10:00 Lois and I get a delivery of our next week's groceries from the convenience store in the village, who operate a delivery service for the area's old codgers.
This week, as it's Easter weekend, Lois has paid for chocolate or wine for all the volunteers who run the system, and she wishes the guy "Happy Easter" as he drops off the delivery, before realising that the guy could be a muslim: he's slightly swarthy and has some sort of head covering of unidentified type - oh dear, let's hope he wasn't put out by the "Happy Easter" reference, it was kindly meant!
Oh dear (again) !!!!!
Budgens (left) the convenience store in the village
11:00 It's really cold again today, but Lois goes for a walk on the local football field. I don't go with her today. Connor, my NHS physiotherapist has scheduled an "exercise day" for me today. I ask her to check how many old codgers are out there on the tennis courts. It turns out it's only about 6, which is manageable haha!
six old codgers today on the tennis courts - not too bad !!!!
16:00 We relax on the sofa with a cup of tea and a muffin. I look at one of the books I got for my birthday, "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" by David W. Anthony.
flashback to last week: I showcase the 3 books I got as birthday presents.
David W. Anthony's book is the middle one
I'm trying to follow the argument. Anthony is talking about the language known as Indo-European, the ancestor of virtually all European, Indian and Iranian languages. At the moment he's concentrating on the chronology.
When did Indo-European, our so-called "mother language", start splitting up into "daughter languages"? He thinks that 3,500 BC is the latest possible date for this process to have begun happening: but it could also have happened at any time in the previous 1000 years (4500BC - 3500BC), so not an exact science so far, is it haha!
And he further demonstrates that by 1500 BC Proto-Indo-European had at least 3 daughter languages and 3 grand-daughter languages, being spoken in various areas: (1) Old Indic, with a language community based in the area of today's Punjab, (2) Mycenaean Greek, spoken in the area of mainland Greece and some Mediterranean islands, and (3) Pre-Anatolian, with its 3 daughter languages, Hittite, Luwian and Palaic, all spoken in the area of Turkey and Syria.
Anthony's helpful explanatory diagram [???? - Ed]
The Pre-Anatolian daughters are the oddest of the lot because they were quite primitive, and only had two tenses - present and past, and had no "duals" - spooky! They must have been the earliest to split off from Proto-Indo-European, that's for sure.
I've got to try and remember all this, otherwise I'm going to get completely lost reading the next few chapters of Anthony's book, that's for sure! Yikes!!!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, the first part of a documentary series on the life of Winston Churchill.
Channel 5 have really got their act together with documentaries now - they used to be done on the cheap, but now we think they manage to get really good experts to plan and write them, which is nice. That's the key, we think, and not just sending B-list celebrities to stand in front of exotic landscapes, or just stitch together bits of archive film and stills. That's what we think anyway!
It's interesting and inspiring to see how close Churchill came to death so many times after he arrived in South Africa as a journalist, sent to cover the Boer War. And the big question is, if he had died out there at the turn of the century, what would Britain have done in 1940, when France had surrendered, the USA was neutral and Hitler was allied with Stalin?
Lois and I think that Britain would probably have come to some agreement with Hitler, sealing the status quo in Europe in Hitler's favour, and putting Hitler in an unassailable position. But who knows, the jury's still out on that one, that's for sure.
In 1899, after failing in his first attempt to get elected to Parliament, Churchill sailed to South Africa to cover the Boer War which had just broken out, on behalf of the Morning Post newspaper.
the group of war correspondents who sailed to South Africa in 1899
to cover the Boer War, which had just broken out.
Churchill is 4th from the right in the middle row.
After a couple of months the train he was travelling on was attacked and derailed by the Boers, and Churchill was captured as a Prisoner of War (POW).
Churchill (right) after his capture by the Boers
He made an incredible escape from the place in Pretoria he was being imprisoned in, and with almost nothing in the way of supplies he travelled hundreds of miles, by train and on foot, through Boer territory to Lourenco Marques in Mozambique, from where he was able to get back to safety in Durban, in British territory. The Boers had put a reward of £25 on his head, dead or alive - yikes!
the Boers' "Wanted" poster for Churchill
(English translation of the Boer poster)
At one point during his escape through Boer territory he had, in desperation, knocked on a farmer's door, and - thousand to one chance - the farmer just happened to be British - what luck, eh?!!!! Thank you, God, as Basil Fawlty once said!!!!
21:00 We continue to watch TV, an interesting documentary about the life of the novelist Jane Austen.
We don't really need to watch this programme, because Lois is (unofficially haha) a leading world expert on Austen, so I can always ask her if I have any questions.
But isn't it astonishing how Jane died, in 1817 at a relatively early age (41), without ever seeing her name in print on a single one of the novels that had by that time been published. Also that her original gravestone doesn't even mention the fact that she was a novelist.
Jane's original gravestone - no mention of her being a writer: what madness!!!!
Contrast that with Jane's legacy today, when 200 years later she is still being read around the world, with her books continuing to inspire numerous films, from Hollywood to Bollywood.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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