08:00 A funny sort of a day starts. I get up and leave Lois in bed - she was suffering with a tummy upset overnight, and she doesn't even want a cup of tea for now.
10:00 Budgens, the convenience store in the village, delivers our groceries for next week. We usually split the anti-COVID swabbing between us, but I have to do it all today, including the fresh fruit and veg, which Lois usually does. Poor me haha!!!!
I order some new print cartridges for our printer. I reschedule till tomorrow our planned zoom chat with our daughter Sarah in Australia. I also produce a large font version (together with vocab lists) for the next 5 pages of the Danish crime novel that our U3A Danish group is reading. This is for the benefit of Scilla, the group's Old Norse / Viking expert, who has poor eye-sight.
It's hard to believe, but even some Vikings suffered from poor eyesight, as this photo proves. This couple were sailing with Leif Ericsson and actually saw America first, but it was kind of blurry, so Leif was able to claim later that he was the one who "discovered" it.
"Is that a continent over there?" "No, it's just our cataracts, precious!"
13:00 Lois has got up but she doesn't want any lunch. I rush into the kitchen and make one of my signature lunches, one portion only, which feels weird: cheese and cucumber sandwiches with mini-tomatoes, followed by raspberries from our garden for dessert - yum yum!
16:00 We start watching a bit of TV, and have a cup of tea and some bread and jam on the couch.
We watch a bit of "Love and Mercy", the biopic about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. It keeps switching between when he's writing all the Beach Boys songs and later in his life, when he's suffering from mental illness. We're enjoying it, but the guy playing the "Old" Brian (John Cusack) just doesn't look like Brian to me, and that takes some of the edge off it from my viewpoint - I'm so shallow !!!!!
John Cusack as "Old" Brian (centre) with his crazy "minder" Eugene (left)
and his almost-girlfriend, Melinda, the car-salesperson (right)
I ask you - does he look like Brian? [All right, that's enough of all that! - Ed]
This is the real Brian -
17:00 I rush into the kitchen to do some dinner for us, two more of my extensive range of signature dishes: chicken soup for Lois, and for me, corn beef, baked beans and boiled potatoes, with ketchup - yum yum!
What can I say, other than "Yum yum!!!" !!!!
Another episode of this fascinating documentary, and another book Hemingway is working on, and guess what goes with that - yes, a new woman for Hemingway to go to bed with. Two new women, to be precise - first Hemingway's fellow journalist in London, Mary Welsh, whom he marries, and then an 18-year-old Italian girl he meets in Venice. My god!
When we start the programme he's still with his third wife, another fellow journalist in London, Martha Gellhorn. They are both covering the D-Day landings for Collier's Magazine, and both cross the Channel in landing-craft, but whereas Ernest is not permitted to land and has to stay onboard the boat, Martha tricks her way onshore and so files a much fuller report.
Despite this, the magazine chooses to highlight Ernest's report on its front cover, and consigns Martha's to the inside pages - typical, says Lois !!!
Eventually Hemingway gets to France and joins the US forces in his role as a war correspondent. Journalists are forbidden to take part in combat operations by the Geneva Convention, but, as we know, Hemingway is a rule-breaker, and he takes no notice. at one point lobbing a grenade down a staircase into a cellar where some Germans were known to be hiding.
He enters Paris ("the city I love best in all the world") with General Leclerc and the Free French, and then takes a full part in battles in the forests on the German border with US forces under Colonel "Buck" Lanham, who became his buddy for life.
Hemingway in Paris after the liberation, drinking
with his US Army pals
It's while Hemingway is in Paris getting drunk, that his future 4th wife, Mary Welsh, moves in with him.
He goes back to Cuba in April 1945, just before the end of the war in Europe, and Mary joins him in Cuba soon after.
Hemingway and 4th wife Mary Welsh in Havana 1945
Here we see another repeating pattern: like with his 3rd wife Martha, so with his 4th wife, Mary, he wants his women to give up work and devote themselves to him, giving him the emotional support he needs to carry on his writing, which is the be-all and end-all of his life; to be obedient, while being sexually free-spirited.
This is where he initiates Mary into his cross-gender experiments, switching sex roles in bed, getting her to dress like a boy, with short bleached platinum hair, while he also bleaches his own hair and impersonates being a woman. Oh dear!
Hemingway also bleaches his hair - oh dear, not good, Ernest!
And now Hemingway is even more seriously "over-drinking" as Mary calls it. And why not call it that? We talk about "overeating", don't we, haha!
He starts to deteriorate mentally big-time, and to have real psychological and general health problems, and, worst of all, his writing is in trouble now - he feels he's started to look old-fashioned, and there are plenty of new younger writers emerging to write the same genre of fiction.
In 1948 he visits Venice and becomes infatuated with an 18-year-old Italian girl from an old aristocratic family, Adriana Ivancitch, fresh out of convent school. Their relationship gives him a brief lease of writing life - he claims that he's "writing like a young man" again. Yes, Ernest, of course you are!
When his next big novel, "Across the River and Into The Trees" comes out, in September 1950, it's a best-seller but the critics hate it, calling it his worst novel yet, maudlin and with lot of sentimental triteness: in his last novel the couple "felt the earth move" after they had made love. This novel has the hero making love to a young Italian girl (copyright Adriana) in a gondola "with the birds flying" - I hope the gondolier kept the boat steady haha!
Literary critic Susan Beegel calls the book "a disaster", "not to mention
the lovemaking in the gondola, with the bird flying". Oh dear!
As this 5th episode of the documentary draws to a close, however, Hemingway is on a "health kick", but is it too late? Lois and I think it is, but we'll see when we watch the last programme in this series. I think we'll wait a while before we do that. You can't take too much of Hemingway-style, larger-than-life characters in too short a time-frame, can you. That's what we always say!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
