06:00 I wake up to hear light rain on the window-pane, but it turns out not to be the deluge that the weathermen were promising, and we also get no thunderstorms all day, at least not yet at time of writing (5:15 pm). Damn! So I suppose Lois and I will have to water our enormous garden and greenhouse again tonight. It's too bad !!!! Really!!!!
08:00 Lois and I are still in bed - she sits up and glances out of the window, and happens to see that our neighbour with the mini-gym has got a client in there again, doing rhythmic motions that we assume are bench-press related.
The client is so-called "Tall Guy" again, and he was observed there exactly a week ago. Ha! He has obviously settled on doing a weekly Saturday early morning session in there. This info will go down in my file later today - it could be important! [I doubt that very much! - Ed]
flashback to last Saturday at the same time:
(from left to right) "Tall Guy" and our neighbour,
probably discussing "gym" matters, or something similar, by the look of them!
Lois and I go for a walk on the local football field. I wear my "Your Margaret River Region" hoodie, bought in Australia 3 years ago, to try and become more popular with local walkers and dog-walkers - but the jury's still out on how successful this is. The locals here are a tough crowd, no doubt about that!
12:00 We come back and have a cup of coffee on the couch. I look at my smartphone. I'm pleased to see that one of our favourite pundits on the quora website, Peter Kvint (crazy name crazy guy!), has been weighing in on the vexed topic of "How many Danes emigrated out of Denmark in the Viking Age, and which countries did they settle in?".
Self-confessed earthman Peter provides a useful map, which is quite striking, marking all the place names in England which are of Danish origin. They are obviously concentrated in the area known as the Danelaw, north and east of the wavy line, the area which in the reign of the great Anglo-Saxon king, King Alfred, was laid down as a different jurisdiction from the rest of England.
But what a lot of these Danish place-names there are!
Prof. William "Twink" Allan, the expert on horse fertility, has died, sadly, aged 80. He famously had a load of horse embryos to transport across Europe, with no easy method of carrying them safely - and he decided in the end to implant the embryos in the wombs of some rabbits, and took the rabbits with him in the back of a lorry: what madness !!! But it worked, amazingly.
we go for a walk on the local football field
The map even shows a few villages that were just over the line - these were places where the Danes were a bit naughty obviously, and decided that the Anglo-Saxons wouldn't notice if they started up a village on the wrong side of the border, as long as they were quiet about it. Sneaky!
Fascinating stuff !!!!
15:00 We go back to bed but get up at 4pm for a phone call with our daughter Alison. After that we listen to the radio for a bit, "Last Word" - we try and catch this programme every week, so we can see if anybody has died recently or not.
But poor rabbits - I hope they were given a nice meal after they arrived at the destination and were relieved of their "cargo". I'm not sure animal rights activists would approve of those sort of methods today, to put it mildly!
Prof William "Twink" Allen, who's died aged 80
Also Alan Lewis has died, a man associated with many music magazines, including the Melody Maker and New Musical Express, and Kerrang, plus the "lads" magazine "Loaded". He famously championed "punk rock" at a time before it became fashionable.
Alan Lewis, music magazine journalist (seated): Alan has died, aged 75
Debbie Harry of the pop group Blondie was very appreciative of Alan's efforts to popularise punk rock, and promised to give him a kiss when she was next in London. Unfortunately when she called at his office to deliver the kiss, he happened to have just popped out for "a quick one" at a local pub, so the kiss never happened.
Poor Alan !!!!!!
Debbie Harry of Blondie - wanted to give Alan a kiss
16:00 My sister Gill, who lives in Cambridge, has been collaborating with me on some surprising news she got recently, that we have a cousin or two that we didn't know about. It originated with a DNA test she was given for her last birthday in May, which put her in contact with David, a BBC journalist, adopted as a baby, whom we suspect is a "lost cousin" of ours. And Gill and I are fairly sure that we have another "lost cousin" living in Spain, who is either a brother of half-brother of David, and also adopted as a baby.
The saga could have come straight out of an episode of soap operas like General Hospital or Sunset Beach, and we're half expecting David or this other guy, Jonathan, to have an "evil twin", who comes crawling out of the woodwork, to make the soap-opera "feel" complete. My god!
typical scenes from the soap-opera "General Hospital"
Sunset Beach, the soap-opera where, famously,
"anything can happen"
Lois and I have today got hold of Jonathan's marriage certificate, so we now know with 99% certainty that he was born in 1949. But Lois has looked this afternoon and she couldn't find his birth record. Gill has now come up with another theory: that he wasn't called Jonathan at birth, but was renamed to Jonathan by his foster-parents.
This sounds unlikely, admittedly, but Jonathan's foster-parents were serial fosterers (7 in total - my god!), and Gill thinks it's just possible that they changed the new adoptee's name to Jonathan, because they already had one adopted child with Jonathan's birth name. It's worth a look, anyway. Gill is going to have a dig around in the next few days.
20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch a bit of TV, this week's programme in the series "Hemingway" about the famous American author.
We then get a picture of his time living with Martha in Cuba, just outside Havana, where he worked on his latest novel, "For Whom The Bell Tolls", eventually published in 1940. He didn't particularly like the Cubans, apparently, although he professed to the contrary: he settled for it because he felt it was like second best to being in Spain, which had now become impossible.
For Hemingway, the best thing about Cuba was that he could isolate himself from being American, according to the programme. He could spend time on his boat, catching giant fish and boozing with his drinking-pals, and hatching crazy schemes to harass German U-boats in the Caribbean.
the film of the book, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman
"For Whom The Bell Tolls", set in the Spanish conflict in 1937, and centred on the fictional American journalist Robert Jordan, was attacked by left-wing critics in the US as a betrayal of the republican cause, because it showed sympathy for the victims on both sides. In fact the novel in many ways gave a much more realistic picture of the war in Spain than Hemingway's journalism there had done: and he put into the novel some the things which he can kept out of his news stories, for example, about the involvement of Stalin etc behind the scenes.
Some critics thought that Jordan's love-affair with a Republican guerrilla fighter, Maria, was too "cloying". And who knew that Jordan and Maria were the first fictional couple to imagine, after making love, that they "felt the earth move"? [I expect a lot of people knew that! - Ed]
how the scene begins: too "cloying" perhaps, for some critics?
Watching the programme tonight on the couch, Lois is quite critical, to put it mildly, of Hemingway's treatment of his various women. Both his first 2 wives, Hadley and Pauline, supported him emotionally and financially for many years and were both cast aside like old gloves, when he saw another woman he preferred. For Hemingway his writing was all that mattered, and he saw his women as being there to support his efforts to write.
His third woman, Martha Gellhorn, whom he's living with in tonight's episode, was actually a bit like Hemingway herself, a strong independent woman, a writer and journalist, but the jealous Hemingway wanted constantly to push her back into the support role. Eventually, when they both decided, after Pearl Harbour, to move to England to report on the war from there, Hemingway got a job with the same press agency as Martha, Colliers, and after that, inevitably, his journalism tended to overshadow Martha's, which was a bit mean-spirited, we think.
Ernest and Martha toured Pearl Harbour early in 1941,
where he commented on the vulnerability of the naval base...
Some of Martha's early war-reports from England, but her
work was later overshadowed after Ernest got a job with the same agency
Fascinating stuff!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!
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