08:00 Lois isn't well, so I take her up a bowl of breakfast cereal and a cup of tea in bed. Later she realises that it's probably a stomach bug that she's got, so it might have been better not to have had the cereal, but it's too late now - oh dear!
I'm downstairs now on my own, and will be until Lois comes down about 3 pm. I make use of the quiet by having a look at a medieval text, as you do!
Lynda's U3A Middle English group is holding its monthly meeting on Friday afternoon on zoom. It's going to consist partly of a talk by Margaret about the so-called "Eccentric Clergyman", William Barnes [Who he? - Ed][All I know is that he was a poet who wrote in Dorset dialect - not sure what he's doing as a topic for this group. Some mistake surely! - Colin]
Eccentric clergyman William Barnes - could his night become
a rival to the more famous Burns' Night? I think we should be told!
After Margaret's talk about Barnes on Friday Lynda's group is going to be looking at a bit more of the 15th century "Book of Margery Kempe" - now that's what I call Middle English!
It's a notable work because it's the first female autobiography ever written in the English language.
Margery gets married quite young - she's about 20 and she's soon pregnant, giving birth and breast-feeding (in that order haha!) - see picture above. She has a total of 14 children over the course of her marriage.
She really enjoys sex, and she and her husband obviously have a lot of it. In those days they called it "communing", or "meddling", with each other.
What madness !!!!
Margery also fancies other men, besides her husband - she records an instance where a man she fancies tries to pick her up: initially she says no, but then she has second thoughts, and twice she tries to pick him up, but to her annoyance she finds that he's "cooled off", so he says no: perhaps he's the sort of man that likes to keep the initiative - it isn't clear from Margery's account. Nothing comes of it, anyway.
Margery swings violently between feelings of sexual temptation, and awful feelings of terrible guilt, combined with visions of devils haunting her. Eventually the guilt overwhelms her and she negotiates a "celibate" marriage with her husband, and after that, things go a bit quiet. They may have been getting a bit past it by that stage, anyway - I'm not sure.
But what a crazy world they lived in in those days!!!!
Margery Kempe being "haunted by devils"
I suppose even devils become middle-aged and chatty eventually, and the devil in the bed looks as if he's listening with genuine interest to whatever it is that Margery is sounding off about. In their later years devils probably get too paunchy and rheumaticky to do a lot of haunting and perhaps adopt a more sedentary lifestyle, staying in bed on Sunday mornings, for instance. Who knows ?!!!!
14:00 In honour of my spiritual mentor, self-confessed "nosy neighbour" film star Michael Caine, I'm continuing to monitor one of our deceptively mild-mannered neighbour's suspiciously mundane activities.
13:00 I make one of my signature lunches: ham and cucumber sandwiches with mini-tomatoes. I take Lois a cup of green tea in bed - she's not ready to get up yet.
I look at my smartphone. My sister Gill in Cambridge has sent me a picture of our Welsh maternal grandfather Sidney as a young man, standing outside the shop in Bridgend where he worked in the very early years of the 20th century.
Mine and Gill's maternal grandfather, standing in front of some kind of
provisions store in the early years of the 20th century.
How fantastic that this photo has turned up after 120 or so years. It's a real bygone age that's being depicted: horses and carts, great joints of meat hung up etc etc, loads of employees. It looks like the shop is called JL Stradling Provisions and [something something] Merchants, the "something something" being hidden by the great pieces of meat.
Sidney was a bit of a failure in his career, compared to his high-flying brothers, who were all glittering success stories in the fields of journalism and education. But he put them all to shame between the sheets, fathering more children (9) than the rest of them combined. Go Sidney!
"My name is Michael Caine and I am a nosy neighbour" -
film star Caine's famous catch-phrase and calling-card, which
reminds me to keep my eyes on our neighbour, the one with the mini-gym
The nights are drawing in, and it's starting to feel autumnal now - it would make sense for our neighbour to make sure his mini-gym will still be an attractive place to strip off and do half an hour's rhythmic movements not just in August but in the depths of winter.
Time will tell !!!
suspicious activity at our neighbour's house involving "Combi-Man".
Could he be installing heating in the mini-gym?
flashback to yesterday: the first appearance of
Pleasantly Plump Woman, arriving for an evening session in the mini-gym
flashback to last month: (left to right) Mr Tall Guy and our neighbour
What an enthralling saga !!!! [If you say so! - Ed]
20:00 Lois is up now, so we sit on the couch and watch a bit of TV, an interesting documentary on the 19th century writer Sir Walter Scott. The presenter is amusing Scottish writer, Damian Barr.
Lois and I didn't know that when his early novels, like "Heart of Midlothian", came out, Scott reviewed them himself, under various assumed names. My god!
To be fair to him, though, some of the reviews of his own books that he posted were rather critical ones, so I suppose that was all right!
a performance of Schubert's "Ave Maria" nearly moves
presenter Damian Barr (right) to tears, or, as he says
in his Scottish dialect, "nearly greetin'" using the Norse word,
"to greet" (to weep), which Lois and I, as Danish buffs, immediately pick up on...
Scott is credited with reviving pride in traditional highland dress, including kilts and trews, when he dressed up King George IV as a highlander in 1822 for the first trip by any British monarch to Scotland for 200 years. Highland dress had been banned for many years by the authorities after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745.
Flashback to 1822: George IV in highland dress
Scott also made Scottish dialect speech respectable, by including dialect speech in his novels, even though the main narrative was always in standard English. The key thing was that he didn't portray the dialect speakers as in any way inferior, which was nice.
Fascinating stuff!!!
a sample of obscure Scottish dialect from "Rob Roy"
But what a crazy world they lived in, in Scotland in those days - my god !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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