10:15 My sister Gill in Cambridge texts me. She recently discovered a mystery close relative, David, that nobody in our family knew about. He's a BBC online journalist who was adopted as a child, and as far as we know, he didn't know anything about his blood relations, until this connection with Gill came to light.
Gill discovered the connection with David only after she sent her DNA in to a large database. My wife Lois and I, and Gill herself, have all been doing some research online and we believe we have found a family of 7 adopted children, one of whom we think is David's half-brother, which David will probably be very interested to know about.
David has now told Gill he has some more information for her, and wants to speak to her by telephone. How exciting - what will be revealed next, we wonder.
Isn't DNA wonderful! Who would want to study anything else haha!
a typical piece of DNA (left)
10:30 The max temperature today is going to be 75F (24C) - phew, what a scorcher! The morning goes like a flash for Lois and me - we do a walk on the local football field taking with us our smart shiny new e-mugs (reusable), which we use for a coffee (me) and a hot chocolate (Lois) at the Whiskers Coffee Stand. It's reasonably quiet on the field, with only dog-walkers for company - what the Danes call "dog airers" haha!
Lois is wearing her fetching Australian sun-hat that our twin
grandchildren in Perth - Lily and Jessie - bought for her
some of the typical dog-walkers we see on the field today
11:30 We come home. There's been no rain for a few days, so we have to keep watering our enormous garden and greenhouse a lot, so I set to work refilling our water-butts from the kitchen tap. It's the ideal gardening "job" in my view - not too demanding, and quite relaxing: I just have to drag the garden hose down to the water butts, turn on the tap and watch the water level going gradually up.
I supervise the filling of one of our water butts
As I watch the butt filling up, I remember with nostalgia Carson Robison's hit country song "Life Gets Teejus, Don't It" (1948) with its upbeat message:
Water in the butt’s gettin' higher an' higher.
I can take a bath every night or more,
But I've heard it said, and it's true I'm sure,
That too much bathin'll weaken you.
Wise words indeed!
14:30 Time for a quick post-lunch nap and then it's time for me to take part in Lynda's U3A Middle English group's monthly meeting on zoom. We hear the second part of Cynthia's presentation on the influence of French on Middle English.
one of Cynthia's slides from her presentation
We have lots of fun during the presentation, especially when we hear about some of the awful French or pseudo-French loan words that luckily haven't survived into modern English, like "refeffement", a legal term which apparently meant "the action of
resettling property on one who had previously held it".
What madness !!!!
During Cynthia's presentation I get the opportunity to show off my knowledge of how Hungarian is pronounced, which is nice. Cynthia was explaining the theories of a Hungarian linguistics pundit called Ősi, whose name she doesn't know how to say - I am able to reveal (exclusively) that it is pronounced in a similar way to how an h-dropping Cockney would pronounce the name of the well-known chocolate bar haha!
the sort of chocolate bar that a typical Cockney would call an "Ősi" haha!
At the end of the session Lynda calls for volunteers to give presentations in the next few months, and I agree to give a talk about the influence of Danish on Middle English. Yikes - I hope I don't live to regret that offer!
I haven't envied Cynthia her task in explaining the influence of French on Middle English. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that there were at least 2 versions of the French language around in England at the time:
(1) Norman French which came over in 1066 with William the Conqueror and his nobles: a perhaps crude version of French spoken by these descendants of Vikings who'd settled down with Frenchwomen and had a lot of children by them, all of whom learnt French from their rustic mums, and who all grew up speaking this Norman form of French.
(2) The so-called "hoity-toity" French of Paris, which had quickly become fashionable all over the Continent, and was gaining prestige in England.
Later I look at my smartphone and I see that one of my favourite quora forum pundits, Tomaz Vargazon (crazy name, crazy guy!), has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "Why the Normans didn't just fully impose the French language on England and wipe out English for good?"
Tomaz starts his comments with a helpful map that illustrates the chaotic linguistic situation obtaining in France at the time, when there were dozens of different dialects, not all mutually comprehensible.
What madness !!!!!
Tomaz comments, "This map [above] is how approximately France looked
linguistically at the time. You have over 40 different languages and dialects
spoken in various regions of the country. Modern-day French was only established by
Louis XIII and Louis XIV, and based on a language spoken by French nobility. It
was established as the language of the whole French population only during the French
revolution.
At the time of the Normans, language was just something folks spoke, and if
the peasants spoke a different language from the nobles you called that a Tuesday.
Most of the nobility solved the problem by learning the language of the
commoners they ruled, and some commoners would learn the language of their
liege lords and that was that. No one was bothered by it, it’s just how the
world worked at the time.
Plus the Normans [who invaded England] numbered 30 thousand men at most
and many of those wanted to return to their homesteads in Normandy. On the
Anglo-Saxon side, Harold Godwinson could have mustered a hundred thousand men
if given enough time, but he was pressured to act hastily at Hastings.
Also, there was no “English language” at the time. This is how the Lord’s prayer
“Our father” looked like in Anglo-Saxon:
Fæder ure
ðu ðe eart on heofenum
si ðin nama gehalgod
to-becume ðin rice
geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum.
Urne ge dæghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgifaþ urum gyltendum
ane ne gelæde ðu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfle.
Note: ð is read as “th”, as in ðis = this; þ is similar, þe = the
I’m not a linguist, but it looks closer to Swedish than
modern-day English to me!"
Thanks for that illuminating post, Tomaz, and for your refreshing directness. I hope to see you on quora again soon. Don't leave it so long next time haha!
16:00 The U3A zoom meeting ends, and I feel completely drained, like I always do after one of Lynda's meetings. I try and unwind with a cup of Earl Grey tea and a Chelsea bun on the sofa with Lois.
20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in the series "The Hotel Inspector", where presenter Alex Polizzi visits failing hotels and restaurants and tries to give them advice on how best to start making a profit.
Quite an odd programme tonight. Middle-aged couple Sean and Janine run a back-packers hostel for millennials in Bude, Cornwall, the UK's 'surfing capital'. But they are averaging only a 16% occupancy rate, despite being the only hostel in town. So what's going wrong?
Presenter Alex Polizzi soon sorts out the low occupancy problem, by modernising the decor, then organising some remarkably photogenic millennials to come and be photographed there, with the pictures finally being plastered all over social media.
Trendy "octopus-themed" walls and a bunch of photogenic millennials
can work wonders on social media advertising!
But Alex doesn't seem to notice fully what Sean and Janine's real problem is - i.e. that the only time they get any privacy is when they're in bed (in the garage), and even then.... [phrase copyright: George Harrison]. This poor middle-aged couple have to share kitchen, dining-room, lounge with the back-packers and deal with the youngsters' constant requests for information about buses, trains etc. My god!
After Alex and the TV cameras leave, Sean and Janine decide to sell up. And they get the last laugh: not only do they get a much better price for the building after all the modernisation work, but also they manage to sell the place just before the pandemic hits!
Kudos, Sean and Janine haha!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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