08:00 Lois and I lie in bed with our cups of tea, putting off the moment when we have to get up and get in the shower.
I look on my smartphone. Our son-in-law Ed, who lives in Headley, Hampshire with our daughter Alison and their 3 children, has been working from home for several months, due to the pandemic. Obviously he needs to create an "office" in their rambling, dilapidated, Victorian mansion, and Alison and he have been trying to get one into shape for him. Lois and I worry sometimes that Ali and Ed have taken too much onto themselves by buying this property in desperate need of modernisation, but they're young after all (45 anyway, which seems young to us haha!).
Ali, pictured on the right, standing in the "office"
before they actually moved into the property a couple of months ago
the office as it looks now, after some decorating,
and the installation of Ed's super-smart desk "Bolia" desk that
they bought while they lived in Denmark (2012-2018)
one remaining problem: a missing door - oh dear !!!!
Yes, the office has no door - damn! So I guess that while Ed is working in it, he may find himself visited by one or other of the family's two cats and one dog. Poor Ed !!!!
An office without a door - oh dear! And what person of my sort of age can't help thinking about the speech given by submarine commander Bob Newhart to the crew of USS Codfish, as they near the end of their 2-year tour of duty, and prepare to sail into port (either New York City or Buenos Aires, he's not 100% sure about which of the two it is).
Text-book oratory there, and we can all learn something from that, I think - bravo, Cdr Newhart haha!
08:30 To further postpone getting out of bed, Lois brings me up to date with the novel she's reading "Foreign Affairs" by American author Alison Lurie.
American author, Alison Lurie
The book recounts the adventures of some American academics spending time in England to research their topics.
One of these American academics, Fred, starts going to some fashionable parties and starts an affair with an English socialite called Rosemary, who has annoyed all her well-to-do friends by keeping her apartment in a disgustingly untidy state.
Eventually Rosemary is shamed by her circle of friends into agreeing to employ a cleaner, apparently a Cockney woman called Mrs Harris. Nobody in the circle has ever met her, but Rosemary amuses her friends by sometimes lapsing into an impression of Mrs Harris and reproducing her Cockney accent and her expletive-peppered speech.
American academic Fred's affair with Rosemary starts to cool off when she starts giving him the cold shoulder. And after that Fred finds he can no longer get hold of Rosemary. Whenever he tries to ring Rosemary, Mrs Harris seems to answer and she tells him Rosemary is not at home, giving him at the same time an earful of choice expletives.
Fred is due to fly home to the States, and he realises that some of his things are still in Rosemary's flat. He calls at the flat but nobody appears to be home. In desperation he uses the key Rosemary gave him at the height of their affair to get into the flat, and he goes up into the bedroom to retrieve his clothes.
While he is rooting around up there, a woman suddenly appears, mumbling expletives - Fred guesses that this is Mrs Harris, the vulgar Cockney cleaner, looking very dishevelled and very drunk. Fred gets a further surprise, however, when "Mrs Harris" starts unbuttoning her blouse for him, and he recognises the woman's breasts: it is in fact Rosemary herself, and he realises that the "Mrs Harris" was in fact Rosemary all the time.
Fred now asks himself, "What does this mean? Why would a socialite like Rosemary pretend to employ a vulgar Cockney cleaner? And so do Lois and I, to put it mildly. Answers on a postcard please haha!!!
10:00 We finally get out of bed and get in the shower, and after that we have breakfast and go for a walk on the local football field, wisely choosing a time when it isn't raining - it's proving to be a sunshine and showers kind of a day.
we go for a walk on the local football field
disappointment awaits outside the Parish Council Offices -
the Whiskers Coffee stand isn't open for some reason - damn!!!!
12:00 We come home and relax with a cup of coffee on the sofa. I look at my smartphone - Joy, a member of our U3A Danish group (the only one in the UK) has discovered that a Danish TV series that isn't about gruesome murders is now available on Channel Four catch-up programmes on line.
