09:00 Lois and I struggle out of bed. Today is International Women's Day and I've earmarked one or two radio and TV programmes to record that I hope Lois will be interested in. I'm so thoughtful haha!
It's also my parents' wedding anniversary - they're not around any more, obviously, but it was this day 76 days ago that they got married at the Registry Office in Oxford.
flashback to March 8th 1945 - my parents photographed after their wedding
in the back garden of my maternal grandmother's house in St Mary's Rd, Oxford.
My father was on special leave from the Army. What an awfully long time ago that was !!!!
11:00 We wait for our delivery of groceries to arrive from the local Sainsbury's supermarket, all the kinds of things we can't get from the village convenience store. When it arrives, we swab everything down with disinfectant, and then we go out for a walk on the local football field.
Schoolchildren went back to school today for the first time in a few months or so, so the only people do be seen are old people like us, the occasional younger adult, usually a dog-walker, and children below school-age. But the sun is shining, the Whiskers coffee stand is getting plenty of customers, and there's a new air of optimism as people feel that lockdowns are on the way out for good, hopefully - but who knows?
we go for a walk on the local football field -
the sun is shining, and there's a new air of optimism around
12:00 We come home from our walk, and then it's time for lunch and then to bed for a nap.
16:00 We have a cup of tea on the sofa, and I look at my smartphone. This morning we saw quite a few people on our walk, but we don't recognise anybody. I check my European haplo-group information to see where they might have come from.
Luckily, Yriana Tynkkynen, the Norway-based civil architect with an interest in DNA and genetics, has produced another thoughtful update on the situation on the quora website, which is nice.
Someone has been asking him to comment on how different today's Scandinavians are from their neighbours, the "Uralic" Finns/Estonians.
Tynkkynen points out that they're not very different from each other - haplo group 'N' (the Uralic peoples) and haplo group 'I' (the "Germanic peoples") and haplo group 'R' (the general European peoples) all left Africa at the same time, which must have been a sight to see, no doubt about that!
Not only that, but the 3 groups were sufficiently friendly with each other to stay together till they got to the Saudi Arabian peninsular, when (I'm guessing here) there must have been some almighty bust-up or argument: as a result haplo group 'I' (the Germanics) went their own sweet way through Southern Europe and into Scandinavia. What madness!!!
In Saudi Arabia, after a big row, group 'I' storms off and leaves the others behind -
they then make their way into Europe and then north into Scandinavia
Groups 'N' and 'R' carried on together for a while, going north up to Iran, but then there must have been another big bust-up there, because group 'N' stormed off into Asia and round into Finland, while the 'R' group carried on into Europe and India. People were so sensitive in those days, weren't they - my god!
Something (or someone) offends group 'N' and they storm off into Asia and round to Finland
meanwhile group 'R' carries on into Europe and India, possibly
feeling a bit lonely after all the other groups decided to "leave them to it" - oh dear!
What a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days!!!
On reflection we're not sure whether we met any of these groups on the football field today - we probably need a bit more information in order to spot them and assign labels to them definitively, no doubt about that!
17:45 Our daughter Alison, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, rings us. They're trying to move to a new house in a quieter location a few miles away over the county boundary, in Hampshire. She rings us to say that the deal has now been done, half an hour or so ago - contracts have been exchanged, and they're moving in on Friday: yikes! They're going to be busy for a few days, to put it mildly - my god!!!!
18:00 I see an awful non-story on the local news. The Cheltenham Gold Cup horse-racing festival is going ahead next week about a mile from our house, but spectators are banned, of course, because of the pandemic.
Not to be outdone, the local news website is today giving us a list of so-called "celebrities" that we won't be seeing this year - what madness!
The so-called "celebrities" we won't be seeing at the Races this year seem to consist mostly of participants in TV reality series, like the awful "Love Island", which Lois and I don't watch, of course!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-rrom to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the couch to watch the 10th and final episode of "The Great", a series based loosely on the life of the future Catherine the Great of Russia. It's a series that Lois doesn't like, so it's a good opportunity for me to have a look at it.
Catherine wakes up on the morning of her birthday. She's in bed with her young lover, Leo, and she makes a spur of the moment decision to launch her coup against her husband, the Emperor Peter III, later that very day.
Catherine gets out bed and goes to raise Velementov, the head of the Russian Army, who is sympathetic to her cause - his support will be crucial to the success of the coup. She finds him sleeping with some woman or other - I'm not sure who she is: there are far too many characters in this series. My god!
Catherine's plan is that she herself will stab and kill her husband Peter, but she's not sure how to do it and whether she has the courage to go through with it. So Velementov, the Army chief, gets hold of a freshly dead body - there are no shortages of these apparently: what madness! He marks the body with X's in the places that are "instant kill spots", and gives Catherine a dagger, so that she can have a practice, or what we might call today a "dry run".
The day of the coup proves to be of mixed fortunes for Catherine and the coup-plotters, but the series ends on a cliff-hanger. After humming and hawing, Catherine decides to go for it, and she gives the nod to Velementov to begin the slaughter of the Palace Guards and launch the coup.
Oh dear, now we'll have to wait for the next season to find out what happens - damn !!!!
But what a crazy life they led in Imperia Russia in those days!!! My god !!!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her seminar and we settle down to watch our favourite TV quizzes, "University Challenge", the student quiz, and "Only Connect", that tests lateral thinking.
Tonight on "University Challenge", Imperial College London play against Durham University. As the series moves slowly towards the semi-finals, it's getting harder and harder for Lois and me to steal a march on the students and find some correct answers that the students fail to find themselves. Oh dear!
In the event we find 4 answers that the students don't get, which isn't too bad for this time on a Monday evening.
1. "Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times". This quotation appears in which book of the Old Testament, the first of the major prophets?
Students: Joshua
Colin and Lois: Isaiah
2. Identify this city, which was used as a temporary capital during wartime:
Students: [pass]
Colin and Lois: Debrecen, Hungary: the seat of government briefly during the Hungarian War of Independence in 1849, and again towards the end of World War II,
3. In 1818 Thomas and Harriet Bowdler produced an edition of Shakepeare's plays in which they removed anything that they thought was indecent. They called their edition the "Family Shakespeare". Which play did they say was "little suited to family reading. The facts which are adduced as proofs of adultery are of such a nature that they cannot be expressed in terms of perfect delicacy."
Students: The Winter's Tale
Colin and Lois: Othello
4. The Bowdlers removed all the appearances of the character Doll Tearsheet, from their version of which play, noting that every scene in which she features is indecent?
Students: Measure for Measure
Colin and Lois: Henry IV Part 2
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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