Monday, 16 November 2020

Monday November 16th 2020

10:00 I send an email to Sarah, our daughter in Australia to brief her about our other daughter Alison's lawyer-husband Ed's ideas for Sarah and family buying our house if they go through with their plan to move back to England next year (coronavirus permitting), after 6 years in the Perth area. 

11:00 After a bit of a "Danish" on the sofa, Lois and I go for a walk on the local football field. My physiotherapist, Connor, has said I only need to have a walk every other day, and the best thing is that on a "walk day" I don't have to do my exercises, which is nice!

half way round the football field we pose for a smug selfie

We see only one dog-walker today, but he's friendly and says hi to us. It's generally pretty quiet.

16:00 I get a call from Scilla, our U3A Danish group's Old Norse expert, who's staying with her daughter in the Canterbury area. Our Danish group is having it's fortnightly meeting on Wednesday on Skype, but Scilla doesn't think she'll be able to take part - she needs the help of her IT-expert grandson, and he's probably going to be at work again - pity! She says if she has any Old Norse reflections on the Danish whodunnit, Anna Grue's "The Further You Fall" ("Dybt at falde"), which is our group's current project, she'll get her grandson to text the meeting, however, so we can thrash it out thoroughly between the rest of us!

Anna Grue's "The Further You Fall", our Danish group's current project.

Anna Grue, the novel's author

17:00 I do some more work on my companion blog, OldnorseColin, developing Kenneth's saga a bit and trying to make it a little more exciting. I decide to have a feud starting between Colin and his friend Eric. The two men have both settled in Greenland, but their relationship is still distinctly cool - Colin steals one of Eric's pigs, but Eric discovers this and steals Colin's golf-clubs in revenge. I feel the resulting tension will make the saga a bit more exciting, but only time will tell - the jury's still out on that one!

Colin - he steals one of his friend Eric's pigs, but loses his golf-clubs in the ensuing backlash

17:30 I go out to the car to take it for a run, but I found the battery is flat again - damn! Still, too late to do anything about it now - damn (again) !!!!!

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar. I settle down on the sofa and watch Episode 7 of the new Danish crime series, "DNA".


My grip on the plot of this crime series is getting looser and looser - oh dear! But it seems to involve Polish nuns who get hold of babies from single teenage mums, and a family gang in rural Denmark that process the babies and get them to the parents that are going to adopt them.

The series's hero, Danish detective Rolf, was also a victim of these gangs 5 years ago when his own toddler was kidnapped, but although the Danish/Polish/French police have identified some of the kidnapped children, Rolf's own little daughter has yet to turn up, I think. 

Poor Rolf!!!!

And Rolf's partner, a Danish stewardess who he had the baby with, has taken up with a younger man, a pilot or something of the sort.

Poor Rolf (again) !!!!!

Meanwhile, Julita, the Polish teenage mum, has again been imprisoned by the nuns who took her baby, and she's on a hunger strike. But luckily for her, a young novice nun at the convent takes pity on her and helps her escape by ostentatiously dropping the key to Julita's cell into the soup she's been given for her lunch, which is nice!




The novice also tells Julita that the man who took her baby is coming back again today, which is helpful too. Julita escapes from her cell using the key the novice has left her, and follows the man back to Denmark.



It's all tremendous fun !!!

We also find out that one of Rolf's colleagues back in Police HQ Copenhagen and his wife are also somehow mixed up in the adoption ring gang - the plot thickens (just like Julita's soup haha!!!).

21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Seminar and we watch our favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests powers of lateral thinking, and University Challenge, the student quiz.

Tonight we have a miserable time on the quizzes, particularly on University Challenge, where, as usual, we're trying to notch up a good total of questions that we get right but the students get wrong. Tonight's two teams - Warwick University and Merton College, Oxford - are just too good. We only score on two questions that the students get wrong, which is very poor for us - damn!!!!


1. What word does Shakespeare use to characterise reputation which the soldier seeks 'even in the cannon's mouth' ?
Students: [pass]
Colin and Lois: "bubble" reputation

2. A museum in Haarlem, Holland, is dedicated to which prominent Dutch portrait artist who died in 1666?  His works include 'The Banquet of the Offices of the St. George militia company'.
Students: Rembrandt
Colin and Lois: Frans Hals

We prepare to go to bed later in slightly chastened mood - oh dear! 

21:30 At least we learn something useful on 'Only Connect' tonight about the much-maligned "mullet" hair-style. Apparently it was first fashionable in caveman times - cavemen didn't make a point of getting their hair cut at all normally, but apparently they used to regularly cut the front of their hair off so that they could see where they were going - makes sense!!! But how do they know this - from cave paintings perhaps????

Also on 'Only Connect' tonight, we find out the Danish word for a mullet - it's "bundesliga-hår", or literally "German Premier League hair", because of the hair-style's popularity with top German footballers.



I'm sure that information will come in very useful at some point in our lives!

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














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