Tuesday August 24th 2021

I'm fast running out of time. Everything's started to close in on me now. 

It's mine and Lois's 49th wedding anniversary tomorrow - we've agreed not to exchange presents in favour of ordering in a lovely meal from CookShop for tomorrow lunchtime, but I haven't designed or printed out my anniversary card yet. Yikes!

the CookShop on the Bath Road, where we go if we want

to spoil ourselves

But that's not the only deadline hanging over my head. Also there's only a mere 37 days to go before I have to give my hour-long zoom presentation to Lynda's U3A Middle English group on "the influence of the Norse languages on the history of English". Yikes (again) !!!!!

10:00 Lois goes out for a walk on the local football field, and I try to get down to some serious research on Norse. I've read what TV presenter Melvyn Bragg has to say on the subject, and it's not very much. It's a bit superficial to put it mildly: for instance he says that Norse influenced English grammar, but he doesn't give any examples. Damn! To be fair, Melvyn is trying to cover the whole history of English up to the present day so I suppose he can't put too much detail on any one aspect.

flashback to Melvyn in happier times: then on his 3rd wife

So I give up on Melvyn for now, and I turn to the 2nd book of the ones I've selected from my extensive collection of language books: Barbara Strang's "A History of English". It's over 50 years old (1971) but it's got lots of detail, which is nice.

I give up on Melvyn (bottom row, centre) and get onto

Barbara Strang (bottom row, left)

Barbara stresses that English and Norse were so similar in those days, i.e. in the Viking Age, that it's very difficult to decide what words were borrowed and what were original, and who was doing the lending and who was doing the borrowing. 

She says it's a similar case to that of British English and American English. Quoting the words of Scottish philologist Sir William Craigie in 1927, she says that to start with, for a short period, borrowings tended to be from Britain to the USA, at least until 1820, but that after that, the contrary direction (America to Britain) slowly became the dominant one.

Sir William Craigie, seen here in happier times - before he died

Craigie identified 4 main categories:

(1) Terms related to the fresh experiences and conditions of living in the new country, e.g. words like backwoods, blizzard, bluff, canyon, dug-out, prairie, squatter.

(2) Political terms; e.g. carpet-bagger, caucus, gerrymander, lynch-law

(3) Business, trades: elevator, snow-plow/plough, to corner.

(4) Miscellaneous: "at that", "to take a back seat", "boss", "to cave in", "cold snap", "to face the music", graveyard, "to go back on", half-breed, lengthy, loafer, law-abiding.

My god! Barbara comments that in many cases few Brits (even by 1971) would realise that these terms all came from the US. 

During World War II, the US War Department thought it would be useful, in its "Short Guide to Great Britain", a glossary listing many "US terms" that American servicemen would find their British counterparts to be unfamiliar with. Barbara includes some examples - US on the left, British on the right. Barbara has put an obelisk/dagger-sign against US terms that she remembers were already in general use in the UK before the end of World War II.

It's interesting that many of the so-called British equivalents - in the right hand column - have now  completely gone out of use in the UK. I remember as a child reading about so-called "buttered eggs" in a pre-war children's adventure book - and I didn't have a clue what that meant.

What madness !!!!!!

11:30 The sun is shining, so Lois and I "take" our coffee out on the patio, which is nice.

it's a little bit sunny, so we "take" our coffee out on the patio, which is nice.

14:00 Lois does some more work on my family tree, taking in the so-called "shameful" episode of two illegitimate births to my Aunty Joan, in 1949 and 1959. My sister Gill and I knew nothing about these "new" cousins until Gill took a DNA test a few weeks ago. 

After the test results came back, it emerged that we had 2 cousins, sons of Aunty Joan, that we knew nothing about. David (1959) an online journalist about to retire, and Jonathan, some sort of business-man who lives in Spain. 

Lois is doing some research into the man who seems to have been my Aunty Joan's married lover, Peter, a hotel manager, who was presumably the father of the two boys. Joan herself worked all her career as a hotel receptionist, so it all sort of fits. Never sleep with the boss, girls!

Lois and I, and my sister Gill are trying to piece together Peter's career. We suspect that he and Aunty Joan tended to move from one hotel to another, and our aim at the moment is to try and find out what hotels he was working at and when. 

Today Lois finds out that Peter was manager of a hotel in Peterborough in the 1950's. Peterborough is the town where our "new" cousin David, the journalist, was born in  1959, so presumably Aunty Joan was also there haha!!!

the Bull Hotel, Peterborough, as it looks today

the Bull Hotel in earlier times (year not known)

my Aunty Joan in the late 1950's

At some stage Peter was manager of a hotel in Henley-on-Thames (1950's we think), and later than that, a historic inn in Gloucester (1960's), and later still, in Tewkesbury (1960's), where he seems to be the actual owner of the hotel concerned, a place Lois and I know well. At some stage he was working at a hotel in Virginia Water, probably back in the 1950's.

Fascinating stuff !!! [If you say so! - Ed]

19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's yoga class on zoom. When it's over I go into the dining-room to design my anniversary card for Lois. I decide to base it on images from last week's visit to the Sculpture Park at Churt, Surrey.

one of the many romantic sculptures from

last week's visit to the Sculpture Park at Churt

Simples !!!!!

20:00 I emerge from the dining-room and we have a look at the local news for Gentofte, the suburb of Copenhagen where our daughter Alison lived with her family 2012-2018.

We get a bit of a shock: a report about a naked man who last night got caught in the blackberry bushes along Ordrupvej, a road Lois and I have walked down many a time on our time to and from the Ordrup Art Museum. 

My god!

The 19-year-old man was fortunately spotted by a passer-by, who gave the man a blanket and then contacted the police. A patrol car arrived and cut the man free, before taking him to hospital for a quick check-up. He was then released. The local news site concerned (sn.dk) had no information about how the man came to be caught in the bushes without any clothes on.

Lois is a keen blackberry picker and only yesterday she was picking blackberries in the bushes by the football field. But she says she always checks for naked men before starting work. She has never so far seen anybody there without anything on, so it must be a Danish thing, she suspects.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

flashback to yesterday: Lois checks out the blackberry bushes

near the football field

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!