Danskcolin: Saturday December 5th 2020

10:00 I take a look at the Danish news media (ekstrabladet) after we take delivery of next week's groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village. We are still swabbing each item down with disinfectant, incidentally, even though people have told us it's not necessary. What madness!!!

11:00 I see that Denmark's ex-prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen has started his epic journey by sail across the ocean, in company with a crew of similarly inexperienced sailors, for the country's latest TV-reality show "Across the Atlantic".

Løkke (right) on the boat he is going to sail across the Atlantic on

And I see also, that in his latest cartoon, my favourite Danish cartoonist, Morten Ingemann, has sketched Løkke struggling in the water halfway across the ocean, as the boat sails out of view - suggesting Løkke may well be unceremoniously "dumped overboard" at the orders of his successor as leader of the centre-right "Venstre" party, Jakob Ellemann. At first I thought this was another of Ingemann's whimsies, but on reflection I'm not so sure - Danish politics is a cruel unforgiving arena, so maybe the idea is not as farfetched as I originally thought!

I'm sure Margaret Thatcher must have similar fantasies about her predecessor, Edward Heath, actually himself an experienced sailor, when he kept popping up to annoy her, in her first few years as Tory Party leader. Oh dear!

Flashback to June 2014: where it all started to go wrong for Løkke -

we see him here preparing to shake us by the hand,

as we were eating in the middle of Copenhagen

16:00 Our daughter Alison in Haslemere has posted a charming picture of the family's Christmas tree on Instagram. Lois was talking to her niece Sharon in Oxford earlier today and Sharon said they too have put their Christmas tree up. It seems a bit early to us, but probably people want something to cheer themselves up with this year, and you can see why. It always seems to do the trick!

our daughter Alison's family Christmas tree: a real one - of course!

As Ali comments the raising of the Christmas tree in their house is a signal for a silent war to commence: Dumbledore and Otto (the family's cats) vs. the tree. Which side will win this year haha!

Dumbledore (left) and Otto - will they be able to bring the Christmas tree down ?

They like a challenge!

It's quite a tall tree, and seems to reach up to the ceiling in the picture. It's not the sort that Donald Trump would like. Last Christmas a story in Onion News about Trump's Christmas tree sort of slipped under the radar a bit, amid a lot of news about Chinese pandemics and other trivia, so it's worth resurrecting it now for later historians' to ponder!

Sharon told Lois that her partner Michael, who's an accountant, lost his job in Oxford a few weeks ago, but has found a new one near Heathrow. His new firm will let him work from home two days a week, which will cut down on the travelling. Poor Michael!

Sharon's son Billy, Lois's great nephew, has taken advantage of lockdown to grow a beard. It’s come out red, which was a bit of a surprise because the hair on top of his head has aways been blonde, which is weird. But then Lois was always blonde, but she has ginger eyelashes, and that seems to work. I guess it runs in the family.

18:00 We have dinner. I'm feeling slightly guilty because my NHS physiotherapist, Connor, has sent me my new sheet of exercises - they arrived yesterday, but today I do the old ones, postponing till tomorrow my exploration of the new ones.

I hate learning new exercises. Basically I don't want to do exercises at all but I can bring myself to do them as long as I can do them without thinking, ie without having to try and follow some chart and/or written description, something which is always annoying . But I'll have to brave them tomorrow, that's for sure - damn! My next telephone session with Connor is on New Year's Eve - the 31st, which will be here before we know it, no doubt about that!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, an archaeological documentary about the Amazon - the river, not the online retailer: we've seen enough of the latter to last us to the end of the pandemic, to put it mildly!

The programme is based on an amazing fact of history: that a early Spanish missionary, Gaspar de Carjaval, who travelled along the Amazon in the 1540's reported seeing vast cities, teeming with inhabitants, along the banks of the river. By the time of the major Spanish and Portuguese conquests that came much later, however, these cities had disappeared, leaving the European world to conclude that the missionary was somehow living in a fantasy world.

With the jungles now being less dense due to deforestation it's become clear, partly through LIDAR radar images, that de Carjaval was absolutely correct. The society that was there was quite elaborate, able to organise and build these great settlements. It was also very hierarchical - skeletons have revealed high status individuals, who were buried in or near the biggest mounds, while the poor people were buried in the small, slightly rubbishy mounds - my god!

However, there isn't a lot to show on a TV documentary, because the structures were made of earth, and the dwellings wooden, so all you get today is the kind of circular "bumps" in the landscape, that typically would have comprised a ring of 'houses' with an inner 'plaza', and a road to a network of similar 'villages'. The inhabitants were mostly killed off during the flu and smallpox epidemics that the European settlers brought with them - it's believed that 90% of the indigenous population perished.

reconstruction of a typical village with road connecting them to hundreds of others nearby

The presenter, Ella Al-Shamahi, is a veteran of doing archaeology in dangerous places - Yemen and Iraq for example - yikes!

And she is very good at putting across the unpleasant side of doing archaeology in this region: the heat, the jaguars, the ants, and the spiny vegetation: if you get a palm spine sticking in you, it takes 2 or 3 months for it to come out, for some reason which Lois and I don't quite understand. Yikes!!!