11:00 This morning I at last manage to fill in my questionnaire for the local NHS physiotherapy unit, so they can advise me on an exercise regime – hurrah! Lois reads it through for me, and okays it.
13:00 After lunch, a quick hour in bed : a message comes in on my smartphone to say that Donald Trump has “refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power”. I recall that back in 2016, my former American work-colleague, Jo-Ann, was already referring to him as “King Donald I” – how farsighted of her!
Luckily, a bit later on, a further, more reassuring message comes in from the New Yorker: apparently Amazon Prime has offered to ship Donald out, if necessary, free of charge inside 24 hours. So I don’t think we need worry.
But let’s hope, for Donald’s sake, that the box earmarked for him (right) has breathing holes. The Amazon packages Lois and I take delivery of usually have plenty of bubble wrap and other ballast, so it should be a comfortable journey for the poor guy. Lois wonders if Prime could send a drone in to pick him up perhaps?
It's none of our business really - we're not Americans, and we don't have a vote there. And we promise to respect the wishes of the majority in November, whatever those wishes may be. It's just reassuring to know that Amazon will be there to make things go more efficiently and more quickly, as they always do.
It's true that Lois and I have always resisted Amazon’s attempts to get us to sign up to Amazon Prime ourselves – we don’t want to watch their TV channel, because it seems to be mostly showing films of the type we’re not really interested in. And we can’t make up our minds whether the cheaper deliveries are worth it for us or not – we ought to do a proper study, but we can’t bring ourselves to do all the math – we’re becoming so lazy!
That doesn’t mean we haven’t a couple of times signed up to Prime by mistake – when checking out on some product and clicking on the wrong part of the screen, or somesuch nonsense. But each time we’ve cancelled our membership immediately afterwards – we don’t like to be hustled into these things.
14:30 We sit down in front of the laptop to take part in our U3A Danish group’s fortnightly meeting on Skype.
It’s fun to chat to our fellow group-members and especially to Jeanette, our only genuine Danish member. However, Lois and I always feel completely drained by the end of the (nearly) 2-hour session, with aching backs and shoulders, from sitting on straight-back dining-room chairs, holding our faces near to the laptop's microphone and speaker, and peering down at our copies of the Danish crime novel we're reading from.
We have to concentrate really hard during the session because the Skype authorities periodically transmit horrible background noises – noises a bit like a vacuum cleaner or dentist’s drill – and we’re not sure why. Perhaps we requested these background noises by mistake when we set the meeting up: it’s difficult to be sure whether you check all the right boxes – a “Do you want us to pass on some of our horrible noises?” box, for instance. Who knows?
During the Skype meeting we read a bit more of our Danish crime novel with its 3 central characters, (1) Dan Dan, the advertising man and amateur sleuth, (2) Flemming the police detective, and (3) Marianne, the Danish doctor who both men are in love with, even though she’s memorably described as being “a bit like a Shetland pony”.
I’ve always thought that “Shetland pony” women tend to be a bit high-maintenance in a crazy sort of way: with small heads, widely spaced eyes and small but alert ears. They tend to have short muscular necks, a compact stocky body, and short but strong legs. However, each to their own, and she obviously has that certain something that both Dan and Flemming repond to in some crazy way - what madness!
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the first programme in a new series of Mary Beard’s “Inside Culture” show.
Mary goes to Stonehenge and interviews Turner-prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, who some years ago created a full-scale inflatable model of Stonehenge so that schoolchildren to play on and around it without the fear of touching something they weren’t supposed to touch, and so on. Luckily it didn’t get punctured, which was nice – I expect he made it pretty hard-wearing.
We were touched by Mary’s comment that it wasn’t the archaeology of the place that interested her, as much as the fact that it had “always” been here – it’s a link between us who live in the Britain of 2020 and all those who’ve come before us in these islands, going back 5000 years: prehistoric people might not all have been able to travel to see it but they all probably knew about it, whatever it was called in those days. And for the first few centuries at least people would also have known just exactly what the monument was for, which must have been nice!
Mary recalls that the monument was drawn by William Blake (1757-1827), for instance. Stonehenge also plays a major part in Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” (1891), because the monument was where Tess spent her last night before being taken away to be tried and executed.
I remind Lois that Stonehenge also features in John of Trevisa’s “The Marvels of Britain”, a 14th century work we’ve been studying in Lynda’s U3A Middle English group
It’s interesting in John of Trevisa’s writings to see what a
puzzle the Stonehenge monument was to people in medieval times – they didn’t
have any means of telling how old prehistoric relics were. And because
Stonehenge was so old by then, there was of course no oral tradition handed
down from generation to generation, that might have explained its existence.
Or in modern English: “in Britain are many wonders. Nevertheless
four are the most wonderful. The first is at Peaktown. There blows so strong a
wind out of the chinks of the earth that it casts up again clothes that people
cast in. The second is at Stonehenge, by Salisbury. There great stones and
wondrously huge, are erected on high, as if they were gates, so that there seem
to be gates set on other gates. Nevertheless it is not clearly known or
understood how and why they are so erected and wonderfully suspended….”
The medieval period’s main sources for history were the Bible and the classical writings from Ancient Greece and Rome. And John of Trevisa also translated a history of the world, starting from the Creation, as described in the Bible, and telling the main events that had occurred up until the 14th century. It’s evident that with such sources as they had, the concept of the Stonehenge monument must have seemed totally inexplicable to them.
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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