09:30 A zoom call with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, and with her 7-year-old twins Lily and Jessie. It's always a terrible struggle to get ready for in time for it, but we manage again by the skin of our teeth, although I haven't had time to shave - damn!
Western Australia is in the "grip" of a 3-day lockdown, Sarah says. They haven't had a single case of COVID in the state for months, but last week a visitor from Melbourne, Victoria came out of his quarantine hotel and went to stay with a friend: both visited various places in Perth and then both turned out to have developed COVID - shock horror! The state government announced the lockdown late on Friday, when a lot of people had already left Perth for the weekend - oops!!! It's sort of spoiled what should have been a nice 3-day weekend: it's ANZAC Day tomorrow (Monday), a public holiday.
But Lois and I really admire the way the state's prime minister has handled the COVID crisis - they've been really strict throughout: that's the only way, we think.
When the call begins, the twins are seated at the table at the back of the room, working on something. We find out later that they've been putting the finishing touches to their home-made card game, a version of "Pairs", where you have to find matching pairs of sea-creatures: all drawn and coloured by themselves - how cute they are !!!
we play the twins' home-made version of the "Pairs" card-game
Lily showcases one of the self-drawn cards, this one's the Sea-turtle
- how cute they are !!!!
flashback to my birthday last month - I showcase the 3 books
I got as presents, including the "Horse" one (pale green in centre)
This fascinating book is all about the original Indo-European language, spoken between the Black Sea and the Ural Mountains about 7,500 years ago, that was the ancestor of almost all European and Indian languages, plus Iranian.
the presumed Indo-European "homeland" between the Black Sea
and the Ural Mountains
Of course the language's speakers didn't have a writing system, so we don't really know what the language was like, although linguists can to some extent reconstruct the language by working back from Latin, Greek and Sanskrit etc.
It's interesting to me how it's possible also to estimate the frontiers of the huge area of land where the language was current all those millennia ago. Archaeologists have discovered from pottery and other artefacts that there are some parts of the world where fashions and customs spread quickly, and other areas where they didn't. The theory is that where these things spread quickly, it's because the people all spoke the same language, and where they didn't spread quickly, it was probably because here there was no common language.
the Dniester River was a language frontier between (1) the Indo-European
"homeland", which was populated by foragers, and (2) the Balkans, where farmers
had spread up from the south, speaking a different language from the foragers
The Dniester River was one of these "language" frontiers, lying on the western edge of the presumed Indo-European "homeland", while the Ural River represented this border on the eastern side.
Fascinating stuff !
Eventually, around 5000 BC, the Indo-Europeans started slowly to adopt farming practices of their western neighbours. They had noticed, by observing their western neighbours' farming results, that the farmers generally had more food on their tables and went to bed in a better mood - makes sense to me !!!!
when skinny foragers and well-covered farmers' daughters first met...
It's interesting that the adoption of farming seems to have led also to a more hierarchical society with a complex set of religious beliefs. It's not clear to me at the moment why that should necessarily have happened - hopefully the book will explain that in later chapters. I can see that if you want to grow crops you've got to stake a claim to pieces of land, whereas foragers could charge about wherever they pleased, spearing deer, catching fish and picking berries, and living for the moment etc. So farming brings a quite different mindset with it, that's for sure.
With this more hierarchical society, the Indo-European language developed a word that later became used to indicate a "king" - "reg" - seen later in the Latin word "rex", French "roi", the Hindustani word "rajah", the Irish word "ri" etc.
We no longer use this word for "king" in English or the other Germanic languages. But the book's author thinks that originally, in Indo-European times, "reg" didn't mean a king exactly, but was maybe a word for a high priest, somebody who "makes things right or straight" for the community. Our word "right" comes from the same source as this old word for "king". Other related words in English include "regal", "reign", "rich", the "ric" of "bishopric", even the garden implement "rake": because it's straight of course - simples!
a typical garden "rake"
a typical king or "rex"
Are languages not totally fascinating? Who would want to study anything else haha!!!!
20:00 We watch TV, an interesting the first half of a new documentary on Channel 5 on Edward VII, the so-called "Merry Monarch".
The conventional wisdom is that Edward was starved of love by his parents Victoria and Albert, and so he tried to compensate for that all his life by sleeping with hundreds of women - oh dear! He started early quickly getting a reputation as a frequent visitor to Paris brothels in the 1860s, and we see a chair he acquired there, allegedly for entertaining two women at the same time, although Lois and I couldn't see how it was supposed to work - answers on a postcard please haha!
Edward's chair for entertaining 2 women at once (?????)
He invited a number of his mistresses to his coronation - they all sat in the same row: the pew was called "the King's Loose Box" - what madness!
According to the programme Edward was reacting to his stern loveless upbringing. His mother Queen Victoria tried to micro-manage him from an early age: when he married the Danish princess Alexandria, Victoria even photobombed his wedding photos, dressed in widow's threads, and looking miserable, staring at a bust of her late husband. My god!!!!
one of Edward and Alexandria's wedding pictures:
Victoria (centre) photobombed it looking miserable and staring
at a bust of her late husband, Albert - my god!!!!
Victoria also tried to be present at the birth of the couple's 6 children - in the end Edward decided to delay telling his mother about the imminent births until the last moment, so that she wouldn't have time to get there. What madness!!!!!
On the plus side, when Edward became king, he brought back the idea of the fun of life, and put to rest the starchy, correct style of his mother. He cleared all the junk and rubbish out of Buckingham Palace, a building Victoria had hated, so that Alexandria and he could live there.
He also started much of the royal pageantry that still continues today. Victoria had only very rarely presided over the State Opening of Parliament, for example. Edward made a point of doing this every time, and he read in person the speech written for him by whoever was the Prime Minister of the day, all about the measures the Government was planning to bring in. This tradition has been followed ever since, of course.
Edward made a point of presiding over the State of Opening of Parliament
Marconi's first transatlantic telegram from Theodore Roosevelt to Edward
What a crazy world they lived in, in those days !!!!!
21:00 Meanwhile work on my latest musical, "Eurasia! - the Musical" is coming on apace.
I'm introducing a new song into Act I:
"Take me back to the Black Sea,
The Black Sea and the Urals,
To the beautiful foraging country that I love."
I've also added a few more lines to my song, "The Forager and the Farmer should be Friends".
[a forager's gal sings:]
I'd like to say a word for the forager,
He walks the shoreline
Hoping to hook a piece of cod.
He roams that Black Sea strait
With just a fishing-rod for a mate
[a farmer's daughter interjects:]
I sure am feeling sorry for that fishing-rod !
[He's hardly likely to hook any cod in the Black Sea - Ed]
[I only said "hoping to hook" a piece of cod. The forlornness of this hope is meant to emphasise the pathos of the situation - Colin]
[What madness! Go away and don't come back until you've come up with something better! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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