10:00 This morning, while Lois goes for a walk, I'm busy with various duties connected with the U3A Danish Group that Lois and I run - the only such group in the UK, surprisingly enough. Poor Joy, one of our members, has suffered a bereavement - we've got her a sympathy card.
And Scilla, the group's Old Norse expert says she needs my vocab lists put into a bigger font: I sympathise with her - my glasses are so far down my nose when I have to read something, that I'm thinking of having my nose lengthened by plastic surgery, to give my glasses what Hitler called lebensraum: and I should maybe have it done now, before I actually need it, as a precaution. I'm not sure: we'll have to see.
As it happens a lot of people on the internet are offering this type of nose job, so it'll just be a question of choosing the cheapest - simples!!!
Here are just two of the providers touting their wares on the web:
12:00 We've booked a Sainsbury's delivery for the 1 pm to 2 pm slot, and our idea is to get our lunch over before that, but once again the guy comes early - at 12:45 pm, so we have to interrupt our lunch to take the stuff in: damn! This is getting to be a regular thing, that he comes early. Of course we're always pleased to see the guy so we don't complain, but we'll have to take this poor time-keeping into account when scheduling deliveries in future, that's for sure.
When the guy has gone, we finish out lunch and then start swabbing the items down and putting them away. Oh dear there's another "sprout"-style debacle. We thought we were ordering "1 kilo" of sweet potatoes, but they've just sent the one sweet potato.
What madness!!!!
we think we've ordered 1 kilo of sweet potatoes
but Sainsbury's just send one - what madness!!!
This isn't the first time we've made this error - which should have been immediately detectable if we'd just taken the trouble to check the amounts on the bill. Oh dear!
flashback to December: Sainsbury's send us a single sprout
but there's a happy ending - a 3p discount
happy ending: Sainsbury's give us a 3p refund
A similar debacle over a Tesco delivery of just one sprout later went viral on the Hungarian news:
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the second part of an interesting documentary series "Make-up: a Glamorous History", this programme being all about the Victorian era. The presenter is, once again, the Nigella Lawson lookalike, Lisa Eldridge.
It turns out that the Victorian era was a bit more sensible and less outrageous when it came to women's appearance (and men's) than the Georgian one was - now who would have guessed that haha!
The Queen herself set the tone, apparently. Now who would have guessed that (again) haha! Even in her official portrait of 1859, Victoria's clothes are grand, but her face appears to be unpainted.
Queen Victoria's official portrait of 1859:
the clothes are grand, but the face appears unpainted
Victorian women had to look thoroughly domesticated, the perfect middle-class mother, the perfect middle-class wife. At the same time, however, a lot of women began to realise that they didn't look that good with just their natural faces: so they came to the conclusion that they somehow needed to use make-up, although it had to be subtle, and if it was labelled "for health reasons", they could get away with it. So anything labelled "skin-care" was permitted, and although lipstick wasn't sold in respectable shops, "lip salves" based on natural products like grape, were okay.
Proper, full-on make-up was inextricably linked to prostitutes and actresses: the two professions were regarded as being virtually interchangeable: what madness!! Both these sorts of women wore proper make-up, and sometimes an ulterior motive was also to disguise the effects of syphilis, which was rife at the time.
Victoria society was obsessed with the problem of prostitution, and ideas about what to do about it. Women wearing make-up in public were liable to be arrested by police on suspicion of being sex-workers: they were then subjected to an intimate physical examination to find out if they had a venereal disease or not - my god! If they refused to be examined they could be jailed for up to a year - yikes!!!!
Another idea that was fashionable in the 19th century was that your looks somehow mirrored your soul, so to use make-up was seen as an effort to disguise your bad qualities. This attitude was linked with the false but fashionable science of phrenology, and also with a lot of anglo-centric racist and snobbish nonsense in general - oh dear!
Men were allowed to use a sort of mascara, not on their eyes haha, but on their beards, to disguise greyness. And Victorian men certainly liked their beards - it was a bit like today.
Lois and I have often wondered why so many Victorian men seemed to be bearded, and tonight's programme offers an answer. Apparently at the beginning of Victoria's reign most men were clean-shaven, but during the Crimean War against Russia (1853-1856), soldiers didn't have the facilities to shave, and so at the end of the war they tended to arrive back in Britain with great long beards - and as they were also respected war-heroes, beards came to be seen as a sign of manliness.
If a man had grey hair there were also a number of dyes available, although they frequently contained dangerous substances like silver nitrate. And if the dye inadvertently spread onto your skin, you would clean it away with - guess what - cyanide. My god - what madness !!!!
What a crazy world they lived in, in those times !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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