The series is called in English "Seaside Hotel", and is about an expensive hotel on the Danish coast, somewhere along the Skagerak, that was in business in the 1920's and 1930's. The series's USP (unique selling point) is that it doesn't feature dozens of gruesome murders, and bodies falling over each other or falling out of wardrobes, which will be a pleasant change, to put it mildly!
I'm quite hopeful about this series, because it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to persuade Lois to watch Danish TV series with me - hopefully she'll be more tempted by this one, because of its lack of bloody slaughterings. I read somewhere that it was inspired by Downton Abbey - my god, that's a switch haha!!!
some typical scenes from "Badehotellet" ("Seaside Hotel"),
a hotel with a low murder rate haha!
The Seaside Hotel only has a "one dagger" rating, which means that murders are infrequent or unknown.
What a refreshing change !!!!
Consider, for comparison purposes, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which has won the coveted "five-dagger" rating for several decades running. Guests here don't normally expect to check out, at least not in the regular way.
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, the first part of an interesting new documentary series on the evolution of intelligence in some non-human species.
I'd never thought about it, but it makes sense, that, as Peter Godfrey-Smith points out, you can take any two animal species and work out when they last had a common ancestor: an ancestor whose descendants split off into two divergent lines of descendants, often thanks to some absolute tiny initial change hardly noticeable at first.
a typical cephalopod - the octopus
a typical person
The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods, we can work out, must have lived about 600 million years ago - my god!!! The cephalopods include octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. By contrast the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived "only" 6 million years ago, so not that long - it seems like only yesterday haha!
The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods was a flattened worm-like creature that lived in the sea 600 million years ago, like all other life on Earth at the time. One line of this worm's descendants eventually led to the development of vertebrates, and then, further down the line, to mammals, and then eventually to us. The other line represents the world's invertebrates.
The cephalopods, who came from this invertebrate line, differ from their close relatives (crabs, bees, molluscs, spiders, centipedes, moths etc) by being on the whole larger, and endowed with a complex nervous system. They have distinct short-term and long-term memories, they engage in play, and they have the ability to recognise particular humans that they encounter. They have 3 hearts, which pump blue-green blood round the creatures' little bodies, using copper molecules instead of the iron which makes our blood red.
Their mental capacity sets them well apart from other invertebrates: they represent a separate experiment by Evolution, as similarly with their eyes, heart etc. What Godfrey-Smith is saying is that Evolution has built the mind twice over, as well as all these other bits that the original ancestral worm didn't have. He says that when we humans meet cephalopods, that this is the closest we may ever get to meeting an intelligent alien.
Fascinating stuff !!!!! I must try and meet one haha! [They say that going online is the best way nowadays - Ed]
21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we sit down to watch the first episode of a new drama series "The Pursuit of Love", based on the Nancy Mitford novel.
The Radio Times calls this a "racy version" of Nancy Mitford's novel from the 1930's, and we certainly see some racy scenes, featuring the two "besties" - the glamorous, romantic, emotional Linda and her mousy, more sensible cousin Fanny - in a bath tub together, in a bed together etc, with Linda fantasising about "copulating" with Fanny (not literally!).
We see the young Fanny and Linda measuring each other in the linen cupboard, and judging their suitability for eligible men or just any men - they don't meet that many: oh dear!
All good fun! But what Lois and I don't particularly like are the occasional modern touches that have been grafted in, like a bit of background music from T Rex in the 1970's and other modern background pop/punk style musical intrusions. What's the point of those? Surely the pleasure in these old novels is the chance to revel in the period and all its trappings?
What madness!!!!
Apart from that, it's all very enjoyable, especially seeing Linda's terrifying father Matthew, who hates all foreigners and children; and also meeting Fanny's mother, nicknamed "The Bolter" because she never stayed with any man more than for a few weeks - my god!
What a crazy world they lived in, back then in the 1930's !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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