Thursday November 12th 2020

07:00 I get out of bed and bring 2 cups of tea up for Lois and me. We've had an email from Sarah, our younger daughter, who, since December 2015 has lived in Perth, Australia, together with Francis and their 7-year-old twins. Sarah says the family are still planning to return to the UK as soon as the coronavirus epidemic subsides, and they want to buy the house Lois and I live in, which will be nice. It's quite a large family house and garden and it's far too big for two old codgers like us, to put it mildly!

We stay in bed a while, and |I look at the Danish news media on my smartphone (ekstrabladet.com). The US Ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, a Trump-appointee, has been telling some untruths on social media apparently - oh dear! 

On Twitter, the ambassador has written, 'Every legitimate vote should count. The legitimacy of the election is at stake and yesterday I checked the vote count in Pennsylvania and they did not count my vote.'

The New York Times has now disproved that, however. 'A search on Pennsylvania's website for the election shows that Ms. Sand's vote has been counted in the county of Cumberland, where she lived for part of her childhood, ' reads the Times article. On Twitter, Sands, who in her personal profile describes himself as 'Mom, risotto lover, and champagne drinker,' has repeatedly criticized the legitimacy of the U.S. election that came out in favour of Democrat Joe Biden.

Carla Sands has been an ambassador to Denmark since 2017 and she is a Republican. She took over the post from Democrat Rufus Gifford. American ambassadors are appointed by the president, so it is Donald Trump's choice that it is Carla Banks who has ended up being ambassador to Denmark.

Rufus Gifford, the former ambassador, has commented on the case on Twitter. 'I'm sorry, Denmark. Truth and Righteousness will return in 70 days,' he writes, referring to the fact that the future president Joe Biden will be installed by that date.

Yes - it'll certainly be nice when "truth and righteousness" becomes the norm again - that's for sure!

10:00 We go for a walk round the village, past the Royal Oak pub, sadly now shut for the duration of the lockdown, and on to the fields leading to the Racecourse.

we stop outside the Royal Oak pub, closed for lockdown, to take an awkward selfie

We walk on down Lake Street, where some tree-felling guys are felling a tree in somebody's garden. Lois is much cheekier than me, and she asks the guys if there's anything wrong with the tree. They say, no, it's just that the owner wants it out of the way so he can have a couple of new houses built there. 

Houses, houses, and more houses - who's going to buy them all, that's what I wonder !! What a crazy world we live in! 

on Lake Street, we see some tree-fellers felling a tree: all is well with the world - not !!!!!

Sheer madness!!!

16:00 We relax on the sofa with a cup of Earl Grey tea and a biscuit. I tell Lois my idea for renaming Donald Trump as one of the Bond villains: Trumpfinger, Trumpfeld of Blo-trump perhaps. She counter-suggests "No, Doctor!" to reference his treatment of Dr Fauci and others. But we can't decide - the jury's still out on that one.

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, a bit of the first part of an interesting new documentary series called "How Britain Won WW2", although both Lois and I agree that a more accurate title would have been, "How Britain Avoided Losing WW2" - if Britain's efforts had gone awry in the first two years, it would have been curtains for this country, and for Europe too - no doubt about that!!!

There have been a number of documentaries about WW2 recently that have focussed on individuals who made an (often) unsung contribution to the war effort, and tonight's programme is very much in that mould. 

The first story tonight was about a 19-year-old volunteer soldier (a "weekend" soldier), Alec Jay, who at the outbreak of the war found himself suddenly a full-time member of the "real" army, and being shipped out to Calais. This was at time when the German blitzkrieg was advancing towards the Dunkirk beaches, where preparations were being made to evacuate a third of a million troops back to Britain. 

Alec Jay (19), a part-time (weekend) soldier, suddenly caught up in real warfare
 

The soldiers in Calais had orders to hold up the German advance at all costs - they were clearly being regarded as expendable for the good of the Dunkirk evacuation, and they were all eventually either killed or taken prisoner. We were impressed that Alec, who was Jewish, had the foresight to take off his military "dog-tag", which listed his religion - and to bury it in the sand on one of the Calais beaches. As a result, when he was taken prisoner, the Germans never found out that he was a Jew. As a POW, he escaped 5 times (but was presumably recaptured each time!). But he survived the war.

Churchill's message to the officer commanding the men stationed in Calais

The second story was about Air Marshall Hugh Dowding, who had the foresight to develop the world's first radar system and to start building up Britain's air defences as far back as 1935, at a time when the conventional wisdom was to assemble a huge force of heavy bombers. It was Dowding, a man Churchill never liked, according to Lois, who commissioned the world-beating fighter aircraft the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and who was the person mainly responsible for the RAF being able to resist the massive German bombing campaign in the summer of 1940.

The third hero was a female "petrol-head", Beatrice "Tilly" Shilling (Ph.D) who found a "beautifully simple" solution to the Spitfires' and the Hurricanes' main design fault - that their engines sometimes stalled when they went into a dive. 

Beatrice "Tilly" Shilling

One of the biggest German air-raids of the whole war, that took place on September 15th 1940, proved to be the turning point. The RAF lost 29 aircraft but the Germans lost 56, and 2 days later Hitler decided to shelve his planned invasion.

Lois and I have quite taken to Channel 5 documentaries - they seem to use intelligent presenters, who get hold of fascinating information, partly by solid research but also partly by talking to e.g. the grandchildren of these (sometimes) forgotten heroes. They don't waste time and money sending the presenters all over the world, just to film their "pieces-to-camera" in front of some impressive international backdrop, like some of the more prestigious channels do. 

Welcome back, Channel 5 - all is forgiven haha!