Thursday August 20th 2020

A sunny day at last – and Lois and I take the car out for a “spin” to Winchcombe and back (16 miles), so that the battery continues to not give out. But the fuel tank is only one quarter full now, so the scary petrol-station-visit is looming on the horizon – we haven’t filled up for about 3 months. Yikes!!!

we take the car out for a "spin" to keep the battery going

our local petrol station, which we’ve been avoiding for 3 months –

oh dear, what will they say to us when we finally stop by???!!!!

While we are out the local pharmacy delivers my first ever supply of statins, supposedly for “high cholesterol”, even though my count is only 5.5, which is very marginal in my view. Let’s hope I don’t suffer from any side-effects. At least I’ll now be in step with Lois, who has been taking statins for a few years now. So we can take our pills in unison before we climb into bed, and we can jog each other’s memories – good grief!!!

“couples that take pills together

have thrills together”  - or do they???

This morning I rang Scilla, the leader of our local U3A Old Norse group, who’s staying with her son at Frome, Somerset, but she wasn’t available for some reason and I had to leave a message.

Our local Old Norse group has actually been out of action since the start of the lockdown, and it occurs to me that the lockdown is a good chance for me to actually learn a bit of Old Norse. Lois and I know virtually no Old Norse, but we manage to scrape by at group meetings, reading out bits of the old Icelandic sagas and having a jolly good guess at translating, and doing so not-completely incorrectly, which is nice.

A lot of Old Norse words are vaguely similar to English or to Danish, and Danish is a language Lois and I acquired a smattering of during the time when our daughter Alison and her family were living in Copenhagen (2012-2018).

Also there are pictures in my version of the saga text, which gives us some useful clues about what’s going on in the story. And usual we know in any case, that probably somebody’s getting killed with a spear, or somebody’s annoying their neighbours by chopping down trees on their neighbour’s land, or stealing one of the neighbour’s horses – you’ll know the sort of thing.

I get out my copy of Byock’s book on “Viking Language”, which I bought a couple of years ago, but which I have never really studied.

Jesse Byock and his book

I have a look at the first chapter. Byock begins with a map showing how the Vikings arrived in Iceland, Greenland and N. America, sailing from present-day Norway, Denmark, Britain and Ireland.

how the Norse got to Iceland, Greenland and N. America

Old Norse vocabulary is a daunting prospect to fully master, but Byock has had the good idea of teaching us gradually, starting with the 50 most common nouns.

The 50 most common nouns seen in the Icelandic sagas

It’s no surprise that in the Top Fifty we see the word for “slaying” – “víg”, as well as “sword” – “sverð”, “weapon” – “vápn”, and “spear” – spjót. What a crazy world they lived in in those days!!!

another slaying – and the start of another typical day in Brennu-Njal’s saga,

the Old Icelandic saga that our group is reading.

Some of the words in the Top Fifty are obviously similar to the English equivalent, and others just need a bit of thought. The word for “boy” - “sveinn” – is related to the old English word, “swain”, for example, which in England in the 12^th century originally came to mean specifically “a young boy attendant upon a knight” – simples !!!!

19:45 We listen to the radio, the fourth part of of an interesting drama series about the birth of the “I Love Lucy” sitcom on American TV.

I listened to the third part yesterday, and the situation they’ve arrived at so far seems to be that one of the US networks, CBS, is interested in having a TV show based around Desi and Lucille, and they have settled on the theme that Desi will play a showbizzy band leader (“Ricky Ricardo”) – ie same as his real life role, which was a band leader – while Lucille will be the usual 1950’s scatter-brained “ordinary” housewife, with ordinary concerns.

Tonight’s episode features the premiere of the show on CBS TV. Things don’t look good to start with, because the cigarette manufacturer who’s sponsoring the show rings up the network to compliment them on the way they’ve presented his cigarette product, but then he starts to complain about “all the garbage between the commercials”, ie the actual sitcom. Oh dear, not a good start!

The sponsor, however, is persuaded to wait for the show’s ratings to be published, and when it turns out it was in the Top Ten most-watched shows, he is mollified. Soon the show is number 1 in the ratings and its future is secure.

A second season is now guaranteed, but after the first season ends Lucille finds that she is pregnant again. The network is horrified – they say they can’t show a pregnant Lucy in the second season “because children all over the country will start to ask questions”. The producer retorts that they are in the middle of a baby boom, and that half the children in the country will have pregnant mothers or will have friends who have pregnant mothers.

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

21:00 We turn off the radio and see a little tv, the third part of Michael  Portillo’s interesting series “Great Continental Railway Journeys”.

Tonight we see Michael travelling through Germany, carrying his guidebook for the series, “Bradshaw’s Comntinental Handbook”, dated 1936. We see him travel from Berlin through Potsdam, Weimare and Nuremberg, to Stuttgart.

Hitler had been in power since 1933 – chosen apparently not for being a strong man, says Portillo, but for being a “weak man”, of the type that the other Conservative leaders thought they could “control” ha! What madness!

It’s interesting, however, that three years later, in 1936, the year of Portillo’s guidebook, Germany was still looked on as a big tourist destination, something the guidebook makes clear – it has 37 pages dedicated to the attractions of Germany. And what’s more, the Nazi regime was very keen to attract foreign tourists, and to impress them as much as possible, while they were in the country.

Portillo explains that, for a start, 8 million Americans had German parents and/or grandparents in 1918. He says also, that many better-off British people who had the means to travel on the European continent, felt a historic kinship with the Germans. Also, unlike France, Germany itself had suffered no damage to its towns as the result of the First World War.

You would think that foreign tourists would have been put off by some of the reports of the atrocities that, by 1936, had already been committed by the Nazi authorities. But Portillo reminds us that there was a level of support for the Nazis in Britain and admiration for their achievements, and the atrocities weren’t always perhaps given the publicity that they deserved, despite the conscientious efforts of British journalists. The editor of the London Times, for instance, was a known sympathiser with the Nazi regime, apparently, which Lois and I did not know, and some reports from the paper's journalists in Germany were censored or watered down before they appeared in the paper.

Witness also the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII, who was happy to visit Germany with Wallis Simpson: the Germans were willing to call Wallis “Your Royal Highness” – something which certainly wasn’t ever going to happen in Britain. Oh dear!

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!