Thursday May 20th 2021

08:00 Lois and I don't want to get out of bed. Another wet and windy day is forecast, with winds gusting at more than 40 mph this afternoon. And tonight doesn't look much better - yikes!

By contrast, Steve, our American brother-in-law, who lives just outside Philadelphia, says that after an indifferent start to May, temperatures have been soaring since Tuesday and are set to reach the 90's Fahrenheit (30's Celsius) by Sunday. 

What a crazy planet we live on !!!!

09:00 We look at the news. The Indian variant of coronavirus is making up a bigger proportion of infections, but it hasn't hit this area at all as yet, and a report suggests that the astrazeneca vaccine, that Lois and I have had, is 97% effective against the variant, which is good enough for us. We're not greedy haha!!! 

The last, most recent map, dated 8 May, reflects the increased surge testing in Bolton, Blackburn and Bedford. More testing equals bigger figures, just of itself of course.

14:20 After a nap in bed we get ready for the fortnightly meeting of our U3A Danish Group on Skype. We'll be one less than last time - Scilla, the group's Old Norse expert, can't join us today, so we'll have to do without her interesting comments on how today's language has changed for the language that the Vikings used a thousand years ago, and the form of the language that they brought to Scotland and Eastern England, which is a pity.

I get ready to greet our group's members on Skype, while Lois does

some last-minute revision at the table

14:35 Eventually the meeting begins, when everybody signs in, and it's super-long today, lasting 1 hour 45 minutes - my god! Lois and I are absolutely drained by the end of it, as always. 

But we get some interesting chat (in English unfortunately!), and interesting news, particularly from our only genuinely Danish member Jeanette, who's son lives on a kibbutz in Israel - apparently they are north west of Tel Aviv, so they haven't been affected too much by the current conflict with the Palestinians. However it seems that some (presumably) Palestinian person or sympathiser set light to one of the kibbutz's fields the other day. My god!

Jeanette, the only genuinely Danish member of our group

As meeting moderators, Lois and I are more than happy to let the chatting have full rein. After all we have been in the middle of a pandemic for well over a year, and people need every chance they can get to chat - it's only natural, isn't it.

Later in the day we get news from Steve, our brother-in-law, of a marvellous Icelandic statue of a Viking, Thorfinn Karlsefni, that used to be on display in Philadelphia between 1920 when it was finished, and 2018 when it was dragged down and thrown into the Schuykill River.

statue of Thorfinn Karlsefni, the Viking, by Elnar Jonsson (1920),

where it was erected in Philadelphia.

The trashing of the statue was the result of the work of two separate bunches of idiots: (1) some white supremacists, who held a couple of rallies in front of it, and (2) a bunch of radical protestors protesting against the first bunch of idiots (presumably). What madness!!! These idiots are destroying world history - how pathetic can you get !!!!! 

Unfortunately, however, the world is full of stupid people (copyright Boy George) !!!!

Hopefully the statue will be restored in due course. In the meantime it's fortunate that there's a version of the statue still standing in Reykjavik (Idiots Keep Off haha!).

20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch and watch a bit of TV, another episode of ex-cabinet minister Michael Portillo's series "Great British Train Journeys".

It's interesting tonight to see the home of author Rudyard Kipling, best known nowadays for having written The Jungle Book. 

It was this house, "Bateman's", where during World War I, Kipling first received news that his 18-year-old son, John Kipling, had been wounded and gone missing on the western front. For a further 4 years Kipling went on hoping his son was still alive, before finally accepting the inevitable, that his son must have been killed in action.  

Kipling kept his son's bedroom as it was, with the young lad's old prep-school uniform hanging in the wardrobe. 

How did Kipling feel about the tragedy? He didn't go on record about it specifically, but there's a line in his famous poem "If":

"If you can lose, and start again at your beginnings,

And never breathe a word about your loss..."

And his poem "The Children" begins with the lines:

"These are the children that died in our lands:

They were dear in our sight.."

It's a long poem which describes the valour of the young people, the appalling things they suffered, with the last line, 

"....But who shall return us the children?"

Lois tells me something interesting at this point: that young John didn't need to have fought in the war at all - he had poor eyesight, and could have got exemption, but his father made big efforts to get him accepted by the Army anyway.

Could this fact perhaps shed an additional light on what Kipling must have been feeling about the loss of his son?

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz !!!!