09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower, and I start on my "busy" morning.
First of all it's my turn on our couples' rota to clean out the shower after we've used it. We are both having more trouble reaching the bottommost and topmost parts of the shower cabinet to clean them, and Lois now uses a cloth wrapped round a loofah to do the difficult parts, but for now I'm sticking to getting down on my hands and knees - the top bits are not a problem for me so far. I'm not the tallest person in the world, but I have a reasonable reach for my 5 ft 10 inches (which is about 1.8m, or so it says in my EU passport).
I clean the shower, an obligation under our "couples' rota"
My second job is to fix the hooks that our dirty laundry container hangs on in one of the bathroom cupboards - the bracket with the hooks on has come off again for the billionth time, and I'm going to fix it good and proper this time. I throw away the silly little screws that the plumber installed and find some chunky and more "macho" screws in my so-called "screw cabinet", to see if they will do a better job. "Farewell wimpy plumber-screws, you had your chance and you blew it!"
At last - I get tough on those wimpy "plumber screws"
My third job is to change the light-bulb in the airing cupboard. Old fashioned British houses have these cupboards, which contain the hot water tank, and you can put sheets and towels etc in there around and above the tank, to "air", which is a big advantage in a damp climate. Changing the light bulb is more difficult than it sounds, because the bulb-holder and its fitting are old and the connection is poor. My guess is the original one that was installed when the house was new in 1930.
I proudly showcase the new 100 watt bulb in the 1930's vintage airing cupboard
11:00 I think it's time for us to have a cup of coffee on the sofa and do our daily "Danish lesson". We've arranged a Skype meeting for our U3A Danish group that will take place tomorrow afternoon.
12:00 I take a quick look at the Danish news media on my smartphone - the big story at the moment is Peter Madsen's sensational brief escape from jail, where he's been serving a life sentence for the murder of journalist Kim Wall on his private submarine. Somebody managed to video part of his "dash for freedom" - it just shows how little privacy there is these days - there's always somebody with a phone somewhere around, and you can't even escape from prison with a bit of privacy - what madness!
I turn to Morten Ingemann's latest cartoon strip, and I get a bit of a shock, to put it mildly. Ingemann is my favourite Danish cartoonist, no doubt about that. He's particularly interested in old, fat, ugly people - much like Lois and me - the type of people who mostly get ignored by the comedic media.
Today's strip is set in the Danish "Car Accident Museum", the kind of institution that wouldn't work in the UK but which seems to be something of an institution in Scandinavia. An ugly elderly visitor is pointing out to his ugly elderly companion, that women are to blame in 75% of all car accidents. He adds that this is an extraordinary statistic, given that "the steering wheel isn't even on their side" - my god, what madness! And it gives an idea of the sort of prejudice that women have to put up with on a daily basis, no doubt about that!
16:00 Nap time is over and Lois and I have a cup of tea and a home-made marmalade flapjack on the sofa. Lois says that many BBC radio personalities have been confessing to the sartorial shortcomings they have succumbed to since the lockdown started.
Many of them broadcast their pieces from home these days. BBC radio's chief technical correspondent says he does his regular broadcast after coming back from walking his dog - still wearing his jogging pants. He keeps a jacket handy for any TV appearances that come up, but he says there's no need to put proper trousers on - viewers can only see his top half.
And one of BBC radio's chief political correspondents interviews government ministers and other politicians in the early morning, still wearing her pyjamas apparently.
It's going to be a shock for all these people when lockdown ends, that's for sure! My god!!!
18:00 We have dinner. Last week we realised we had inadvertently run out of fish fingers, so when "Nick the Fishman" drove up with his stuff from Bristol a few days ago, we asked for some - but he only had "jumbo" fish fingers. Tonight we decide to try some of these.
You certainly get more fish for your batter - they're each about 6 inches long. We're not sure, but we think the regular ones are about 3 or 3 and a half inches. Thanks, Nick! Yum yum!
we feast ourselves on Nick the Fishman' "jumbo" fish-fingers - yum yum!
We're planning to enter some "installation art" in the competition for this year's prestigious "Turner Prize". Our theme will be "Clothes that look like animals' faces". Our first exhibit is drying on the radiator this evening - one of my shirts which is a good representation of the face of a pig, we feel. More on this to come - watch this space!
my light-brown shirt - part if our entry for the art world's prestigious "Turner Prize"
20:00 Lois disappears to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the sofa and watch a bit of TV, a documentary on the comedy actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
I have to say that, although I'm a long-time fan of Jerry Seinfeld's show, I have never stopped to consider the contribution that Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on her own, made to the show. So I'm very grateful to this documentary for pointing up what a brilliant comedy actress she was, in Seinfeld and in other shows.
And it's nice to see some old clips from Seinfeld, like this one, at the coffee shop, where Julia's female frankness and directness contrasts so spectacularly with Jerry and George's male vanity and self-doubt.
21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Class and we watch a documentary about the Tower of London, which went for several months without visitors during the early stages of the lockdown.
It's interesting to see how, from the point of view of the Beefeaters who welcome and instruct visitors to the Tower, how much they were longing for the lockdown to be eased. Presumably you don't volunteer to be a Beefeater unless you're pretty extrovert, and just "maintaining" the Tower in the absence of any visitors at all wouldn't have been very satisfying for them.
And who knew that the Tower's moat was given over to growing vegetables during World War II? [I expect a lot of people knew that - Ed].
It's another reminder of how determined our parents' generation was that, at whatever cost, Britain mustn't lose the war against Hitler, especially in 1940 and most of 1941 when we hadn't got the USA to help us.
And we see old photographs of how the Tower's moat looked during the war.
All sorts of public land, parks and tourist attractions etc were given over to growing vegetables. Before the war we imported 75% of all our food, and those imports came to a virtual halt in 1940, because the Nazi U-boats were creating havoc with the shipping lanes in the North Atlantic and around the British Isles.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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