11:00 I ring Scilla, our U3A Danish group’s Old Norse and general Viking expert. She didn’t appear for the group’s Skype meeting yesterday afternoon, and I want to check that she’s ok. She’s temporarily abandoned her flat in Cheltenham, and is now staying with her daughter just outside Canterbury. She says she’s ok, but she couldn’t join us yesterday on Skype because her current IT support person, a.k.a. her daughter’s son, couldn’t get time off to be there, so she had to pass on it. She’ll try again next time.
Scilla knows a lot more about Viking myths and legends than about I.T. which is fair enough, particularly at her age. But it’s a mistake, however, to assume that the Vikings themselves had no knowledge of computers: this is a common misconception, a trap which many have fallen into.
Many Vikings in fact used computers as an aid to their work in the rape and pillage "sector", according to the 2008 movie drama “The Outlander” which I watched a few months ago.
In the movie, an alien spacecraft with an on-board rogue dragon/monster, “Morwen”, crash-landed in Norway in the 8th century AD – the pilot got out of the spacecraft unharmed. His vessel’s computer, which communicated with the pilot in Old Norse, then connected itself to the man’s brain and taught him how to speak English in about 30 seconds – that’s the kind of language training I like haha!
The pilot turned out to need English to speak to the local population, and not the 8th century Norwegian lingo that one might have expected. This seems hard to swallow, but then most of the film’s actors were either British or American, so it saved the time, money and trouble of teaching them Old Norwegian: it all made sense financially, at least, no doubt about that!
11:30 I do my best again to stay not completely unfit: my usual 15 minute walk round and round (and round) our 150ft back garden (what I call “the exercise yard”) and a 4 and a half mile ride on my exercise bike. It all seems to go ok at the time, but later I suffer some twinges in my right hip – damn!!!
I take a look at my smartphone, just to check current levels of COVID-19 in the UK – it’s a subject I try to keep on top of: call me a nosey parker if you like! [All right, I will ! – Ed]
Coronavirus map of the UK – the darker the area the more new cases…
It’s a quite extraordinary map, I think. Obviously the south and Midlands are the safest place to be (also most of Northern Ireland). Why this pattern? Is it because the south and Midlands are where people have more in the way of white-collar jobs, and can more easily work from home, perhaps, in comparison with other areas, where jobs are more in manufacturing? Or is it because people in the south and Midlands are less friendly, maybe, and don’t socialise so much? I don’t know – the jury is still out on that one.
16:00 We get a text from our daughter Alison, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, with Ed and their three children, Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10). Lois and I sent Alison some money yesterday so she could treat all the children to ice-creams at Dylan’s after school today.
They’ve all be achieving a lot just recently, making Lois and me feel quite inadequate – oh dear!
Josie got a distinction on her Grade 5 piano theory exam, which she took online.
Rosalind was the star of a soccer match the other day in what was almost a movie-style performance. Her team were losing 2-0 with 6 minutes to play. Rosalind says she had a “sudden flood of determination” (her words), and she somehow managed to score 3 goals in those last 3 minutes, including one where she fell over as she took the shot: but it still went in – into the bottom right hand corner of the net.
Isaac, who’s just started his final year at primary school, has just been elected Head Boy, out of a total of about 8 candidates: an honour voted for by his fellow pupils. All the candidates gave a speech, saying why they wanted to be Head Boy – Isaac included a song with his speech: my goodness! He’s a pint-sized little boy – one of the shortest in his year, but like his father Ed, he has a gallon-sized personality – my god! He’s a real showman, like his father, and is good at acting, singing, playing soccer, and also making music: violin and piano. What a boy!
The Head Boy has a number of duties to perform, and sometimes has to lead school assemblies and address the whole school, and he certainly has all the self-confidence he needs to do that.
Lois and I can identify with our grandchildren’s musical talents, but neither of us ever showed any real promise at sports, and we were never ever accused of “having a personality” – that’s for sure. Oh dear!!!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, the Beatles’ first film “A Hard Day’s Night” from 1964, being reshown by the BBC4 as part of an evening of programmes to commemorate what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday.
A nostalgic experience for both Lois and me, and we both report briefly feeling we are teenagers again – my god! 1962 was a great year for the Beatles to “burst on the scene” for us, because we were both 16: the perfect age to start experiencing it.
The old feelings of pure joy at being young fill our heads again, for me particularly when George and the group sing my favourite song from the film, “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You”.
We enjoy the Marx Brothers / Keystone Cops style of the many
chases in the film: mostly of the group being chased by crowds of girls or
dozens of policemen in helmets, from taxi to train station, and theatre to taxi,
from taxi to taxi etc.
This hysteria was all choreographed, with the director Richard Lester signalling to the hordes of fans to “start chasing now”. But we get more than a hint of the real hysteria that reigned in those years in the last 30 minutes of the film, where the group perform a medley of their songs in front of an audience of invited fans, mostly female – here we see the genuine hysteria of the hundreds of ordinary girls in the audience, who are seen screaming and mouthing the names of their favourite: “John!” or “Paul!” etc, some of them in obvious real distress!
I went to an all-boys school and we often used to chat in our form room about the amazing power of female sexuality, that was to be seen at the time in Beatlemania.
By coincidence, in our class at school, we were reading Euripides’s play “The Bacchae” at the time. As the play starts, we learn that the god Dionysus has driven the women of Thebes, nicknamed the Maenads, into an ecstatic frenzy, sending them dancing and hunting on Mount Cithaeron. The King of Thebes, Pentheus scolds them harshly and effectively bans Dionysian worship, ordering his soldiers to arrest anyone else found engaging in the rites. He sees the women’s divinely-caused insanity merely as drunken cavorting and an illicit attempt to escape the mores and legal codes regulating Theban society.
A herdsman then brings sensational reports from Mount Cithaeron that the Maenads are behaving especially strangely and performing incredible feats and miracles, and that the Theban soldiers are unable to harm them with their weapons, while the women appear able to defeat them with only sticks.
Pentheus is now even more eager to see the ecstatic women, and Dionysus (wishing to humiliate and punish him) convinces the king to dress as a Maenad to avoid detection, and go to the rites himself.
Another messenger then reports how the god helped Pentheus up to the top of a tree for a better view of the Maenads, but then alerted the women to the snooper in their midst. Driven wild by this intrusion, the women tore the trapped Pentheus down from the tree, and ripped his body apart, piece by piece.
Later, Pentheus’s own mother, Agave, who has also joined
the Maenads, rips her son’s head off his body, under the illusion that he’s a
mountain lion – yikes!
I remember our Greek teacher, Mr Robson, said he thought that the Beatles’ female fans would do the same to their idols – i.e. rip them apart piece by piece - if they ever managed to get hold of them. My god, what madness!!!! But his theory was never proved one way or the other, fortunately, so perhaps he was exaggerating a bit - who knows!
22:00 We go to bed, both slightly restless with all the memories of the 1960’s coming flooding back – oh dear!
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