09:00 Lois showcases her latest crop of harvesting from the garden, arranging them artistically, and after that I check the local news for Gentofte, the suburb of Copenhagen where our daughter Alison lived with her family from 2012 to 2018.
Lois showcases her latest produce, and then....
...I scan the local news for Gentofte, the Copenhagen suburb
where our daughter Alison lived with her family from 2012 to 2018
In the Gentofte suburb of Copenhagen, a Danish woman called Judith Jørgensen has opened a new boutique to introduce her Danish customers to what she calls "English design".
My god, English design? I never knew such a thing existed!
Judith has for several years been living in Sevenoaks, England, making a living out of selling Danish furniture and furnishings to the English, with the avowed aim of "taking the heaviness" out of English homes, and "creating a little air and lightness".
Now that she's back in Denmark, she wants to do the opposite - i.e. bring a bit of heaviness into Danish homes, and "take out the nudity" - I don't think that means persuading the Danes not to walk about naked. It's all about making sure that rooms are stuffed full of furniture like English homes are!
Whatever next?
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Copenhagen: just one of the better ways to walk from Ali's former home in
Parkosvej to the new "English" design centre on Jægerborgs Allé
11:00 In a month or so's time I have to give a talk on zoom to the local U3A Middle English Group about the influence of Old Norse on the development of the English language.
Today, as preparation, I do a bit more work on English place-names that were created by the hundreds of thousands of Danish and other Scandinavian settlers who settled here during the Viking Age. I'm using Matthew Townend's book "Language and History in Viking Age England".
I do a bit more work on preparing my so-called "talk" -
on the influence of the Scandinavian languages on the history of English.
Today I'm dipping into Matthew Townend's book (bottom right)
You can learn a lot from the place-names that the Scandinavians came up with for the towns and villages where they settled in England, many of which already had English names, some of which the Scandinavians kept, and others that they simply couldn't stand, and so they tried to alter them, but subtly, so that the English wouldn't notice.
These Scandinavians didn't really like some of the sounds in the English language, particularly the 'ch' and 'j' sounds, and also 'sh', sounds which weren't present in Old Norse, so they tended to replace these sounds by 'k' and 'g', and 'sk'.
Between you and me I think those rough old Norsemen, who couldn't read or write, probably thought that those particular English sounds were a bit "cissy", but I don't know that for sure, it's just a feeling - call me crazy if you like! [All right! - Ed]
the Lancashire town which the English originally called Churcham,
and which a bunch of Norwegian settlers renamed "Kirkham", because
they thought it sounded better - what madness !!!!!
And the Scandinavians also didn't like names ending in "'-bury", because that was a word they didn't have in Old Norse - they preferred a similar ending, "'-by", which meant a farmstead or village.
One of the existing town-names they would have hated was pronounced something like "Rotchbury" in English. So they changed this to "Rugby", which they quite liked. So in a sense they kind of, in the process, invented the name of the ball-game we call 'rugby' today.
What madness (again) !!!!!
a tense moment in a typical game of rugby
The English called boars "eofor" but the Danish word was subtly different: "jofurr" shortened to "jorr", pronounced 'yorr". Adding the "-wick" or "-k" ending, the Danish version for the town stuck, and so in a sense the Danes named not just the city of York, England, but also, by extension the city of New York, New York, USA, "so good they named it twice" - which is sort of a ringing endorsement of the Danes' work in this field.
To this writer's ears at least, "New Efferwick New Efferwick" for example doesn't sound nearly as good. There must surely have been a risk they would only have named it once. Who knows.
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
12:00 Lois and I have lunch and then we've just got time to hop into bed for an hour's rest before our latest zoom appointment, the fortnightly meeting of the U3A Danish group that we run - the only one in the UK.
16:00 The meeting ends at 4 pm, and we both feel completely drained, as usual. The sun is shining, so we relax with a couple of Magnum ice-creams and cups of tea on the patio.
