08:00 Lois and I can lie in bed and still see out of our bedroom windows, which is nice. This is quite an advantage sometimes.
one of the typical views we can see from our bed
We look out of one of our windows this morning and we see that Mr. so-called "Tall Guy" has been working out in our neighbour's gym again, probably since 7 am. I'm amending the file I'm keeping on him: it could be that he's opted for a "twice a week" option of Tuesdays and Saturdays. That could be important! [I doubt that very much. As I've told you before: nobody gives a damn about Mr so-called Tall Guy, or his work-out schedule! - Ed]
flashback to last Saturday morning: (left to right) "Tall Guy"
and our neighbour, at the end of an hour's work on the "bench-press"
my role-model, film-star Michael Caine, tracking his own
mild-mannered neighbours' "suspiciously mundane" activities
09:00 Lois has had a bad night so I encourage her to stay in bed longer today. I will go downstairs so she can get some more sleep, and I tell her to give me a shout when she'd like me to come back up with our cups of tea. I'm all heart haha!!!!!
11:00 We do a spot of "Danish" on the couch and then have a cup of coffee. There have been little bits of light rain so far today, and we're hoping for more this afternoon. This will save us having to water the garden tonight.
Despite the weather forecasts of rain and thunderstorms, our area seems to have escaped, so far, some of the deluges that, for instance, have affected our daughter Alison in Hampshire, not to mention the London area and all of Denmark apart from the remote island of Bornholm.
What a crazy planet we live on !!!!!
16:00 I speak to Gill, my sister in Cambridge. The topic is 60-something BBC journalist David, the cousin, adopted as a baby, that neither Gill nor I knew we had until Gill's DNA found a match on a big DNA database.
David is ringing her tomorrow to chat, and he obviously wants to know as much about his "real family" as possible. The problem is that some of our other relatives have "sensitivities" about the issues which originally led to David being adopted.
flashback to earlier this month: Gill (2nd left) at the wedding
of her youngest daughter Maria
Gill and I know, for instance, that David has a brother or half-brother, Jonathan, and we think that David deserves to be made aware of this. But others of our relatives would possibly have problems with this !!!
Help!
Gill is going to warn David tomorrow about the fact that sensitivities exist, and she will ask him to be patient while we try to negotiate with the people concerned, to try and get a resolution. Yikes !!!!!
Meanwhile I will update the "interested parties" and invite them to put forward some proposals. It's like being in the UN or like working on the Northern Ireland Peace Process.
What madness!!!! [That's enough madness for today! - Ed]
typical scenes from the Northern Ireland peace process talks
18:00 Lois and I have dinner, and we can see that Mr. so-called "Tall Guy" is back, doing some more workouts in our neighbour's mini-gym. That's the second time today, and I'm as far away as ever in "cracking" what the rationale behind his scheduling is. Damn! He may have a randomiser app. Well, we'll see - I don't give up that easily!
19:00 We don't need to water the garden tonight, just the greenhouse, thanks to the intermittent light rain we've been having today.
And Lois tells me that Steve, our brother-in-law in Pennsylvania, advises that it's better to water in the early morning than in the evening. Evening watering encourages mould, I think. Suits me! It's a real pain to go out in the evening and drag the hose or a heavy watering-can around when you want to sit down and watch a bit of TV. What a crazy world we live in !!!!
19:30 Lois goes into the dining-room to take part in her sect's Tuesday Bible-Reading Group's meeting, but finds out that it's "on a break". By the time she gives up on it, I have started watching Episode 5 of the 3rd season of "The Killing", the Danish crime series, which Lois doesn't like.
However, sportingly, she offers to let me watch to the end of the episode, while she looks at possible houses we could buy if our daughter Sarah and family decide to move back to the UK from Australia.
The kidnapper offers to exchange little Emilie for Zeuthen himself, and the police pretend to cooperate with the plan, hoping to nab the kidnapper during the exchange.
Everything appears to go wrong, however, when it comes to the "exchange". It looks like the kidnapper gets wind of the police operation and shoots Emilie, while escaping capture, eventually managing to leave the country. But in a typical "The Killing"- style twist, all of this seems in doubt at the end of the episode, as the closing credits come up. Has the kidnapper really shot Emilie and has he really gone abroad, or is that what the kidnapper wants everybody to believe?
The series is complicated by a lot of political shenanigans, which I find it hard to follow. The Prime Minister is being accused of withholding information and bungling the affair. But his creepy opponent in the forthcoming election, Ussing, has been doing some shady work of his own with the civil servants in one of the Government's own departments. Whatever next !!!!
Also there are an awful lot of failed relationships which it's difficult to keep track of. The two star detectives, Inspector Sarah Lund and Inspector Borch once had an affair, the Prime Minister has been having it off with one of the other party leaders, i.e. Rosa Lebech of the Centrists; Inspectors Lund and Borch have a boss, Brix, who once had a relationship with one of the investigators investigating his handling of the case. And so it goes on - and that's just the tip of the iceberg! What madness !!!!
But I suppose Denmark is a much smaller country than the UK, so the chances of running into one of your exes, professionally or otherwise, is that much greater haha!
Chief Inspector Brix (right) discovers that the woman appointed to
look into his handling of the kidnapping is one of his ex-girlfriends
21:00 Lois re-joins me on the couch and we watch the rest of the recent film version of Stella Gibbons' classic comic novel, "Cold Comfort Farm".
And both Urk and Meriam agree to have their first ever wash, which is nice, and a gratifying achievement for the novel's heroine, their visiting cousin from London, Miss Flora Poste, who's been trying to tidy up the lives of her medieval country cousins. All's well that ends well !
The significance of the sukebind flowering has been the subject of much debate among Stella Gibbons aficionados, as Steve, our brother-in-law, points out.
Later we see Meriam having her first bath in the yard.
Mrs Beetle comment that there may soon be another little Beetle on the way, now that Urk's got together with young Meriam, and she notes also that "the sukebind" is flowering.
One aficionado writes: "Stella Gibbons invented the sukebind for Cold Comfort Farm, and she wields it with
metaphorical deftness as if it had its own long floriographic history to draw
on.
"I'd assumed that the sukebind and its blooming were indicative of animal
urges, especially un-premeditated sex. But then it's also associated with Ada Doom,
as a wreath of sukebind buds on Fig Starkadder's portrait is an explicit herald
of her impending emergence--and of all the Starkadders I'd say Aunt Doom is the
least in touch with their earthy sense of 'what comes naturally'."
But not everybody agrees - the jury's still out on that one. I think Lois and I will have to do a bit more studying before we come up with our own response!
22:00 For now we go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment