10:00 While I go up to the bedroom and do the exercises that my NHS physiotherapist has scheduled for me, Lois goes out for a walk. It's still cold outside, temperature-wise, but it's sunny and with a bright blue, cloudless sky.
I remind her to take her phone with her - I'm encouraging her to practise her photographic skills, especially when it comes to selfies, and today I can exclusively reveal that she's really getting quite good, at least that's what I think - call me biased if you like!
what a gorgeous selfie - showing the hills and the blue sky as well!
Well done, Lois! Sorry am I being patronising now? - oops!!!!!
to cap it all, she takes this spectacular picture of the cherry tree
outside our house - just superb !!!!
11:00 We have a cup of coffee on the patio and Lois asks me if I can dig out our hosepipe and fill up the water butts from the outside water tap this afternoon - the weather's been really dry and there's no rain on the next two weeks of forecasting: not like the Aprils of our youth when it was rain-sun-rain-sun all day long! What a crazy world we live in !!!!
I decide to do the job before lunch to get it out of the way - it's a fiddly job getting the hose off its reel and uncurling it so that there are no "kinks". We have three enormous multi-gallon water butts to fill up. Also she wants me to water the raised beds at the bottom of the garden, so she can start planting things in them, maybe tomorrow.
I start to refill one of our three multi-gallon water butts
Meanwhile Lois does some more work on the greenhouse, watering the shingle and fumigating, that kind of thing.
meanwhile Lois does some more work to get the greenhouse ready
16:00 We have a cup of tea and a Weetbix slice on the sofa. I read a bit more of my book "The Horse, the Wheel and Language" by David W. Anthony, about the Indo-European language spoken on the Russian steppes about 7,500 years ago, the language that was the ancestor of English and almost all European and Indian languages, plus Iranian.
These "Indo-Europeans" were not that sophisticated, originally - they stayed alive by "foraging": eating berries, hunting deer, and catching fish.
Then about 5,500 BC they came into casual contact with some smarter guys, who'd learnt how to be farmers, keeping livestock and growing grain etc. These farmers had moved up from Anatolia in Turkey, via Greece, eventually reaching the Bug and Dniester river valleys of southern Russia. And they spoke a different language: one that's been lost to posterity now.
about 5,500BC the Indo-European foragers came into contact
with farmers moving north-east from the Balkans
The Indo-Europeans observed this alternative "farming" lifestyle being lived by their new neighbours, and eventually they gradually copied it. But it was a really big change of life for them, and a new mindset - if you're a forager you eat immediately any fish that you've caught, the deer that you've shot, the berries that you've picked. But if you're a farmer you have to be a bit more careful. You can't kill and eat all your cattle - you need to keep some for breeding more. And you can't eat all your grain - you need to keep some back to seed next year's crop.
This new mindset also led eventually to a more settled hierarchical society, much more wedded to the tribe's territory and cornfields, with new rituals and a distinctive form of religion - really one of the big changes in human society, to put it mildly! By comparison, foraging was much more happy-go-lucky lifestyle, where people lived more "for the moment".
The book's author, David W. Anthony, says that intermarriage with foragers' sons marrying farmers' daughters may have played a part in the foragers' adoption of the new farming lifestyle. He suspects, however, that the crucial element was probably simply that the foragers could easily see that the farmers usually had more to eat and generally had a better time and more fun, which makes sense to me!
Fascinating stuff!
And I've got the germ of an idea about maybe writing a musical about this momentous event: as far as I know, it hasn't been done yet. I've got a working title for my musical - "Eurasia!"
I've also started writing some of the songs, the first one is "The Farmer and the Forager Should Be Friends", and I have sketched out some of the lyrics:
The farmer and the forager should be friends
Oh, the farmer and the forager should be friends,
One man likes to strip a bough
The other one likes to milk a cow
But that's no reason why they can't be friends.
Eurasian folks should stick together
Eurasian folks should all be pals,
Foragers dance with the farmers' daughters
Farmers dance with the foragers' gals.
Promising, I think. I'm beginning to feel quite excited about it, which is a good sign!
my vision of how the song might be staged, a bit rough and ready
at the moment, but at least it's a start!
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, a programme in the series "Comedy Legends", this one being about the actress-comedienne Madeline Kahn.
Literally 5 minutes after the programme starts, Lois gets a phone call from her cousin Iris in Southport, so we have to abandon the programme and see it some other time.
Luckily there is just time to hear a bit of Madeline's incredible "little girl" voice that always seems to us to belong to somebody else.
With her voice, it's somehow hard to imagine her in charge of some sort of harem, but here she is - so you can't argue with that haha!
And the high voice always lends a somewhat ethereal tone to her classic double-entendres, but it certainly seems to work - my god!
21:00 Iris rings off and we watch a bit more TV, the latest programme in the "Amazing Hotels" series.
We're starting to get a bit fed up with this series, and in fact Lois falls asleep halfway through, not even waking when the closing credit titles come up - oh dear!
For me, my main interest is in checking whether the hotel of the week ticks all the boxes in my list of "must haves":
(1) It's got luxurious big beds
(2) It's got a nice view
(3) The staff keep birds out of your room
(4) The hotel isn't in the projected lava flow path from an active volcano.
It's a pity that this hotel fails the 4th test, because it passes all the others with flying colours - what a shame haha!
there are some awe-inspiring natural wonders I can do without, frankly!
Call me a coward if you like haha !!!!
Before Lois falls asleep she notices that presenters Giles Coren and Monica Galetti pronounce the adjective "Chilean" in a funny way. Both Lois and I have always pronounced it so that it rhymes with "million", "billion", "Gillian" etc. But Giles and Monica make it rhyme with [????] (Ed, I'll fill this in later, is that ok? - Colin) [How about "rhymes with Malayan?" - Ed] (Oh yeah, thanks! - Colin).
Why so hoity-toity, Giles and Monica? The old way not good enough for you???
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
22:00 I wake Lois up and we go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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