Friday October 30th 2020

08:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower and get ready downstairs for 9 am, in case Waghorne's, the local butcher's shop delivers our meat, cheese, pies and bread etc for next week. They actually come about 11 am, so that's all right.

11:00 We have a coffee and I look at the Danish news media on my smartphone. I see that the cinema in Gentofte, a North Copenhagen suburb, where our daughter Alison and her family lived for 6 years (2012-2018), will be playing host to the country's former Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen. The ex-PM will be giving a talk next Monday prior to the showing of a (presumably English-language) film entitled "Unfit: the Psychology of Donald Trump".

The local news media reports the forthcoming event as follows [my translation] : The former Prime Minister will speak, before the film is shown, about his meeting with Trump. Former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen is visiting Gentofte Cinema because he is one of the few Danes who has met Donald Trump. He will talk about what it was like to get behind the scenes at the White House and meet the world's most powerful man, the President of the United States. And perhaps answer the big question: how was the president's handshake?

After Lars Løkke Rasmussen's introduction, the cinema will be showing a new film about Donald Trump, 'Unfit - The Psychology of Donald Trump'.

The film puts Donald Trump on the psychiatrist's couch, so to speak. A number of highly respected psychologists are set to diagnose the US president - and the result is, unsurprisingly, rather frightening.

According to the film's professional panel, Trump suffers from a wide range of mental illnesses, including malignant narcissism - a syndrome characterized by a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), characterized by an excessive sense of personal greatness and an excessive urge to gain personal admiration.

And all this is combined with antisocial and paranoid traits, absence of conscience and empathy as well as a strong psychological need for power.

Gentofte Cinema is showing the original version of the film without Danish subtitles.

Yikes! Yes, and Løkke can certainly also tell them what Donald's handshake is like. This reminds me that I myself have shaken Løkke's hand, so I've shaken the hand that shook Donald's hand. 

What a small world this is haha!!!! 

Flashback to June 2014: Løkke preparing to shake us by the hand,

as we sat eating lunch in the middle of Copenhagen!

16:00 Lois and I settle down on the sofa, and have our Earl Grey tea and home-made Weet-bix slices. 

We are starting to get excited about Tuesday's Presidential election - the prospects for it seem to make our elections in the UK look so boring and flat by comparison, that's for sure! 

It's not just the question of Trump's astonishing psychological make-up - whether unfit, as the film in Gentofte suggests, or not - and not just his apparently obvious moral defects and untruths, but also his power-base, which includes all those religious people who don't seem to mind about his apparent defects and his untruths, plus all the controversy and uncertainties about postal voting or the threat of votes being disallowed or not counted, plus the threat of civil unrest and all the extremist groups hanging around waiting to stick their oar in, and the possible lengthy legal challenges, the question of whether the opinion polls are accurate or whether some Trump voters are too shy to admit their intentions, plus the doubts about whether Trump will hand over power peacefully or not, and finally which parties will be in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate - my god, what an enormous cliff-hanger! 

Lois and I don't know that much about the subject, we have to confess - we just know what we have read in the media here, which is possibly not always accurate, we have no way of knowing. But how exciting! Basically, what's not to like???!!!

Next week's Radio Times has a cover reflecting next week's election. The Spitting Image programme is doing a special on the election at the weekend - no surprise there.

Next week's Radio Times cover showcases Spitting Image's Biden-puppet and Trump-puppet

Inside the magazine, Jon Sopel tries to explain what we Brits don't really understand - why Trump is so popular in so many areas of the US, especially in the middle bits, and why so many voters in those areas felt they were being ignored for years by a godless, liberal, self-serving East Coast political class; ignored, that is, until Trump came along and recognised these downtrodden voters' potential as a voter-base for himself - my god!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, tonight's edition of Autumnwatch, in which a team of presenters introduce live and live-ish pictures of British wildlife using a network of hidden cameras from around the country.

Squirrels - that's the bit of the programme Lois and I become fascinated by! You pretty much only ever see grey squirrels in England and Wales: the red ones have largely gone away, and are now mostly confined to other parts of the British Isles, e.g. Scotland and Ireland. 

The grey squirrels, however, are newcomers - they have only been here since the 19th century when the Victorians first introduced them from North America. Since then the grey ones have mostly eradicated the indigenous red squirrels in England and Wales, simply by out-competing them for the rapidly decreasing habitat areas and food sources.

Michaela demonstrates the grey areas, where only grey squirrels are found (i.e most of England and Wales), the red areas where only red squirrels are found, the yellow areas, where both types are found, and the green areas (the Atlantic fringe) where no squirrels are found

However, researchers have recently discovered a possible way to get back more of a balance between the 2 types of squirrel. They've discovered that pine martens, which prey on squirrels, are mostly only successful at reducing grey squirrel numbers: this is because Britain's remaining indigenous red squirrels have, over eons of time, built up an instinctive fear of pine martens, and they avoid areas where they can smell pine marten scent. Whereas the North American grey squirrels, which have only been in the country for the last 150 years, still haven't developed an instinctive fear of the pine marten, and easily fall prey to it.

So we need more pine martens down here in the South - can you get those on Amazon perhaps??? [No you can't - Ed]

Who knew that it takes such a long time for a species to become instinctively wary of a threat from a predator? Hundreds, or thousands of years maybe? Or millions? Yikes!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!