10:00 Lois and I run a local U3A Danish group, and we're currently meeting on Skype every 2 weeks. Jeanette, the group's only genuine Danish member recently had a long weekend in London with her partner and they took a side-trip to Folkestone, a town I have some early memories of: my mother used to take me there frequently on the bus, when I was a toddler - we lived nearby, just outside Dover.
On her trip last weekend, Jeanette discovered a recently erected statue on the cliffs there that echoes the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen.
Jeanette, our group's only genuine Danish member
The model for the statue was a Folkestone resident. Some may claim that, while undoubtedly sexy, the Folkestone resident is not as sexy as the Mermaid, but Lois and I think her position high up on the cliffs is more dramatic than the Mermaid's, no doubt about that - although it's a pity there's a nasty, charmless, modern building just behind it - what madness!!!!
Lois and I took a boat tour of Copenhagen harbour with our elder daughter Alison and her family one freezing cold day in February 2013 on our first visit to Denmark, and we were surprised that the Mermaid was much smaller than we expected.
us, waiting to start the boat tour, with Rosalind, one of our grandchildren
12:00 Lois and I sometimes wonder why we achieve so little each day, and today's a case in point. We realise it's coming up to lunchtime and what have we done?
After breakfast, a cup of tea, and our daily Danish lesson on the sofa (more fun than it sounds!), it's taken us a couple of hours to do the following:
(1) Finish our tea
(2) get on the computer and make out an online supermarket order to Iceland Supermarkets; and
(3) work out the postage and print off mailing labels for 2 parcels we want to send to Sarah, our younger daughter in Perth, Australia - the parcels contain books for Sarah and Francis's 7-year-old twins: actually books that once belonged to Sarah herself.
(4) take delivery of a load of frozen fish from Nick the Fish Man, who comes up every couple of weeks from Bristol
(5) compile a shopping list and put in a phone order for next week's groceries from Budgens, the local convenience store;
And already it's lunchtime!
We've already fitted in a couple of hot drinks: to keep our daily liquid intake up we have a cup of tea together at about 9 am, a coffee at about 11 am, and then there'll be two more teas, at 1 pm and 4 pm, and an after-dinner drink at 7 pm.
No wonder the days slip by - oh dear!
our shopping list for Budgens - a complex job to put together without forgetting anything, my god!
We haven't ordered any meat to any extent this morning - we'll get that delivered by the local butcher's shop next week.
Our requirements can be seen to be quite unlike those of prehistoric times, when all shopping lists so far known about have been found to contain little else other than meat (source: Onion News).
Archaeologists recently discovered a crudely carved shopping list - containing lots of meat requirements but little in the way of salad fixings. Interestingly the list dates from a period one million years before man invented cheese fries, which I remember came as a bit of a surprise at the time of its discovery.
What a crazy world they lived in in those days!!!
21:00 We watch some TV, an episode of the offbeat but fascinating "Urban Myths" series: tonight, a dramatization of the staging of an off-Broadway play "Driftwood" in 1959, in which Joan Rivers and a very young Barbara Streisand appeared.
Joan Rivers, a comedienne in her late 20's, had decided she wanted to try being a straight actress, and so she muscled her way into taking a part in this off-Broadway play, insisting on taking the lead role, even though it had originally been written for a man. The snag was that, at the climax of the play, the script called for her to kiss the 16-year-old Barbara Streisand, who was at that time just starting out on her chosen career as an actress.
Throughout the rehearsals, however, Joan refused the director's order to rehearse the kiss with Barbara. And the previously submissive Barbara noted, and was impressed by, Joan's refusal to be browbeaten. As the opening night drew near, the director suggested that he rehearsed the kiss with Barbara in Joan's place, but Barbara now felt she had the courage to turn him down - the #metoo# moment, I guess.
The tension was mounting as the opening night arrived, and Lois and I are sitting here expecting any moment to see one hell of an unrehearsed kiss between the two women, but instead the programme focuses for several minutes on the small audience's horrified (and/or amused) reaction while the kiss is going on, an approach which works well, we think.
The play was being staged in a cold, draughty hall at the top of a flight of stairs. The audience consisted solely of Barbara's parents until about 5 minutes before the play started, when a bunch of mainly Chinese people, who Barbara used to babysit for, rushed in - it's not clear that they could understand English however - what madness!!!!
The play closed after 5 weeks, but it had long-term consequences for Barbara - Joan liked Barbara's singing voice and convinced her to take up a singing career. The experience also taught Barbara never again to kowtow to directors. And Joan gave up her attempts to become an actress at some point and started on a vastly more successful career as a talk-show host, and the rest is history.
A bit of an odd programme, we think, but a lot of fun. What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!
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