It’s going to be wet and windy for a few days – Storm Alex has arrived, another reason to need cheering up with a little bit of comfort food. We decide we’re not going to do anything very much today.
10:00 After our daily Danish lesson on the sofa, Lois and I look at the Danish news media. The former prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, has been taken to task for keeping a pet snake. His Danish critics say that these kinds of snakes should not be considered as pets, though I don’t quite understand why. The poor guy probably needs to have a few hobbies, now that he's retired from front-line politics.
Løkke remains the only Danish prime minister that Lois and I have
ever met. He approached us when he was campaigning for votes in central
Copenhagen a few years ago. Sadly we had to tell him we were only tourists.
Poor Løkke!!!!!
Snakes can certainly be a bit of a comfort to politicians when they suddenly fall from power, as happened to Obama and Joe Biden 4 years ago, but Biden's pet snake unfortunately disappeared at the crucial moment.
Let’s hope Donald Trump found Biden's missing snake, christened "Fruit Loop" by Biden, as soon as possible, after Trump and his family first moved into the White House in 2017 (source: Onion News). I remember it was a bit of a worry at the time, when the deadly snake went missing just as the removal vans were waiting outside to take away the Obamas’ and Bidens’ personal possessions.
WASHINGTON—Urging staffers to keep their
eyes peeled for a “scaly little f****r without any legs,” Vice President Joe
Biden reportedly searched the White House one last time Wednesday for his
missing 12-year-old pet coral snake, Fruit Loop.
“Look, I just found a discarded skin on a chair in the Roosevelt Room, so I know he’s still slithering around here someplace,” said Biden, who sources confirmed rummaged through the drawers of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and crawled around on his hands and knees peering underneath furniture for the 3-foot-long snake.
I remember Lois and I heard not only that the snake never turned up but that Biden was too embarrassed to say anything to Trump about the danger. And as far as we know, Fruit Loop is still on the run. Let’s hope that, if Biden returns to the White House this winter, that after Biden's silence 4 years ago, Fruit Loop doesn’t come back to bite him!
We had doubts at the time about Biden’s description of Fruit Loop – “a “scaly little f****r without any legs”. We think this description could have fitted any number of snakes! No wonder Fruit Loop has never been found!
10:30 We look at Facebook. Our daughter Alison in Haslemere, Surrey, has noticed a dangerous tree that looks about to fall over on the road outside their house, and the family are worried that if the main tree falls it could come down on their front fence. The county council has closed the road, but that hasn’t stopped some mad gung-ho motorists from attempting to climb the hill on the wrong side of the road nevertheless. What a crazy world we live in !!!!
12:00 I’m glad to say that Lois’s shoulder has been slightly better yesterday and today, although it’s still far from back to normal. She’s venturing out into the kitchen again, so we’re doing quite a bit of joint meal preparation now. She’s getting fed up with the diet of my monotonous so-called “signature dishes”, no doubt about that.
I’m still doing anything in the kitchen that requires the slightest bit of strength, including all chopping and peeling. I feel I’m very much the kitchen assistant, or kitchen “hand”, to Lois’s “celebrity chef” – she’s taking on the Gordon Ramsay role. There's been no use of the 'f-word’ as yet, however – but it’s probably only a question of time – oh dear!
19:00 We settle down on the sofa and watch online the first talk
we have bookmarked from the Cheltenham Literary Festival, “More Than A Woman”
by the journalist Caitlin Moran. She’s written a very successful book giving
general advice to women (“How To Be A Woman”- 2011), and is just publishing
another.
The Festival Blurb says,“A decade ago, Caitlin Moran thought she had it all figured out. Her instant bestseller How to Be a Woman was a game-changing take on feminism, the patriarchy, and the general ‘hoo-ha’ of becoming a woman. Back then, she firmly believed ‘the difficult bit’ was over, and her forties were going to be a doddle. If only she had known. Now with ageing parents, teenage daughters, a bigger bum and a To-Do list without end, she’s back with More Than A Woman: a guide to growing older, a manifesto for change, and a celebration of all those middle-aged women who keep the world turning. Chaired by Alex Clark.”
There’s no doubt that this talk resonates strongly with Lois,
particularly the bits about the endless to-do lists that women carry in their heads from the moment they wake up in the morning. Also the point about the woman always feeling she’s got to make sure everybody around her is happy, and that she’s
got to solve their problems as much as she is able to, while at the same time
feeling that nobody much is doing the same for her – oh dear!
Women often like to ask their partners to say what they’re thinking about, and it’s well-known that men tend to say something like, “Nothing in particular”, which is an incomprehensible answer to women. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once proved that this answer was factually true, says Moran. In my own defence I say that in my case I’m usually thinking in an unstructured way, but later I wonder if it’s just laziness that makes me answer “nothing in particular”. So the jury is still out on that one – oh dear (again)!
21:00 We watch some TV, the second part of the series “The Bone Detectives”, talking about the 1987 discovery of a grave cut into bedrock and still containing most of a body, in a very isolated spot in Caithness, mainland Britain’s northernmost county.
The body was dated to between 2300 and 2145 BC, i.e. the early
Bronze Age. Much of the body had decayed away, but there was enough of it left
to tell that it was of a locally born young woman, 18-22 years old: in view of her age, she
may well have died giving birth. Like many other bodies from this period, the
woman was buried with a beaker, indented with lines made by a tooth-comb.
Yes, the body was buried with a beaker! So the woman was one of the so-called “Beaker People”. This is
not the first time recently that we have heard about the Beaker People story, but it’s nice to
have it reiterated tonight for Lois and me – our memory is not what it was,
that’s for sure!
It’s been confusing to us, because when we were growing up in the 1960’s, we learnt a lot about the Beaker People, and the theory that they spread all over Europe in the early Bronze Age, bringing their characteristic, lined beakers with them.
This theory was discarded however in the 1980’s, and archaeologists started saying there weren’t any particular “Beaker People” – it was just that somebody somewhere invented this type of beaker and people liked it, so it got traded far and wide, and arrived all over Europe in that way.
Now, thanks to DNA analysis we know that the first theory was right after all – an argument for always being sceptical about the latest “theory”, at least until all the DNA facts are in! My god!
Finds from this period all over Britain indicate that about this time Britain’s earlier Neolithic population, which was beginning to go into decline due to soil erosion and other factors, got swamped by a big influx of Beaker people from the near Continent.
The two populations looked significantly different - the Neolithic peoples were blue-eyed, with dark hair and dark skin, while the Beaker people were brown eyed, with black hair and fairer skin. Yikes – they both sound a bit odd to me!!!! In particular their skull shapes were very different: the Neolithics' skulls were higher and narrower, the Beaker people's rounder and wider.
There’s no evidence of any ‘conquest’ or conflict. And the two peoples must have found each other reasonably attractive, because there was certainly interbreeding. But the important thing is that it was the Beaker DNA that won out. Within a couple of hundred years, DNA from bodies found in Britain was 92% Beaker and only 8% Neolithic. And you can't argue with DNA!!!
Is DNA not totally fascinating? Who would want to study anything else?!!!!
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
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