Danskcolin: June 22nd 2021

07:30 Lois and I are still in bed when Mark the Gardener texts me - he wants to come at 8:30 am - yikes! I rush out of bed and open up the side gate for him, fill up our biggest water-butt, and clear the garden hose off the lawn for him. He arrives on schedule and begins work on cutting back the monster hedge between our garden and our neighbour Bob's property.

Mark the Gardener (just about visible in a white t-shirt) trying to tame

the monster hedge between our garden and our neighbour Bob's

09:00 Lois and I send a "Happy Birthday" text to our younger daughter Sarah, who lives just outside Perth, Australia with Francis and their 7-year-old twins, Lily and Jessica. It's just another working day for Sarah, unfortunately, in her accountancy job, but she's going to celebrate the birthday properly on Friday and at the weekend. We've sent her a gift voucher for a spa treatment session at Joondalup Resort on Friday, which will be nice.

She's 44 today - Lois and I always say that we know that we're getting old when our children start to approach middle age, and that's for sure! I had a look back and these two pictures were some of the earliest ones we have of little Sarah as a baby in June/July 1977 - what a long time ago it seems haha!

flashback to summer of 1977 in the tiny back yard of the

first house Lois and I ever owned. With Ruth (Lois's mum)

and little Alison, then approaching her 2nd birthday.

our little family of four all together

Happy days !!!!!

11:00 We have a cup of coffee on the couch. I look at the latest from ancient-origins.net, a touching story from the Iron Age. We all know that people used to bury favourite objects or jewellery with the bodies of the dead people who used them or wore them, but what happens when ancient peoples stopped burying their dead, and instead either cremated them or practised "excarnation" (flesh stripping, whereby the flesh and organs were removed, and all of the body's parts were thrown to the winds) ?

New research by Dr Lindsey Büster of the University of York, suggests that if there was no grave to put objects into, then the dead person's loved ones collected together their favourite mementos and other personal items from the person's life and buried them in a hole in the ground, sometimes long after the loved one had died, suggesting that they sometimes kept these objects by them for many years as a reminder of the dead person that they loved.

Dr Lindsey Büster of the University of York

How sweet! And very touching, I think. Technology advances, but human nature doesn't change, does it. Obviously the dead don't suffer after they've died, but their nearest and dearest are left with a gigantic hole in their lives.

We need things to remind us of the dead people who were dear to us. I have some large boxes of papers, photos, objects etc, one each for my late mother, father and brother, which I keep in my wardrobe: it even includes my father's teeth! I suppose I could put everything in a hole in the ground, but I prefer to let our children decide whether they want to keep them or not. Makes sense to me, anyway!

12:00 We go for a walk on the local football field - I haven't done one of these walks for a couple of weeks due to the showery weather, and it's immediately apparent how much the hedges have grown with all that rain - my god!

we pass the house of the rabid England soccer fan,

just visible over the burgeoning hedge round the field

today's walk on the local football field - the wind is from

the north east and freezing cold - brrrrr!!!!

19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's online yoga class on zoom - all the participants are in their 20's apart from Lois, so I think she's very brave. After the yoga class Lois stays in front of the laptop for her sect's weekly Tuesday Bible-Reading Group on google meet.

I settle down on the couch and watch Episode 14 of the Danish crime series, "The Killing", which Lois doesn't like.

I'm gradually working through this mammoth series now - I've done the first two thirds more or less. A teenage high-school student, Nanna, was raped and murdered after a Halloween party at her school. And And I've learnt how the plot works - in almost every episode seemingly there's a new suspect in the frame, who then gets eliminated from police inquiries in the following episode.

In Episode 13 the principal suspect was the young civil servant Olav, who, at the end of the episode, got run over and killed by a car outside City Hall. This was obviously deliberate, and not an accident. I've noticed how often bad guys try to murder somebody by running them over, and it always seems to me to be a highly unreliable way to kill somebody, but I'm going to let that one slide for now.

flashback to Episode 13: young Olav lies on the road,

murdered by a mystery car-driver outside City Hall

- poor Olav !!!!!!

Tonight, in Episode 14, star detectives Sarah and Jan have a new suspect in the frame, somebody that we haven't even seen before this episode, somebody called Philip Dessau, who turns out to be creepy Mayor Bremer's "special adviser", a sort of Copenhagen version of Dominic Cummings.

Dessau, a Copenhagen version of Dominic Cummings,

introduces himself to star detectives Sarah and Jan

Sarah and Jan are concentrating on the creepy Dessau now as the most likely suspect, but Sarah and Jan's boss, the creepy Brix, is still trying to pin the murder on Troels Hartmann, creepy Mayor Bremer's political opponent. Are Dessau and Brix all working for Mayor Bremer to eliminate Hartmann from the local political scene perhaps?

The plot thickens - yikes!

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom Bible Class, and we watch the second programme in Andrew Marr's new series on "World's Greatest Paintings". This one is all about Constable's picture "The Hay Wain" (1821).

This is Lois's choice - I'm not a big fan of programmes about paintings, or, for that matter, a fan of Andrew Marr with his serious face, who always sounds like he's announcing the outbreak of World War III. But it's quite an interesting programme as it turns out.

I didn't know that John Constable was quite a respectable, and decent, man for an artist - happily married with 7 children, devoted to his wife, and a lifelong Tory voter. Who would have guessed it? [I expect a lot of people knew that - Ed].

It's also interesting that the art world didn't pay much attention to Constable's paintings until he decided to make them bigger. He began producing what he called his "six-footers" - so big that if they were hung in a gallery you couldn't really ignore them - what madness!!!!

It's also interesting that the French art world took Constable's paintings more seriously than the British one did, and today they are now looked on as forerunners of Impressionism. And it was really only after the French staged exhibitions of Constable's work that the British critics looked at his stuff again and decided it was quite good after all.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

Constable's reward in his homeland was, that even during his lifetime, his home county of Suffolk was already being called "Constable country", and indeed as early as 1890, Thomas Cook travel agents were already advertising tours of "Constable Country". Fame indeed!

Before I go, here's a quick example of Andrew Marr's commentary style:

"When you think about it, [the Hay Wain] is an almost ridiculously banal image. [begins shouting to camera] It's the 1820's equivalent of a battered white van leaving a Tesco forecourt on its way to make a food delivery. This is 'John Constable gives you logistics solutions'. [quietens voice down again] And yet, when you look at it it is impossible not to feel humbled and proud, and very moved indeed."