09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower and have a quick breakfast before Mark the Gardener arrives to do a couple of hours of gardening for us.
Lois and Mark put their heads together to plan the little flower bed in front of the house, which is currently empty, after Mark recently cleared out all the past-their-sell-by-date lavender bushes. He's going to plant instead a circle of brand new vigorous lavender bushes with possibly a rose tree in the middle - but the jury's still out on that one.
This flower-bed is what visitors walk past when they approach our front door, so it's important to give a good impression haha! The old impression they got with the old lavender bushes was "the people who live here must be clapped out, just like these bushes haha!
flashback to Sep 2020 - Lois about to pass the old clapped-out lavender bushes Mark has now removed
This is the kind of thing we pay Mark for, after all - to fine-tune our image by creating visually exciting in-your-face floral displays haha!
11:00 Lois and I have a cup of coffee on the sofa and I look at my smartphone. I see that New Hampshire has an odd law that permits some of its communities to open for polling, if they wish, just after midnight, at the very start of election day, and also to declare the results provided all their residents have voted.
In Dixville Notch (NH), all 5 voters have voted for Biden, according to the New York Times. I consider sending a telegram to Biden to advise him to quickly declare himself the 2020 winner, but before I get the chance, another community, Millsfield (NH) has declared their results - Biden 5, Trump 16. So I guess it's too late for Biden now to jump in with a statement. Damn !!!!!
11:30 We pick up the latest cooking apples from our tree - we've had most stupendous year for cooking apples, the best since we moved into this house in January 1986. For some reason the weather must have been just right this year.
And there have been another 22 apples just since the weekend, some of them blown down by Storm Aiden.
It's cooking apple madness, I tell you !!!!!
12:00 Lynda's U3A Middle English group is holding its monthly meeting on zoom on Friday afternoon, so I take a quick look at William Langland's 14th century poem "Piers Plowman", which is the group's latest project, to see if I can spot any interesting words.
Langland is always keen to give a bit of moral instruction through the mouth of the poem's hero Piers, and the pages I read today are no exception.
Here's Piers is advising a knight to "hold with no harlots, nor hear their tales, and to avoid such men especially at meal-times, because they're the devil's minstrels, I'll have you understand.". And the knight agrees to do this, swearing an oath "by St James" to gain greater credence for his promise.
It comes as a surprise to me today to realise that in those days 'harlots' could be men as well as women, because the word just meant 'a ruffian': it only came to mean 'a prostitute' in the 15th century. And a 'disoure' is a word I haven't come across before, but it seems to have meant originally a story-teller (from French diseur, or 'speaker') and later came to mean also a minstrel - somebody who played a musical instrument.
It's funny what was regarded as wicked in those days. If you were a minstrel or story-teller, I suppose today you'd be regarded as part of the entertainment industry - perhaps with an Equity card. And you'd be rich and famous, and get to open supermarkets etc.
And why does Piers want us to avoid such people "especially at meal times"??? I suppose that's the equivalent of sitting in a pub or restaurant today and having to put up with piped music. So maybe on reflection it's fair enough to complain about minstrels in the restaurant! Lois and I find it can be annoying if we can't have a nice conversation with each other because of some loud, looped tape of somebody's idea of a Mariachi band, for example.
But what a crazy world they lived in in those days!!!!
Piers in one of his notorious 'grumpy' moods - oh dear!
In a famous medieval picture we see some typically annoying medieval minstrels - the landlord is trying to get them to clear off, and the diners in the tavern have had to give up trying to have a conversation - they are just sitting there, waiting for the minstrels to stop and move away!
some typically annoying medieval minstrels
What madness!
20:00 We settle down on the sofa to watch some TV, the latest edition of Autumnwatch, which monitors wild life live across the UK using a network of hidden cameras.
Tonight we learn from Michaela a little about a peculiar type of duck, the goosander.
Observers noticed some time ago that in June to October every year the male goosanders disappear completely from the UK and nobody had a clue where they went to ("The Leavers"). The females remained ("The Remainers").
It was noticed, at some point, that every June the males begin to moult and lose those green feathers on their heads and they end up looking remarkably like the females. So at first it was thought that the males didn't fly away, it's just that they were, for a while, indistinguishable from the females.
Eventually however it was discovered that the males had indeed gone away for 3 months, and they were finally tracked down to northern Norway. And so in effect, the males had left the females to do the business of rearing their young alone, back in the UK.
The area in North Norway where the males "went on paternity holiday" was found to be a place with lots of food, plenty of sand-eels for instance, and very few predators. Very nice!!!
The reason for this extraordinary annual "males only" holiday is, that in June, when the males moult, they lose all their flight feathers, so for at least a month or more they are extremely vulnerable. So that's why they fly all that way up to northern Norway, where they are safe and can moult in peace, and do "men's things" and talk "men's talk". What madness!!!!
The females, having brought up their young in the UK, do their own moulting a bit later, in September, but remain in the UK. So the females are presumably fairly vulnerable then, but that's just "bad luck" apparently. They don't get a holiday, which Lois thinks is grossly unfair.
Welcome to the crazy world of British goosanders !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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