10:30 Lois and I go out for a walk over the local football field. We're feeling a bit unclean because Lois successfully proposed that we postpone our Monday morning shower till tomorrow, so her hair will still be good for her Wednesday morning styling session with James, her stylist.
the "Billy Shears" hairdressing salon (second business on the left),
which Lois's stylist James has recently bought up and is now running.
Lois has an appointment for Wednesday morning
we make a beeline for the bushes to check out the blackberries
but we can't see what the "nasty" developers are doing at the building site behind - damn!
Lois here showcases the shiny new bench paid for by the "good"
developers, B+K Building Services, who are building the shiny new doctor's surgery
here she showcases a somewhat battered old bench,
kindly donated by the Parish Council themselves, bless 'em !!!!
We're not yet ready for these new benches yet, anyway, so we decide to sit down on one of the other benches, the so-called "Pirie Bench", with all its happy memories for us. We enjoy a coffee and a chocolate flapjack together.
we enjoy a coffee and a chocolate flapjack together
the ball games court is busy with Junior Soccer Camp, which is nice to see
the blackberries Lois has managed to forage
from the bushes this morning - yum yum!
12:00 I am conscious of the fact that I've got to give a presentation to Lynda's U3A Middle English group at the beginning of October, and I haven't done anything about preparing it yet. Oh dear!
The talk is supposed to be about the influence of Old Norse on the development of the English language. I decide to at least make a start today by assembling any books I've got that could be useful.
I dip into it for a few minutes. TV presenter Melvyn grew up in the county of Cumbria/Cumberland, an area heavily settled by Norwegians in the Viking Age. He claims that, as a young child, he spoke in a dialect that was "heavy with Old Norse vocabulary", and that when he eventually started going to the grammar school in Wigton, his teachers couldn't understand what he was saying, so at age 11 he had to set about learning the Queen's English.
Poor Melvyn!
Still at least that bit of study enabled him to go to Oxford University and later get a job with the BBC, which is nice. So a happy ending there.
flashback to 2019: Melvyn, then on his third wife, Gabriel Claire-Hunt
Melvyn also recounts an anecdote about a local man he knew who was a soldier in the British Army Occupation Force that occupied Iceland during World War II, a force sent there to stop the Germans using the country as a u-boat base. This local man from Cumberland could apparently understand what the Icelanders were saying to him, based on the dialect he grew up with in Wigton. What madness!!!!
I think that academic purists would dismiss that evidence as "anecdotal", but I'm going to put it into my talk anyway. I need all the input I can get to speak for an hour, that's for sure!
Yikes !!!!!
13:00 I see that Gill, my sister in Cambridge has emailed me. Thanks to a recent DNA test she found out the other week that we're both related to a cousin we'd never heard of, David, an online journalist. David's mother was an aunt of ours, Joan, who was unmarried, and decided to give David and an earlier child, Jonathan, up for adoption after they were born (in 1957 and 1949 respectively).
Lois has recently found out a lot about Peter, David's father, from local press reports - for some period in the 1960's Peter was manager of a local inn at Tewkesbury, an inn which Lois and I have often visited.
So Peter had 2 children born in 1949-ish, (1) a daughter born to his wife Elizabeth, and (2) a son, Jonathan, born to his mistress (and employee), our Aunty Joan. My god!
Confusing isn't it!
A lot of the press information that Lois found was new to David, apparently, and he has asked Gill to thank Lois and me for our work. And now David has supplied some information about Peter's father, i.e. David's grandfather.
Peter's father was also a bit of a slippery character it seems. Peter's mother died and Peter's father put Peter and his siblings into a children's home, before clearing off abroad for a few years. When he came back to the UK he married again, and had another son with his new wife, and he called that son Peter as well, telling his new family that his children by his first wife were all dead.
What madness !!!!!!
16:00 The sun is shining so we sit out on the patio to have our cup of Earl Grey tea and currant bun.
we have a cup of tea and a bun on the patio
Tonight's contest is between University of Strathclyde and University of Reading.
We only record two answers that the students get wrong, which is pathetic. My god! Is our career as smart alecs clearly over? I think we should be told!
1. Shared with a town in Surrey, what was the given name of Lady Jane Grey's husband, who was executed alongside her? He was the son of John Dudley.
Students: Richard
Colin and Lois: Guildford
2. The name of what element comes from the Swedish for "heavy stone"?
Students: osmium
Colin and Lois: tungsten
Not much for a half-hour's concentrated brainwork on our part, is it. My god (again) !!!!
In our defence, I would say that Reading in particular were an excellent team - I wouldn't be surprised to see them ending up winning this year's contest! [You can't keep on giving that excuse indefinitely! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed in solemn mood - oh dear! Zzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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