the earlier idea – of real, flesh-and-blood “Beaker
People” coming across the Channel and replacing the existing British culture. We
know this time that this is the true explanation thanks to DNA studies. DNA
rules OK !!!!
British DNA quickly became “beakerized”, with our previous British
DNA being swamped pretty much out of existence – and it all happened so quickly
that historians think it was probably due to “love, not war”, ie interbreeding,
not bloody conquest. My god, what a crazy world we live in !!!!
some typical “Beaker people”
Also I find out in this programme that the Stone Age in the
British Isles lasted 500 years longer than on the Continent – it took 500 years
or so for us to accept the new-fangled metals that were in widespread use all
over the rest of Europe.
What’s wrong with us in Britain. What a crazy country we live in
!!!!
16:00 I get up and Lois is still in the kitchen working on the 10
lbs of chutney. And I can tell by the smell in the kitchen that it’s going to
be yummy!!!!
remains of the the 6 onions (about 2 lbs) that Lois peeled
the mixture on the stove – yum yum!
20:00 We settle down in the living-room and watch a bit of TV, the
first part in a new series on “The African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power”,
with this first episode concentrating on Ethiopia.
An interesting programme, and Lois and I learn a lot we did not
know about the history of Ethiopia and of its art world through the centuries.
Who knew, for example, that Emperor Haile Selassie fled to England
in the 1930’s after Mussolini’s forces invaded his kingdom, living first in the
very white suburb of Wimbledon, South London, and then in Bath, Somerset? [I expect a lot of people knew that actually!
– Ed].
a statue of Emperor Haile Selassie in Wimbledon
woodland
An interesting theme throughout the programme is a celebration of
Ethiopia’s position as more or less the only country in Africa to have escaped colonial rule, and of its role of acting as a beacon of hope to the other
African countries suffering under domination by one or other of the European
powers.
We hear also an interesting new perspective on the drought and
famine that hit Ethiopia during the 1980’s. In the West we tend to think immediately
of Bob Geldof, and his very Anglo-American themed charity concerts in Britain
and the US. Presenter Afua Hirsch says the event cemented Africa in Western
minds as a place that would remain in a pretty parlous state if it
were not for the West.
Bob Geldof visiting Ethiopia during the
1980’s famine
Ethiopian artists interviewed in the programme, by contrast,
stressed what the Ethiopians did to help each other in this difficult period,
an angle which they say is not generally acknowledged in the wider world.
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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