Monday June 21st 2021

08:00 After our usual Monday shower, Lois and I get a parcel ready for the postman to collect. It's a birthday present for our granddaughter Rosalind, who will be 13 in a few days. It's been so useful during the lockdowns to have the postman collect parcels, with postage already paid online, so that we don't have to risk getting coronavirus in a crowded post-office queue. Makes sense to us!

Royal Mail's "Parcel Collect" service

10:00 My friend, "Magyar" Mike rings me. He's decided to give up driving, because he no longer feels safe: he's had a few "near misses" he says. Yikes! I don't know exactly how old he is, but Lois and I think he's about 85, so fair enough. 

Losing use of a car is a big step in the life of an older person - I remember how much it affected my father in the 1990's. I'm going to try and see if I get Mike to cope with online software like Skype or zoom - it would benefit him in all sorts of way, e.g. in speaking to his daughter Claire and family in Chesham. Mike uses email and looks at webpages, but he's generally not very IT-literate apart from that.

Flashback to 1994 and my first visit to Hungary: "Magyar" Mike (right) 

in happier times: we showcase our second-hand "excellent worker" 

medals from the Communist era

11:00 Lois goes out for a walk on the local football field, but I stay at home to wait for the postman. To compensate for my absence on the walk, I do "List B" of the exercises that Connor, my NHS physiotherapist has worked out for me, and I also do a 4.5 mile ride on my exercise bike (in the afternoon). Plus, I vacuum the whole house,  which is a work-out on its own, that's for sure. 

13:00 After lunch I see an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law. He comments on my blog of yesterday where I define one of the bewildering flood of trendy new words in English relating to interpersonal relations: so-called "gaslighting", which defines a certain kind of emotional abuse and manipulation.

He has another such word, a form of gaslighting, which Lois and I have never heard of. Here's a hypothetical scenario, using Christian-backed anti-gay rhetoric as an example:

1.    Deny: Christians don't hate gays. Christians love everyone. We just want everyone to have the love of the Lord.

2.    Attack: You only think otherwise because of the fake news pushed by the corrupt, atheist media that tries to slander Christians.

3.    Reverse victim and offender: We need to stand up to the gay lobby pushing their agenda down our throats.

It sounds quite Donald Trump-ish to us - did Donald perhaps take a psychology course at some stage in his career? We don't know, but we think we should probably be told.

16:00 A cup of tea and a piece of bread and jam on the sofa. I look at my smartphone, and I see that one of my favourite pundits, Yoan J.Leleu (crazy name, crazy guy), has been weighing in on the quora forum on the vexed question of whether the French-speaking Normans, who invaded England in 1066 looking as French as frogs' legs, still had some Norse words in their language as a relic of their Viking origins.

Yoan weighs in, pointing out that there are plenty of words in Norman French that originated from the Old Norse language of their Viking ancestors.

I was delighted to see that one of these words is "colin" - my own name. It means some kind of fish from the cod family ("koli" in Old Norse, "coley" in English, I guess), and it's passed into the French language. In the days when Lois and I used to travel to France and browse their supermarkets, I was struck by the frequency on the shelves and in the freezer compartments of "tinned colin" or "frozen colin", because I've often wondered what it would be like to be tinned or frozen.

a typical pack of frozen "colin" seen in a French supermarket:

here it's "colin of Alaska" - yum yum!

When the Vikings came to Normandy, they didn't bring many women with them, and so they tended to settle down with Frenchwomen. Family homes became bilingual, with children learning most of their words from their French mothers, but learning a minority of words from their Norse fathers - mostly words to do with the fathers' occupations, which in this case tended to be in seafaring. Hence the preservation of Norse words like "colin" - simples!

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 watch the rest of Episode 13 of "The Killing", the Danish TV crime series, which Lois doesn't like.

I'm coming to learn what the pattern is with "The Killing" - in each new episode a new suspect arises, who is eventually ruled out. Tonight a young civil servant, Olav, falls under suspicion. He's been doing work for the Liberal Party at the Town Hall, and it was a Liberal Party apartment where the murder victim, Nanna, was attacked and raped before being driven out of town and eventually drowned in the boot of a car, after it was pushed into a waterway and sunk. Poor Nanna!!!!

Olav falls under suspicion because of his connection with the party apartment and also because he's getting a mysterious pay supplement from some unknown source. But at the end of tonight's episode poor Olav gets run over by an unknown vehicle - I imagine Olav was being eliminated by the real killer so that he couldn't talk to police.

Detective Jan rings Detective Sarah in her car to say

that Olav has been located

Olav - he'd been hit by a car while he was crossing 

the street near the town hall - oh dear!

Poor Olav !!!!!

20:40 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we talk on the phone to Alison, our elder daughter, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children, Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10). Rosalind turns 13 later this week, and Ali and Ed have arranged a little "rite of passage" for the two girls: after a piano lesson in Liphook, they'll both catch the train to Haslemere and have lunch there, just the two of them, before making their way out to St. Barts (Isaac's school) from where Ali will pick up all 3 children and bring them home to Headley. Exciting!

(left to right) Lois, Rosalind, Josie, Alison, and Isaac

in the back garden of their rambling Victorian mansion

The builders will be arriving at their house probably Wednesday this week to start the renovation of this crumbling Victorian pile, so it's going to become a noisy place for a few weeks from now on, that's for sure.

Ali's family spent 6 years in Copenhagen from 2012 to 2018, and they've heard in the last couple of days that a mini-scandal has blown up at the children's International School over there. A student  that should have been self-isolating went to see one of Denmark's Euro-2020 soccer games in company with other students from the school, and some of his friends got infected with coronavirus - oh dear!

flashback to 2017: Ali and Ed were away, so Lois and I

took our 3 grandchildren to school each day

21:30 There isn't much time before bed, so we watch the rest of an old episode of Doc Martin to wind down, the one where Martin's wife Louisa has to have an emergency brain operation, and her husband, the haemophobic GP, Martin, shuts the real surgeon in a store cupboard and performs the operation himself.

I remember I never "bought" this episode the first time around - it seems too unlikely a sequence of events, if you ask me! Call me a hardened sceptic if you like!  [All right! - Ed]

Martin locks the real surgeon, Mr. Wentworth, in a store cupboard...

...and locks him in with a long-handled mop.

Martin then operates on his wife himself. What madness !!!!

The long-handled mop doesn't seem a fool-proof method of locking the poor surgeon into the cupboard , and why does nobody rescue him? Did he die in there? I think we should be told !!!!

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