Monday September 21st 2020

11:00 I make one of my periodic phone-calls to Scilla, our U3A Danish group’s Old Norse expert, to see how she is. She’s still staying with her son Tom in Frome, Somerset, and our next Danish group meeting on Skype is going to take place this coming Thursday. Scilla is hoping that Tom will be her IT support and that she’ll be able to take part. So we’ll have to see.

Yesterday we visited our friends Mari-Ann and Alf: we came away with a bag of grapes cut from their garden grapevine. This morning Lois gets the grapes off the twigs – they weigh 3 lbs or about 1.33kg. She wants to make grape jelly out of them, which first involves cooking them for 5 minutes, mashing them repeatedly with a potato-masher and pouring the result into a jelly-bag for straining – my god! She’ll then finish the process of tomorrow.

Lois showcasing her 3 lbs of grapes in her preserving pan 

13:30 After lunch we speak on the phone to Alison, our elder daughter, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey together with her husband Ed and their 3 children. Ed is taking the day off today to relax and celebrate after completing the deal he helped strike with the Government on behalf of a number of railway and bus companies – the Government has agreed to continue financial support to the companies, as they face the loss of income caused by the pandemic.

Ed, Josie (turning 14 next week), Rosalind (12), Isaac (10) and Alison, on a pub outing last month. 

The family are still trying to find a larger house to move into. They have a buyer for their own house an have now identified a house they would like to buy, not too far away in a rural setting but only 12 minutes from the town centre by car – it has 6 bedrooms, compared to the 4 in their current house. The downside is that the house needs a lot doing to it, but Ed is enthusiastic and already has big ideas about improvements they could make.

One of their motives for moving is to find a house in a quiet street or road. Their current house is on a busy road into town. One of the 2 Danish ex-alley-cats that they brought home from Copenhagen after the family’s 6 years over there, got run over by a car a year or two back, and since then Alison has restricted the surviving cat, Dumbledore, to the confines of the house – not an ideal situation, to put it mildly.

Dumbledore, pictured today in a flowerpot – poor Dumbledore!!!!!

Yes, poor Dumbledore !!!!!! 

Dumbledore and his late brother, whose name we can’t remember were born to an alley-cat that lived in the back yard of Books & Company, an English bookshop in Hellerup, Copenhagen. Alison and the children were frequent customers at the shop and offered to adopt the two kittens to save them from perhaps being put down by the authorities.

Books & Company in Hellerup, Copenhagen, where Dumbledore was born. 

Poor Dumbledore (again) !!!!!

16:00 Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, sends me a text. One of her two 7-year-old twins, Jessie has won her year’s Spelling Bee today – bless her little cotton socks!

Jessie (left), the winner, with the two runners-up in her year's Spelling Bee

20:00 Lois is too tired tonight to take part in her sect’s weekly Bible Seminar on zoom, so we settle down to watch some TV, our two favourite quizzes: Only Connect, where you have to find connections between 4 seemingly unconnected things,  and “University Challenge”, the student quiz.

Lois triumphs in “Only Connect”, by deciphering this quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

And Lois and I get 5 questions right in “University Challenge” that the students strike out on: 

1.      ‘In “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast”, the collection of mesmeric optical illusions is pleasingly perplexing.’ These words refer to Lord’s illustrations for which book, published in 1871?

Students: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Colin and Lois: Alice Through the Looking-Glass

2.       Leofric, who died in 1057, held which Anglo-Saxon earldom?

Students: Kent

Colin and Lois: Mercia.

3.      “She was a simpleton. Not even the mention of sage and onions made her suspicious.” Of which Beatrix Potter character were these words written?

Students: Tabitha Twitchit

Colin and Lois: Jemima Puddleduck

4.      “The Silver of the Mine”, “The Isabels”, and “The Lighthouse” are the three parts of which novel by Joseph Conrad?

Students:  Lord Jim.

Colin and Lois: Nostromo

5.      What is the Italian title of an opera featuring the courtesan Violetta Valery as its title character?

Students:  Aida [????? Surely not! – Ed]

Colin and Lois: La Traviata

So all in all, not a bad result for us, to put  it mildly! 

At the gong, however, we see that it hasn't been such a good evening for the Royal Academy of Music, however.

Poor Royal Academy of Music !!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed– zzzzzzzzz!!!!!