07:00 I get out of bed early to make our cups of tea, because Mark the Gardener is coming this morning.
I expect to have to swab down with disinfectant our normal 3-times-a-week delivery of 5 pints of milk, but when I open the front door there's no milk there - oh dear. I ring up the dairy later and I find out that there's a new milkman doing the round, and that he "sometimes leaves the milk in strange places". Later we discover that he's left our milk next door outside our neighbour Nikki's house. I hope this isn't going to be a regular occurrence - my god!
It's a really good dairy, family-owned through 3 or 4 generations, but they are occasionally let down by some of their feckless young roundsmen, which is a pity.
07:30 I bring 2 cups of tea up to the bedroom and get back into bed for a few precious minutes. But I have to be up before Mark arrives, so I can unbolt the side gate for him - damn!
I look at my smartphone. Our younger daughter Sarah, who lives in Perth, Australia together with Francis and their 7-year-old twins Lily and Jessie, has sent me a text. The family has been flirting with the idea of moving back to the UK after more than 5 years "down under".
She explains that they want to buy a house in the UK while they are still living in Australia, and rent it out to tenants. She can get a bigger loan based on her Australian salary, and if they came back to the UK right now, they would have to wait until she and Francis had found new jobs before they could apply for a loan. Makes sense to me!
08:40 Mark the Gardener arrives and works for 2 hours pruning one of our apple trees at the bottom of the garden.
Mark the Gardener, seen here in happier times, having a picnic with his partner
Then I look at my smartphone. Both Lois and I are looking forward to seeing Joe Biden inaugurated tomorrow. And we're not the only ones. I see on the Danish quora website that few tears will be shed by many Danes when the Trump-appointed US ambassador Carla Sands packs her bags and leaves Copenhagen.
"Carla Sands has made a name for herself by loyally supporting Donald Trump's destructive and psychopathic behaviour. Most recently, Sands received a protest note from [Danish] Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod, regarding the attack on Congress. But Carla does not believe that Trump incited violence, which he certainly did.
"Even worse was when Trump declared himself the winner of the election, even though he obviously lost big-time. Carla Sands said in this regard that "Trump wanted to stop the counting of votes to make sure that the election was free and fair.
"Last but not least, she has been very aggressive in trying to further Trump's sinister plan to buy Greenland. In that connection, she reportedly had to run away to escape the attentions of curious Faroese journalists."
This is very much Simon's personal view, and I'm not sure how accurate it is. Another Danish politics-buff, Jens Knudsen comments, "Of course, the US Ambassador to
Denmark is going to be loyal to her President. What else was she supposed to be? He has
appointed her himself and he pays her salary….Carla Sands has not been worse
than any other ambassadors we have had in Denmark from the USA. Rather the opposite - she has been more informative in every respect.
"Re the riot at the Capitol, it
would be strange if the US ambassador to Denmark said that she would like to
see her President convicted as a traitor.
"As for the vote count, I saw Carla
Sands on the TV news and she did not say that there was cheating with the
vote count, but that it should be investigated. Would we not investigate
whether election fraud had taken place if such an accusation came from one of
the political parties in Denmark?
"The fact that she ran away from
journalists from the Faroe Islands is probably no coincidence, however, because it is
conceivable that she might have coaxed into sayting her sincere opinion about the
completely insane proposal that Trump came up with.
"No - Carla Sands has been a good
diplomat for both the USA and Denmark."
So the jury is still out on that one. Gosh isn't politics complicated.
But it certainly looks like Trump's Greenland initiative touched a raw nerve across a wide spectrum of Danish opinion, that's for sure!
Oh dear!!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, the second part of Fergal Keane's interesting series on "How the Irish Shaped Britain".
An interesting programme taking us through the 19th century and into first half of the 20th century. That's probably going to be enough for Lois and me. Anything that happened in the second half of the 20th century isn't a mystery to us - we've lived it haha!!! So we may not bother to hear the final and third part next week, but I'm going to let that one slide. Don't tell Fergal, anyone haha !!!!
Hundreds of thousands out of the total of 2 million Irish who left their homeland because of the great potato famine of the mid 19th century ended up settling in Britain. By the end of this wave of immigration, Irish settlers made up 7% of the total population of Scotland, for instance. My god!
As we know, it was largely Irish labour that built Britain's railways. They also played a huge part in shipbuilding, especially on the River Clyde in Scotland, but also in Liverpool: today it's estimated that 50% of the population of Liverpool have Irish ancestry. Irish immigrants also became a big part of the workforce in the Lancashire mill towns.
But it wasn't just the labourers who made a difference to our society. Irish immigrants became a major part of all walks of life in Britain, filling many British Empire civil service posts, and at one time they made up 30% of Britain's armed forces.
Irish MPs were a big force in Parliament: 86 of them in all, under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, lobbying for home rule for Ireland. They often held the balance of power between the main British parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. And through their power these Irish MPs were able to pressure Prime Minister Gladstone into drawing up the first home rule bill.
Many Irish intellectuals believed they could bring a truly Irish flavour which would enrich British society and also the English language. Presenter Keane mentions especially writers such as Yeates, Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker and others.
With the English language it was the start of a century or more of the enrichment process, whereby "the different Englishes" from around the world gradually came to be felt to enhance the language with a wider blend of cultural influences. It was George Bernard Shaw who the BBC chose to "tell the Brits how to speak English", which is interesting. Nowadays we're used to the idea that the varieties of English spoken in various parts of the world, e.g. India, South Africa etc constitute a plus to the language and not a minus haha!
Fascinating stuff!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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