Saturday August 14th 2021

09:30 A scramble for Lois and me to take our shower and get ready in time for our zoom call with Sarah, our younger daughter, who lives in Lower Chittering, just outside Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessie.

The twins are a delight as usual, proudly showing us the birthday cards they have created from their arts and crafts kits, for their Aunty Alison, out elder daughter, who turns 46 tomorrow.

As Lois and I always say, you really know you're getting old when your "children" really start getting into middle-age. Oh dear!!!!!

10:30 Apart from the zoom call it's a funny old day today, as we concentrate on getting ready for our trip: something we're no longer used to doing, after over a year of lockdowns etc, so it's all a bit of a struggle for us, at our age - my god!!!!

14:00 I browse the Danish news media (as you do). 

Alison, together with Ed and their 3 children, lived in the northern suburbs of Copenhagen between 2012 and 2018. Lois and I visited them a few times during their stay over there, and we almost always visited the art gallery and museum at Ordrup.

Today when I was browsing the local news for the suburb where Ali and Ed used to live, I see a reference to Ordrup, and an article revealing some of the things local Danes might not know about their suburb.

The name "Ordrup" somehow doesn't sound English, to put it mildly, but this article makes clear that when the village of Ordrup was founded in 1248, its original name was Horæ-thorp. 

This made me realise yet again the close connection between English and Danish place-names. Hundreds of thousands of Danes settled in England during the Viking Age, mostly populating the country's eastern counties. There are dozens of place-names in Eastern England that end in the suffix   "-thorpe", a Danish word which meant a village or farmstead in those far off times.

This type of town name is especially common in Lincolnshire I would say, and the most famous of these places is perhaps the port of Scunthorpe. Scunthorpe was founded by Danes, and it means "the farmstead belonging to [a guy called] Skuma. And there are many other such town names.

Fascinating stuff!! [I'll have to take your word for that! - Ed]

flashback to May 2013 - Lois and I visit the Art Gallery

and Museum at Ordrup, Copenhagen, for the first time

15:00 I continue to browse the internet, and see a story on Ancient Origins about how Pleistocene hominins managed to cross seas and oceans etc, and other wet bits of territory.

These "Ancient Origins" articles are often quite complicated to read, but luckily in this case, the authors have seen fit to produce a helpful diagram to give an idea of how Pleistocene hominin managed these epic journeys a million years ago.

Thank you, Ancient Origins - this is just the sort of graphic I need when reading these sorts of articles very often! 

And I'm guessing that the absence of a Method E and Method F, perhaps one featuring a diagram of a hominin waving from the deck of an ocean liner, and the other a hominin looking out of the window of a prmitive airliner, essentially indicates that those methods of travel have effectively been "ruled out" by the latest research.

Now, all I've got to know, is to try and remember these latest discoveries for the next time Lois and I get invited to a cocktail party haha!