Magnum ice-creams...
.. followed by cups of tea in our Danish
"mormor" and "farmor" maternal grandparent cups.
17:00 Lois does a bit more work on family tree research, concentrating on my "new" cousin, David, the online journalist, that I knew nothing about until my sister Gill sent her DNA into a big database a few weeks ago.
David's mother was my unmarried aunt, Aunty Joan, who gave David up for adoption soon after he was born. David's father was called Peter, a hotel manager, who moved from job to job, at least a lot of the time working in the same hotel as my Aunty Joan, who, conveniently, was his receptionist: the two must have had quite a cosy sort of working relationship haha!
Gill, Lois and I have been trying to piece together the whereabouts of Peter's various hotel managerial jobs. We've got evidence of him managing hotels in quite a few towns: Henley-on-Thames, Peterborough, Virginia Water, also Gloucester and Tewkesbury.
Today Lois discovers that in 1974, Peter and his family (wife Elizabeth, daughter Elizabeth and son-in-law Thomas) were living here in Cheltenham, which is a bit of a surprise. Lois and I moved here in 1972, so we were in the town at the same time as Peter, which is a weird thought. He was perhaps manager of the hotel in nearby Tewkesbury at the time, but we're not sure about that as yet.
the car journey that Lois and I could have taken in 1974 from our house
in Windsor Street to Peter's address, at The Verneys, if we'd known about him, that is haha!
Lois also finds a picture of Peter's grave - he apparently died in Lewes, Sussex, in 2001, aged about 81.
Fascinating stuff !!!! [If you says so! - Ed]
18:00 Exhausted by our Danish group meeting on zoom, we settle for a CookShop ready meal tonight - Bombay salmon bolstered by some of yesterday's left-over wedding anniversary coconut and lime leaf rice, and some of our home-grown green beans - yum yum!
20:00 We watch a bit of TV on the couch, one of our favourite TV quizzes, "University Challenge", the student quiz. Tonight's contest is between Durham University and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Lois and I always try to find correct answers that the students don't get, but we haven't had much luck lately. We're more optimistic tonight, however. Although these turn out to be really good teams, they're all quite young, in the sort of 21-22-23 bracket, so we may be in with a chance on some of the more ancient topics that could come up, all about the kind of things only old codgers know about or are interested in!
And so it proves - we come up with 8 answers that elude the students, which makes us feel a bit better about ourselves.
How shallow we are haha!!!!!
1. Artists' models: born in 1753, which Welsh-born actress modelled for Gainsborough, Lawrence and Reynolds, the latter in a portrait depicting her as the Tragic Muse?
Students: [pass]
Colin and Lois: Sarah Siddons
2. Born in 1828, who married John Ruskin, and later John Everett Millais, posing for the latter in The Order of Release? She was the subject of a 2014 film written by Emma Thompson.
Students: [pass]
Colin and Lois: Effie Gray
3. Archaeological sites: Name the Mediterranean island that is the location of the following: the neolithic site of Kalavasos-Tenta and the tombs of the kings at Paphos.
Students: Crete
Colin and Lois: Cyprus
4. Canals: the Caen Hill Lock flight close to Devizes is on which canal, named after two rivers?
Students: Avon and Wylye
Colin and Lois: Kennet and Avon
5. The Barton Swing Bridge Aqueduct carries the Bridgewater Canal over which inland waterway?
Students: the Thames [say what????!!!!! - Ed]
Colin and Lois: the Manchester Ship Canal
6. Scottish football clubs: what flower follows the name Crossgates in the name of a club based at Humbug Park near Dunfermline? In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the same flower precedes the words "path of dalliance".
Students: thistle [say what????!!!!! - Ed]
Colin and Lois: primrose
7. Names in the first chapter of the gospel according to Luke: derived from the Hebrew for "Jehovah has remembered", what is the name of the father of John the Baptist?
Students: Isaiah
Colin and Lois: Zechariah
Good enough!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment