Danskcolin: Thursday November 5th 2020

08:00 For once we don't have to rush out of bed, which is nice. We have a Sainsbury's supermarket delivery booked, but not till the 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm slot, so it won't come till after the fortnightly Skype meeting of our U3A Danish group, when we know we'll be feeling absolutely exhausted, as always.

10:00 We check the latest on the US Election, though it looks like there's still a long way to go. What madness!

Lois and I are holding our breath - even though people have said to us, "Don't hold your breath!".

We know that many Americans also are finding it hard to concentrate at the moment, witness this story today from the influential American news website, Onion News.

NEW YORK—Though he was indignant that his employer expected him to carry on as normal while the nation awaited results in what might be the most important election of his adult life, sources confirmed local data analyst Dennis Andino nonetheless put in his ordinary half-assed effort at work Wednesday. “Seriously, how the hell can I stay focused on anything else when the future of our country hangs in the balance like this?” said Andino who, during a typical day on the job, completes the bare minimum amount of work necessary to avoid being fired and who spent much of Monday and Tuesday refreshing Twitter ahead of the NFL’s trade deadline.

“I honestly don’t understand how I’m supposed to [file a report that was due three weeks ago and answer a day-old email from a supervisor] as if nothing else is happening in the world. I was so anxious last night I could barely sleep, yet I’m still expected to [complete a tiny fraction of the responsibilities outlined in his job description] like I would any other day. This is bullshit.” At press time, reports stated that the bitter, disappointed man who goes to the office every day with a raging hangover had apologized to his coworkers, saying he was a bit irritable from the election stress.

Lois and I sympathise with Dennis, no doubt about that. We just have to try and take our minds off the election by doing the occasional piece of housework, and then sitting down for a rest [i.e. just what you always do - Ed].

11:00 I vacuum the whole house in stages, a job which exhausts me more and more whenever I do it. I'm getting old, no doubt about that!

We stop for a coffee and one of Lois's delicious home-made brownies. We look over the 5 pages of our Danish crime novel, "Dybt at falde", that we'll be covering this afternoon at our Skype meeting.

12:30 Lunch and then a nap in bed. At 2:25 pm we switch on the laptop and wait for the other members of our Danish group to join us.

Lois and I sign on to Skype and wait for the other group members to join our meeting

After we exhaust ourselves doing all the Danish reading and translating, we and the other members wind down with our usual discussion of "what we've been watching on TV in the last 2 weeks". Unfortunately this conversation eventually starts to falter, when we realise that pretty much none of us have seen any of the programmes that anyone else has seen.

Some people, like Joy, watch only documentaries, some, like Jeanette, only watch dramas, and so on. I blame the plethora of channels these days for the lack of any common, shared experiences, plus the facility for recording lots of programmes and only seeing them maybe several months after they've been aired: oh for the old days when there were only 2 channels and you couldn't record anything : that was much more fun haha!

16:00 The meeting ends and Lois and I relax with a cup of tea and other brownie on the sofa. At 4:45 pm the Sainsbury's delivery guy rings the doorbell. Sainsbury's are trying to minimise their plastic bag use at the moment, so they ask customers to leave boxes or bags out for them to put the groceries in, which is fine - we've done that.

All goes smoothly, until we realise that by mistake we ordered one brussels sprout instead of one 1kg bag of brussels sprouts - we'll just have to share the sprout between us when we finally get around to using it. I should have noticed that the price of the order list said only 8p - that was a bit of a giveaway: my bad again - oh dear!

we find we have mistakenly ordered one brussels sprout and not "one 1kg" bag, as we intended - damn!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa to watch a bit of TV, tonight's edition of Autumnwatch, that reports on wildlife throughout the UK via the medium of live pictures from their network of hidden cameras.

Lois and I have become quite taken with intimate pictures of wildlife - in their nests or scurrying about in the dark woods etc: their little faces look so cute!!!

However we are both big history buffs and we still have a strong bias towards any historical mentions, and nothing gets us more excited than a reference to the Battle of Agincourt (1415). We know it's madness, but what the hell!

A momentous oenithological event occurred last spring. While everybody was cowering inside because of the coronavirus, white storks were breeding in the UK, on the Nepp Estate in Sussex, for the first time in more than 600 years: 1416 was the last recorded instance of this happening, the year after Agincourt,

There were 2 nests, each of which had 3 chicks in them. Altogether 4 of these 6 chicks fledged successfully. And during the course of this year another 19 storks were bred successfully at the Cotswold Wildlife Park and introduced to the Nepp Estate also.

a pair of storks nest in the UK for the first time in over 600 years - yikes!!!!

Storks need to migrate to warmer climes as winter approaches northern Europe, so 8 of the new birds were fitted with satellite tags so researchers could track their progress. It's known that in September/October this year these "British" storks flew along the south coast of England to Cornwall and Land's End, but then changed their minds, and decided to fly back again, as far east as Kent, to take the much shorter crossing to the Continent, over to the Calais area. They then flew over France and Spain and into Morocco over the Straits of Gibraltar. Simples! They obviously don't like long sea crossings, and who's to blame them haha!!!

20:30 We speak on the phone to our daughter Alison, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, together with Ed and their 3 children: Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10).

The family are still hoping to move, perhaps before Christmas, to a house in a less busy part of the town, and they are currently waiting for the long legal and financial processes to resolve themselves.

Alison has been tidying up a bit in their loft and she came across some old pictures of her and Ed, and also a letter from my mother (Alison's paternal grandmother or her "farmor", as the Danes say). My mother seems to have going through a similar sorting-out process at the time; which is a bit of a coincidence, to put it mildly.

Pictures of Ali and Ed from the past: the second one looks like it was taken in their Haslemere house, so it must predate their move to Denmark in 2012