Wednesday September 9th 2020

07:00 Lois and I get up early again to unlock the garage and the side-gate for the painters. Unfortunately it looks like they’ll be with us till at least Friday – damn!

09:30 I go for a walk on the local football field. My doctor prescribed statins for me last month, and I have reported some apparent side effects – joint and muscle pain: damn (again)! But the doctor wants me to continue taking the statins for another week, while keeping a diary of my experiences (not too verbose or flowery, he says haha!). Then after that I can stop taking statins for 2-4 weeks, and continue to keep a diary, and then report back. What a nuisance!

The road leading to the field is being resurfaced this week, so it’s fairly quiet as I stroll down.  I follow a jogger woman into the field. I take a walk round the running track and I make one circuit while the jogging woman does about 6 circuits, so passing me 6 times (at a social distance!). Oh dear! Still she is about 50 years younger than me (if not more!).

the road to the local football field,

which is being resurfaced this week

the jogger woman I follow into the field:

she runs 6 times as fast as I walk – oh  dear!

The local football field is a favourite haunt of early-morning joggers, also early-morning dog-walkers. As far as I know, none of them has yet found a dead body during their runs, but it’s probably just a question of time. It was a teenage dog-walker, Benedikte, who found the latest dead body in the Danish crime novel, “The Further You Fall", that is our U3A Danish group’s current project. 

Of course Benedikte was questioned extensively by police, before being offered counselling, but she turned the offer down, on the grounds that her mother was a psychologist, which must be useful if you’re going to develop a habit of early-morning dog-walking, no doubt about that!

“The Further You Fall” –  the English title of Anna Grue’s Danish 

crime novel, which is our U3A Danish group’s current project

In the US, joggers have had enough of discovering dead bodies and a couple of spokesmen for the American jogging community recently held a press conference to protest about their heavy workload (source: the influential news website, Onion News).

CHICAGO—Citing the sobering statistic that over 10,000 of the 12,800 slayings in the United States in 2006 were reported by joggers, a national coalition of fitness enthusiasts called upon government officials Tuesday to impose measures that would reduce the likelihood of runners discovering lifeless bodies.

"We joggers have lives outside of finding violent-crime victims," said jogger Elizabeth Riccardi, who recently stumbled upon the remains of a double-pickax homicide  while jogging around the Bartlett Reservoir near Scottsdale. "We're willing to cooperate with law enforcement, but we don't all have the time to be consoled with a blanket and a cup of coffee while some cop asks us the same tedious questions."

Riccardi said that some joggers have become so fed up with the dead-body encounters that they've been forced to run only on busy sidewalks, to the chagrin of pedestrians.

"I don't run through Lincoln Park after 6 p.m. anymore, I steer clear of that alleyway by the liquor store, and I definitely do not jog by the river at all," Chicago resident Chaz Montgomery said. "But, without fail, every few months I make another gruesome, routine-disrupting discovery."

"I just want a good cardiovascular workout," Montgomery added. "I never asked for this, not during an intense incline push or even a slow cooldown."

What a crazy world we live in!!!!   Don’t jog and don’t keep a dog, is the message I take from all this. Cats do their early morning walks by themselves, so they are much lower maintenance, that’s for sure!

16:00 After an afternoon nap we go to our neighbour Frances’s house to water her greenhouse, vegetables and pot plants, as she is away for a couple of days. Along the way we take a sneak peek at the horrible new houses that are being built next door to Frances’s property. Ugh!!!!

We water our neighbour Frances’s garden and take a

sneak peek at the horrible modern houses being built just feet away.Ugh!!!!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to participate in her sect’s weekly Bible Class. When she emerges we watch an edition of Jon Richardson’s “Ultimate Worrier” series.

This programme tries to address concerns that our mobile phones know us better than our famiy and friends do, but it certainly doesn’t manage to allay any such fears – yikes! Don’t get a smart TV, fridge, toaster or anything else smart, seems to be the verdict, because these devices are very easy for outsiders to hack  into apparently.

The apps we use certainly know a lot about us. A lot of joggers and dog-walkers use “Strava” to log their routes, so Strava know all the routes taken by all the joggers and dog-walkers in the world. They recently published some of these on the web, including a couple of interesting ones run by some Canadian guy.

What a lot of planning must have gone into those routes! What madness!

Let’s hope he didn’t find any dead bodies on either of these runs – the possible unforeseen extra journeys to report to a police investigation unit would have played havoc with his artwork, no doubt about that.

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzz!!!!