Danskcolin: Wednesday January 6th 2020

08:00 I get up early because we're expecting a meat, cheese and pies delivery from Waghorne's, the butcher's shop in the village. Sometimes they are here by 9 am, so I need to be on standby. As it turns out, they don't come till late afternoon - we ring the shop up at 3:30 pm and they apologize, saying that they have an increased number of orders this week because of the new lockdown; also that they've lost one of their drivers, which is a pity. When the delivery arrives we see that the driver's a white-haired old gentleman, who looks older that us. Poor soul! What old people are driven to in these crazy times !!!!

Waghorne's, on the left, the butcher's shop in the village

09:00 I get a call from my friend, "Magyar" Mike, who I've been studying Hungarian with for over 25 years. He says he and his wife Mary have just been invited to have one of the anti-coronavirus vaccinations this coming Saturday, which is nice. They are both in their 80's, and Mike has a diabetes problem; plus, of course, they had started to become worried when some of their contemporaries had been called, and they hadn't. Poor Mike and Mary !!!!!

report of December 29th 2020

flashback to 1994: "Magyar" Mike in happier times: with our friend Ibolya,

in the small town of Kaposvar in Southern Hungary

me in Kaposvar in 1994

10:00 Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent me an alarming prediction about this year's "Beast from the East", when temperatures are due to plummet across Europe, according to his chart.

Lois and I have uncomfortable memories of the last "Beast from the East", which happened in 2018, just as we were having to travel through snow to Birmingham Airport to fly to Perth, Australia, and visit our daughter Sarah and her family. We arrived in Perth dressed in winter coats and scarves, only to find that the temperature locally was 95F / 35C.

What a crazy planet we live on!!!

flashback to March 2018(left to right) Francis, our son-in-law, Jess, Lily and Lois -

Lois and I escape the "Beast from the East" in England

only to be hit by Australian temperatures in the 90's F

10:30 I check the BBC weather forecast for 11th to 18th January 2021, and they're taking a rosier view of the likely weather than the WSI prediction, which is a comfort. Lois and I have noticed for years that different TV channels give you quite different forecasts sometimes - I suppose that's one of the benefits of competition, but I'm not completely sure: the jury's still out on that one!

the BBC's forecast: all temperatures in Celsius

15:00 Lynda's U3A "Middle English" group is holding its monthly meeting on zoom on Friday afternoon, so I have a quick look at the 14th century Towneley Play of Noah, which is the group's current project.

The play is written in Yorkshire dialect, which is on the east coast of England. I can see that the language is very much influenced by Danish - thousands of Danish settlers flooded into Yorkshire and other east coast areas of England around the 10th century or so.

Noah and his wife are about to start hitting each other. The wife isn't happy about having to go into the Ark, that's for sure, and she's really having a general go at Noah, bringing out every complaint she's got in her "gunny-sack". Here she claims that Noah does what he likes and spends money on whatever he fancies, and yet "of meat and drink have we very scant [quantities]". Poor Noah's wife !!!

The people of Yorkshire are speaking an English that's got a very Danish flavour to it, there's no doubt about that. But they've forgotten some of the Danish grammar, that's for sure. They've adopted into their English the Danish word "scant", meaning a small quantity of something, without realising that it shouldn't necessarily have a "t" on the end, unless it's describing a neuter noun. What madness !!!!

Noah and his wife start fighting with some sort of pointed stick

in the car-park of a Canadian university, in a sparsely-attended

performance of this medieval play.

16:00 We have a cup of Tea Pig Extra Strong Earl Grey Tea and a biscuit on the sofa. I look at my current book, a history of GCHQ - "Behind the Enigma" by John Ferris, which was Lois's main present to me this last Christmas.

flashback to Christmas Day 2020: I open my main present from Lois

I'm currently studying the Victorian period - it's quite noticeable how self-confident the Victorians were about Britain's place in the world. They didn't feel threatened by any foreign power, so they didn't bother too much with enciphering their diplomatic and military/naval communications to any great degree of complexity or sophistication: they relied mainly on being able to throw their weight about all over the world with relative impunity, so they didn't care too much whether foreign intelligence services were reading their messages and telegrams or not.

The other factor in their favour was that it was Britain and the British Empire that built, owned and operated most of the world's communication cables, so it was difficult for foreign powers to get hold of British communications in the first place. What a crazy world it was in those days!

cable map of the world 1901

18:30 We have dinner - 6 and a quarter inch jumbo fish fingers with some kind of strawberry mousse for dessert - yum yum!

Lois showcases tonight's dinner - jumbo fish fingers; yum yum!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the first programme in a new series of Grand Designs, where presenter Kevin McCloud follows some large-scale, grandiose project for house renovation or conversion, embarked on by the owner, who in my experience isn't usually 100% sane - oh dear!

I personally feel a little bit dissatisfied with this opening programme in the new series - it's just SO over the top. The house-owner, Justin, a young and crazy, spoilt but filthy-rich ex-army officer who's just split up with his wife (we wonder why she left haha!) wants to renovate a former cemetery keeper's lodge, and demolish the adjacent council-built toilet block, replacing it with a massive one-storey building containing a long, narrow swimming pool, only suitable for one person doing lengths, we suspect.

The whole thing goes massively over budget, ending up at £4.5 million, but money doesn't seem to be a huge problem for this guy. About three quarters of the way through the programme the man discovers that he needs an extra £1 million, which he claims he doesn't know how he's going to acquire. Then in the last 10 minutes, when presenter Kevin arrives to see how the project's turned out, hey presto the money has somehow been found and the whole project has been finished somehow, despite the pandemic.

Justin's original plans for a home in the middle of an old cemetery

- what madness !!!!

I think it's much less satisfying to see an owner just "find" the money "somehow" - from rich parents or whatever, rather than see a more ordinary person who's obviously really struggling to pay the bills. Also the project time has massively extended itself from the original estimate of 1 year, to 4 years. Justin partly envisaged the house as something his little boy, George, would enjoy, but by the time the house is ready to move into, the boy is now away at boarding school for much of the year - what madness!!!!

the finished project - a horrible mish-mash of old and new

The interior of the house is also completely horrible, as Lois and I predicted, consisting of the usual Grand Designs-style lack of cosiness - it looks more like a corporate head-office building than somebody's home, with massive high ceilings, vast staircases, dining-tables to seat 12, sofa-areas to seat 20 - that kind of thing. Yuck!!! Needless to say, however, presenter Kevin drools all over it, as usual - no surprise there!!!!

And is it all just for Justin to rattle around in, now that George is away at boarding-school?

Well, not entirely. Also in the last 10 minutes of the programme Justin introduces us to his new Japanese girl-friend Hideko. But how long will she last before she's "upgraded"? The jury's still out on that one!!!