08:00 Lois and I get out of bed early to be ready for two our food deliveries this morning, from Budgens, the convenience store in the village, and from Waghorne's, the local butcher's shop. We're still swabbing every item down with a disinfectant, which is a pain, but we're carrying on with all that nonsense to be on the safe side! After all the R number is rising because of the Indian/delta variant of COVID, although we're guessing there aren't nearly so many hospital admissions, because most people have been vaccinated now.
We're not going to take any risks now, just to save time, that's for sure. Plus we're both creatures of habit, so it's easier this way haha!!!
11:00 Lois and I are still buzzing from yesterday's fascinating talk from York University's Festival of Ideas, all about the Great Viking Army that kickstarted England's first modernisation push starting in the 860's. We even talked about the book in bed last night - what madness!!!!
We decide to order a signed copy of the book by the joint speakers at the event, married York University professors Julian Richards and Dawn Hadley, who didn't have to socially-distance for their zoom talk, which was nice!
flashback to yesterday's talk: chairperson Steven Ashby introduces
speaker-couple Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards
14:00 We get on the sofa, and watch the film version of the musical Oklahoma. My father took me and my siblings to see this film at our local cinema in Bristol in 1960.
Once more, Lois is highly critical of the lengthy dream sequence: the story's heroine Laurey is uncertain whether to marry Curly, the good guy, or to go with Jud, the bad guy, so she takes the unusual step of sniffing a bottle of smelling salts she bought from Ali, the pedlar. The resulting dream based on the smelling salts is supposed to tell her definitively which man to "hitch her wagon to".
part of the annoying dream ballet scene in Oklahoma
We discuss whether it would be worth emailing the studio that made the film, in an effort to get them to shorten this dream sequence, which is quite annoying, we both agree! We feel it may perhaps be too late for that now, but we're not 100% sure - so the jury's still out on that one!
It was called the Paratethys Sea and was bigger than today's Mediterranean. And it was caused by the same movements of tectonic plates that also created most of the mountain ranges in Europe and Asia, while trapping a huge area of ocean in part of the Eurasian continent.
one of the stand-out songs from my musical -
16:00 We have a cup of Earl Grey tea and a currant bun on the patio.
I look at my smartphone, to find a notification from the Ancient Origins website. I didn't realise that a massive mega-lake appeared in Eurasia 12 million years ago.
What crazy weather they used to get in those far-off times!!!
Around 7 million years ago, a series of droughts made the mega-lake start to shrink, but it retained all its salt, so the smaller the mega-lake became, the saltier it became at the same time. Eventually a crack in the western sides of the mega-lake made most of its remaining water drain into the Mediterranean.
Biologists now believe that many of Africa's animal species - giraffes and elephants for example - originally evolved around the southern shores of this Paratethys Sea. They eventually migrated south into Africa, probably because climate change made their original habitat too dry for them. And the rest is history.
Today the only direct remnant of the Paratethys mega-lake is the Black Sea.
But the other important effect of the disappearance of the mega-lake was the fact that the great Russian Steppes became "nice'n'dry" afterwards, so that they could eventually be settled in by our distant language-ancestors, the Indo-Europeans, who were speaking the ancestor language of English there about 5,000 years ago. They were the people who first thought of the word "man" for example - sheer brilliance haha!
I once wrote a musical about the Indo-Europeans, calling it "Eurasia! - the Musical(!)" [optional second exclamation mark], themed around the eternal tension between farmers and foragers in those far-off times.
the iconic poster I designed for my musical
one of the stand-out songs from my musical -
"The Farmer and the Forager Should Be Friends" -
and it's more than stood
the test of time, I think you'll agree !!!!
Isn't history wonderful!!! Who would want to study anything else?!!!!
20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to make a phone call to her friend Rosemary, whom Lois has known since childhood, and who now lives just the other side of Bristol. Rosemary is a former member of Lois's sect, and she's been listening in to the sect's various zoom sessions for some time now, and members are hoping they can tempt her back into the fold.
With Lois occupied with something else, it's a chance for me to watch the rest of Episode 10 of "The Killing", the 20-part Danish crime series, which Lois doesn't like.
The series is all about the murder of a teenage high-school student, Nanna. And I have to say, I think this is a really good plot, with lots of suspense. Every episode it seems that there's a different "main suspect", often somebody who pops up in the story out of nowhere - my god!
Tonight there's a new suspect suddenly in the frame - a creepy politician called Jens Holck, leader of the Moderate Party and supporter of shifty mayor, Bremer. And tonight the star-detective, Sarah Lund, finds out that Holck is rumoured to have been having an affair, which has been causing the break-up of his marriage. Was Holck's mysterious affair with Nanna, the murdered high-school student?
creepy politician Jens Holck (right), leader of the Moderates, caught on
surveillance camera at a drinks-party at the Town Hall on the night of the murder
We know that shortly before her death Nanna met a man she started sleeping with. She had got a job as a waitress in a nightclub, which was where she met the man, according to her friend and fellow-waitress Charlotte.
Pernille (left) the murdered girl's mother, goes to the nightclub where
her daughter worked, to talk to the daughter's best friend, Charlotte
after Pernille goes home, we see waitress Charlotte in the lady's room -
is she sniffing cocaine? Unfortunately Lois isn't here for me to ask - damn !!!!
Fascinating stuff !!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her phone conversation with Rosemary and we watch a bit of yesterday's Springwatch wildlife programme before turning in to bed early - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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