Danskcolin: Wednesday June 16th 2021

09:00 An email comes in from Sarah, our younger daughter in Lower Chittering, near Perth, Australia. Her back has been giving her trouble recently, and it's her birthday in a week or so's time, so we decide to send her a gift card for a massage at a spa at Joondalup Resort.

Joondalup Resort

the Endota Spa at Joondalup Resort

This is nostalgic for us because Lois and I visited Joondalup Resort in 2018 and had lunch there.

flashback to 2018: our visit to Joondalup Resort

the little Hyundai that we were renting

Happy days!!!

Also come in on "Instagram" are some charming pictures of my sister Gill in Cambridge and two of her daughters, Zoe and Lucy.

My sister Gill and her eldest daughter Zoe,

at the Coffee House, Cambridge

Zoe and Lucy at Kingsway Golf Centre

10:00 It's warm again today, but Lois and I figure that if we go for our walk early it won't be too bad. Lois has some letters to post, and we'll do that on the way.

Lois posts her letters in the local Royal Mail post-box

we go for a walk on the local football field -

first time this year I'm going out without a sweater, which is nice

we pass a house where some rabid England soccer fan has

been plastering England flags on his house - what madness!!!!

It's the Euro soccer knock-out competition at the moment,

which means that there isn't much to watch on TV sadly - damn!

11:00 We come home and have a cup of coffee and a biscuit on the patio. The garden is looking really nice today. Mark the Gardener came yesterday and strimmed our so-called "mini-meadow" down a bit: we asked for an 8 inch effect, which is looking good: wild, but not too wild, a bit like Lois and me.

13:30 After lunch a parcel marked "Father's Day" arrives, which reminds us that the big day is coming up this Sunday. We order a meal from CookShop for the celebration: crispy roast half duck for mail meal, with salted caramel, chocolate and honeycomb cheesecake for dessert - yum yum!

Then it's up to bed for a nap. On my smartphone I see from the Ancient Origins website that Germany has been discovered to have its own "Stonehenge".

It looks interesting and it's a similar age to Stonehenge, but I don't think it's quite as good as Stonehenge because it's just made of wood. In fact it looks a bit like a set of multiple soccer goal-posts, perhaps for training the early neolithic teams perhaps? I don't know - the jury's still out on that one. Like Stonehenge, Pömmelte is thought to be an early astronomical calendar, to remind locals of the date, so they can check if they've got a meeting scheduled or other important event. What madness!

17:00 We get ready for what local journalists (i.e. me) are now calling "the second busiest evening ever" in our house. We've got to have a quick sandwich and a cup of tea at 5:30 pm and then get ready for another zoom talk from York University's Festival of Ideas:

The programme says: Event details

From Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to ‘Cat Person’ and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, author and philosopher Kate Manne will show how privileged men’s sense of entitlement - to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power - is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.

Drawing on her book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Kate will argue that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels [??? - Ed] and the seemingly intractable notion that women are ‘unelectable’. Moreover, she implicates each of us in toxic masculinity, revealing how it’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time.

The only way to combat it, Kate will argue, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them.

Kate Manne - tonight's speaker from York

Should be interesting! Then after a short break Lois has to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom.

Poor Lois !!!!!

18:00 We sign on to the York site only to find that the talk on Male Privilege isn't till tomorrow - damn! My bad - I got a reminder email from them today and assumed it was tonight. I didn't check the date - damn (again) !!!!!

It's that lockdown "What day is it? It's Blursday" feeling again - oh dear!!!

We use the spare time to water the garden and greenhouse. The forecast is for light rain overnight tonight, but the probabilities are not that high - we don't trust that forecast!!!! Call us sceptics if you like haha!!!! [You're a right pair of sceptics, aren't you! - Ed]

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch and watch the rest of Episode 11 and the first 20 minutes of Episode 12 of a 20-part Danish crime series, "The Killing".

Nanna, a high-school student, was raped and murdered after a Halloween party at her school. The main suspect, as far as detectives Sarah and Jan are concerned is Troels Hartmann, the Liberal Party's candidate for the forthcoming mayoral election.

Troel's alibi is that he spent the weekend of the murder in a hotel with Rie, who is his political aide as well as being his girl-friend, and that he was suffering from flu. Rie has confirmed this alibi. However, detectives Sarah and Jan have heard from the hotel maid, that only one of the two duvets was slept in. Fishy, or what?!!!!! Jan confronts Rie with the maid's testimony, but she tries to brazen it out.

Lois and I noticed in 1970, the first time we had a holiday in Norway, that double beds in Scandinavia are fitted with 2 single duvets. So this plot wouldn't have worked in a UK setting.

The website Scandinavia.com explains:

So the Scandinavian system makes sense, especially in cold climates!

flashback to 1970: our first visit to Scandinavia

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and, to wind down before going to bed, we watch an episode of "Comedy Legends" on the Sky Arts channel, this edition featuring comedy actor Sid James.

What people most remember about Sid James is his battered face, his dirty laugh and his streetwise Cockney banter, the master of any situation he found himself in - he always played essentially the same character in whatever film he was in. This was an odd persona to alight upon, considering that he was born into a middle-class family in Johannesburg, South Africa - he served with the South African Army over in Europe in World War II, and, after the war finished, he decided to settle in the UK.

I admired him most for his courage and panache in playing this same personality even when cast in bizarrely inappropriate film roles, e.g. in "Carry On Up The Khyber", when he played Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, Queen Victoria's governor of the fictional province of Kalabar on India's North West Frontier with Afghanistan.