10:00 Lois and I get ready to receive Mark the Gardener and give him his instructions. It's a wet day but not as wet as they said it was going to be, so Mark manages to do a lot of hedge and shrub cutting, which is nice.
Having a gardener, or "gardenering" as it tends to be called these days, is a wonderfully fulfilling hobby, a realization that SusanTager, the spiritual leader of the Anglosphere's thousands of gardener-hirers, came to almost by accident, way back in 2006.
We've got to think hard about what to give Mark to do today, because he's shortly going to be taking a 2-week paternity break: his wife is expecting the couple's first child, so we're going to have to manage without him for a little while. He's hoping to pop in sometime next week to do the odd bit of work, but then we'll somehow have to struggle through the following fortnight without any help - yikes!!!!!
Mark sets to work on a typical hedge or shrub, I'm not sure which
I've got to try and talk for about 45-60 minutes, which is a lot of words - oh dear! I see that the word file with my talk in it, "MyPresentation", has grown to 19 pages of Calibri 11 font, which sounds like quite a lot, but then I realise that not only is page 19 totally blank, but also I see I've put some passages of stuff in twice: what madness !!!!
Old Norse (ON) and Old English (OE) were quite similar languages, so the English and the Norsemen/Vikings could more or less understand each other, say 80% of the time. But sometimes the English and the Norsemen used the same word in different ways. For example the Norsemen had the word "bread", and so did the English, but in English the word still carried its original sense of "a fragment or a piece": that is, something 'broken'. But when the English heard the Norsemen using it for specifically a loaf, that is, as a "piece of something to eat", they decided this was better use of the word, and soon started using it in the Norse way. How crazy!
And sometimes the English borrowed a Norse word they liked the sound of, but changed its meaning later, when they thought the Norsemen wouldn't notice, or after a lot of the Norsemen had cleared off to somewhere else. Again - how crazy can you get!
14:30 My sister Gill in Cambridge emails me. We recently found out, after Gill took a DNA test, that she and I have a cousin, David, a 62-year-old online journalist, that we didn't know about. He was the illegitimate son of one of our many aunts, Aunty Joan: Joan wasn't married when David was born in 1959, and she had him adopted as a baby.
It's a heart-warming story. The DNA test has enabled David to find his "real family" after over 60 years of him not having a clue about what his origins were. Joint research efforts have revealed the identity of David's father Peter and the identity of Peter's wife Elizabeth, and further interesting facts.
Elizabeth's father John was a mining engineer and he lived in Sarawak, Borneo, in the 1910's, and either married, or had a liaison with, a Sarawakian woman called Poing-Ah-Lian. How complicated life was in those days - not like today haha !!!!
David's mother Joan died in 1977, aged 55, but today is a special day - it would have been Joan's 100th birthday, and David, together with his wife and daughter have been visiting Joan's grave in Oxford - it's also the grave of mine and Gill's own mother, Hannah, plus ours and David's maternal grandparents.
When mine and Gill's mother Hannah was buried in the grave in 2011. In 2013 Gill and I had a new memorial stone tablet laid on the grave, a tablet which David says today is in need of a bit of maintenance - not surprising after 8 years! He says that next time he will come with various cleaning materials, which will be nice.
flashback to 2013: Lois and I visit Oxford to see my mother's grave, which is also
my Aunty Joan's grave, to inspect the newly erected memorial stone:
Joan's name is highlighted in a circle bottom right
And there are still papers everywhere on the dining-room table, and Lois has discovered a new voyage made by John, the man with the Sarawakian mistress or wife, in 1915, travelling back on his own from Singapore to London via Sydney, on the ship called the Malwa.
the passenger list of British arrivals in London from Sydney, Singapore etc on the SS Malwa
- a list that includes John's name but not Poing-An-Lian's [not shown]
The second name on the passenger list (above) is Dr Ken Simpson, somebody from the Colonial Office, address Downing Street - yikes!!!
18:30 We have dinner, and to save time it's another CookShop ready-meal, the last one in the freezer: oh dear!!!!
19:00 Lois disappears back into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's online yoga class, followed by her sect's weekly Bible Seminar, restarting this week after a break, coming from Brockworth Library, but with many participants joining the session online.
I settle down on the couch to watch the second half of Episode 2 of the 2nd season of "The Killing", the Danish crime series that Lois doesn't like. It's the first chance I've had to see any of this series in over a week - I can only watch when Lois is doing something else. The downside is that, if there's too long a break, I soon start to forget the plot and the characters again - damn !!!!
"The Killing" is famous for throwing up red herrings - with a different suspect every week that turns out in the next episode to be innocent, and another suspect suddenly brought into the frame. So I'm cautious about trying to guess the "gerningsmand" - Danish for "perpetrator" (whatever the crime): what a useful word! If only the Anglo-Saxons had borrowed this word from the Vikings, we'd be in better shape in English-language crime fiction, that's for sure!
Two murders have been committed, associated with the Danish Army's part in the NATO mission in Afghanistan - (1) Anne Dragsholm, a young legal advisor to the Army, and (2) Myg [crazy name, crazy guy], a member of the Danish army unit previously stationed in Afghanistan.
The extremist group called "The Muslim League" or some-such nonsense, have claimed responsibility, but star Copenhagen detective Inspector Sarah Lund is not so sure it's them. Myg's friend, fellow-soldier Jens Peter Raben, a guy who went crazy out in Afghanistan, has told Sarah he doesn't know Anne, the other murder victim, but Sarah has discovered a photo of them together.
Suspicious or what??!!!!
star Copenhagen detective, Inspector Sarah Lund, asks the
army unit commander if she can borrow the suspicious photograph
the photograph shows crazy soldier Jens with legal advisor
Anne, even though he told police he didn't know her - fishy or what ??!!!!
I expect, however, that in the next episode Jens will turn out to be innocent, and somebody else will be under the police's spotlight. What madness !!!!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her yoga and Bible Seminar, and we settle down on the couch to watch one of our favourite TV quizzes, "Only Connect", which tests lateral thinking.
I'm afraid I can't say that Lois and I perform very well tonight against these 2 teams, but Lois gets one answer that defeats them. The teams are asked to say what it is that jelly, cream, custard and ladyfingers all have in common.
Lois was onto that one, like a flash! And what a pity my late father isn't around to enjoy that question. The traditional English trifle was his signature dish, that's for sure, and he made it for me and my siblings periodically hundreds of time in my childhood, and afterwards too.
a typical English trifle - yum yum!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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