Danskcolin: Thursday June 17th 2021

08:00 Up early to be ready for a delivery from Ocado Supermarket after the usual Danish lesson with Lois on the sofa and the exercises that Connor, my NHS physiotherapist, has scheduled for me.

Also, asap, I have to buy a spa "freedom" gift card for Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia. It's her birthday in a few days, and she wants to book the spa treatment for Friday next week, when she has the day off from work. Busy busy busy! I'm supposed to be retired !!! How did I ever find the time to go to work haha!

While still in my pyjamas, I have to rush out of bed to log on

to the computer and order a spa-treatment gift card for Sarah,

our daughter in Perth, Australia. What madness!!!

How did I ever find the time to go to work, before I retired????!

11:00 The Ocado delivery comes. I'm expecting somebody called "Coleen" to be driving the Ocado van, judging from the company's email to me at 6:50 this morning.

As it turns out, the order is delivered by a big man with a beard, but I suppose that's not to say that he isn't called Colleen. I didn't check that with him, so I'm not 100% sure on this point. But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!

14:30 Lois and I settle down in front of the laptop for our U3A Danish Group's fortnightly meeting on Skype. An enjoyable 90-minute session - and also instructive today. Jeanette, our only genuinely Danish member, explains to us how upscale Danes can be a bit obsessive about raking the gravel on their driveways. They like to get their "staff" to use a rake to "swirl" the gravel into large curved patterns.

And in the Danish crime novel that we're reading, Anna Grue's "Dybt at falde", it's noticeable that the local police prefer to park out on the road, when visiting one of these upmarket houses. And this is just in order to avoid "messing up" the patterns on the driveway. What a crazy world they live in, over there in Denmark!!!!

the passage from the book in question. We think it's scandalous

that an important detective like Flemming should feel

forced to park on the road to avoid "messing up" the patterns

on some rich person's gravel driveway. What madness !!!!!

17:30 Lois and I have a "Magnum" on the sofa. No time for a meal - we had to have our main meal at lunchtime, because in 30 minutes' time we are part of the audience for a zoom session from York University's Festival of Ideas.

Leading feminist Kate Manne will be giving a talk at 6 pm called "Entitled: how male privilege hurts women".

Kate Manne will be talking about "male privilege"

18:00 We settle down in front of the laptop to watch Kate's session from York University on "entitlement" and "male privilege". Use of the word "entitlement" in relation to men, Kate explains, is essentially referring to society's notion that men are entitled to certain things from women, including sex, care, love, admiration, power, and that women are "punished" by society if they don't give them these things.

We understand that concept, but unfortunately Lois and I find we're not up to speed on some of the other terms used in the talk. The prefix "cis-" is used a lot, as in "cis-men", an expression which neither of us had come across before.

I look it up and I see that it's based on the "cis-" prefix in Latin being the opposite of "trans-", as in "Cisalpine Gaul" (the Gaul on the Roman side of the Alps) and "Transalpine Gaul" (the Gaul on the far side from Rome) - ha! So cis-men are not trans-men - or should that be that they're not trans-women? We're so confused haha!!!! But cis-men must presumably be the men who are happy being the sex they were born as.

We're not that impressed by this session overall. It's a pity that Kate decided to do the session as an interview from start to finish, we think. There's nothing wrong with the way York University's Karla Evans, the interviewer, conducts the interview, but it would have been nice to hear Kate herself spend at least some time saying a piece about why she decided to write the book, how she feels about the subject, and why she thinks it's important etc.

Also, we feel that what Kate says tonight is rather general, and not very specific, going through some of the many areas women have grievances about, including society's treatment of sexual assaults on women, "mansplaining" (men's condescending lectures to women), "gaslighting" (emotional abuse and manipulation of women by men), the increased pressures felt in the home by working wives and mothers, especially during lockdowns, and many more. And Kate's comments on these issues may be fine, we feel, but they are at the same time perhaps a bit predictable.

We don't particularly feel that Kate comes up with much in the way of new insights of the kind that make us think we'd like to read her book, shall we say. This may be unfair - the book may be full of such insights. It's perhaps the case that the session is trying to cover too much in the space of just an hour.

One of the things that most annoys Lois about the treatment of women is deficiencies in the medical sphere, whether it be research or general treatment. New medication is frequently tested mainly or exclusively on male "guinea-pigs", maybe because men's bodies are simpler. Women have more complex insides because they have the extra function of giving birth, but this also makes their reactions to new drugs more difficult to analyse, she thinks. Also, women's symptoms are often ascribed by doctors to "emotional" states of mind, whether due to menstruation cycles or other factors, she says.

Kate makes some reference to these medical issues but not extensively - again it may have been through lack of time and trying to cover too much in the hour. Also, surprisingly, we don't think there is any real reference to women's grievances in the workplace - is this because both Kate and interviewer Karla are both academics perhaps, and so not working in typical workplaces?

20:00 We have a bit of toast and tea, and then settle down on the couch and watch a bit of TV, the first half of the first programme in Alex Polizzi's latest season of programmes "The Hotel Inspector", where Alex visits failing hotels, pubs and restaurants, and makes some suggestions to how they could start to make a profit.

We only see the first half of the programme, but Alex, the feisty presenter, is as direct as always in her suggestions to the pub-owners in this case, James and Yvonne.

James, the pub landlord, turns out to be a sweaty man who doesn't care much about personal hygiene, and needs to smarten himself up a lot. And James's generously-endowed German wife Yvonne, whom James met when he was in the Army stationed in Germany, needs a more supportive bra.

Also James needs to clear up the pub car-park, which is littered with rubbish and left-over materials from his many unfinished D-I-Y projects.