08:00 Another hot day forecast, with a high of 83F (28C). The disappointing thing is that until now they were forecasting big thunderstorms for tonight. Now they've downgraded all that to possible light showers between 11 pm and 2 pm. Damn! Lois and I were looking forward to lying in bed and hearing the thunder claps and the rain beating down on our window-pane. Damn (again) !!!!
Just like yesterday I get up early and do all my outside jobs while it's still cool - in particular all the watering.
Lois meanwhile picks some raspberries and apples before going out to the local football field to pick blackberries.
Once again there were no naked young men in the blackberry bushes, she reports, and we are becoming more and more convinced that blackberry bush nudity must be a purely Danish phenomenon.
Last month one such man actually got completely trapped in a blackberry bush and had to be cut free by Danish police or "clipped free (klippes fri)" as the Danes say. What a crazy world we live in!
10:00 Our granddaughter Josie, who turned 15 yesterday has sent us some pictures - one of them in 3D. In the original you can move your phone slightly and the kitchen in the background moves round slightly. I wonder how they do that? Beats me !!!!
Josie yesterday in an appropriate T-Shirt,
particularly appropriate as she enjoys maths.
(the 3D function doesn't work here by the way)
I like maths too - does genetics really work after all ???? So I've made a start in designing a T-shirt for myself: however I think it probably needs a lot more work before I can put it on the market, and I need to find a square root sign on my keyboard - obviously! And I may need to find an older male model - but we'll have to see!
Still it's a start isn't it! So many people have been opening up their own businesses since the pandemic started. Why not me?
Josie has also sent us a picture of herself wearing the hoodie Lois and I bought her for her birthday yesterday - it's something to lounge around the house in, and Josie says she can't wait for the mini-heat wave to go away so she can start wearing it at weekends. Amen to that - Lois and I are gagging for some cooler weather, that's for sure.
our eldest grandchild Josie in the hoodie Lois and I
sent her for her 15th birthday yesterday
11:00 It's still warm out but it's a bit breezier now, which is nice. Lois and I decide to take advantage of this and have a coffee and biscuit on the patio.
we have coffee and biscuits on the patio, as
Lois struggles with her phone
I look at my own smartphone and see news of other daughter Sarah's family in Perth, Australia. It's 6pm over there. It hasn't been a good day, because Sarah and Francis's 8-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie, haven't been able to take part in their school's sports day today - particularly unwelcome for Lily, who is great at running and jumping - and she doesn't get
that from me, that's for sure!
Lily has had a heavy cold for a few days, and Francis, who's a house husband, can't take Jessie to school because Lily isn't fit to travel. It's a real shame because both girls have been looking forward to taking part in today's events.
photo of today's hurdles race at the twins' school, 9000 miles away from here,
just outside Perth, Australia - but the twins are stuck at home
because of Lily's heavy cold Oh dear!
16:00 We have a cup of tea and a currant bun on the sofa. I do a bit more research for my so-called "presentation". I foolishly volunteered to give a presentation on "The Influence of Old Norse on the History of the English Language" on zoom to Lynda's U3A Middle English group on October 1st.
I've begun to see what a lot of work this is going to involve me in - oh dear! But it's too late to back down now, that's for sure.
typical Norse immigrants arriving in England by ship
during the Viking Age (a rare, actual colour photograph from the time)
Today I discover that, of all the words that English borrowed from Old Norse, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, so many of them have a "nasty" or "negative" twist to them, for some reason. Did the Anglo-Saxons associate all the Norse immigrants who flooded into the country in the Viking Age with "nasty things"?
I don't know but I think we should be told, there's no doubt about that!
a typical Norse spray-painting vandal from the Viking Age
As Viking expert John Geipel has noted, "grace and elegance" are rare in the English language's borrowings from the Scandinavians, and “it can hardly be claimed that words like big,
bag, scab, scum, scumbag, nasty, clumsy, odd, blinking, tosser and prod make a great impression on the intellect", to put it mildly, compared to some of the graceful and beautiful words that English has borrowed from other languages like Italian, for example.
Viking expert John Geipel castigates "nasty" Scandinavian words
"The main thing we know about
the Vikings' presence in England is that they were brutes and bastards", says Geipel.
Don't hold back, John haha !!!! And Geipel adds, "wherever they went, I'm afraid that vandalism, robberies and destruction followed".
And perhaps for that reason, many negative terms of Old Norse (ON) origin were incorporated into English. For example, words like: angry, ON angr ‘grief, sorrow’; awkward, ON öfugr ‘backwards’; clumsy, ON
klumsa ‘dumbfounded’; dirty, ON drit ‘excrement’; ill, ON illr ‘bad’; rotten,
ON rotinn ‘rotten, foul’; ugly, ON ugga ‘to fear’ uggligr ‘dreadful’; weak, ON
veikr ‘ill’; wrong, ON rangr.
In addition to the negative adjectives there were
also several negative verbs, e.g. die, ON deyja; drown, ON drukna, scathe (i.e. injure), ON
skaða; scream, ON skræma (Harper, 2013).
Still life can sometimes be cruel and it would be difficult to carry on with casual conversation, expressing
emotion, and to give thorough descriptions of the nasty side of life, if it were not for these borrowings.
yes, life can sometimes be cruel - poor us !!!!!
As Danish language expert Otto Jespersen said way back in 1907, “An Englishman cannot be ill or die without
Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to his daily fare”.
Danish language buff Otto Jespersen
Oh dear, Otto, really ?????!!!!!!
18:30 After dinner we take the car out for a spin - we realise we haven't used it for 8 days - my god, the sins of lockdown! We need to post some letters on the way - Lois's sect is starting up its Brockworth Bible Seminars again soon, and she needs to send out invitations to some of the previous participants: the ones who don't use the internet and can't be emailed.
We drive to Bishop Cleeve and back - only about 6 or so miles in all, but it'll keep the car's battery ticking over, we hope.
we take the car for a spin out to Bishops Cleeve and back -
we realise we haven't used it for 8 days - my god!
20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch to watch the first half of the 2nd episode of the 2nd season of "The Killing", the Danish crime series, that Lois doesn't like.
I only have time to watch the first half of Episode 2, and I'm not sure we're much further forward yet.
Two people have been murdered, both connected with the Danish forces stationed in the Middle East and Afghanistan: a woman called Anne, who was a legal adviser to the Danish contingents (stabbed to death), and a soldier called Myg [crazy name, crazy guy - and he's already been identified as "a bit of a loner" - yikes!], whose body was found hanging in a basement.
At the moment it appears that an extremist Muslim group, The Muslim League, is responsible for the killings, acting in revenge for the actions of the Danish army overseas, no doubt.
Star detective Sarah Lund and her expressionless boss Brix start
investigating The Muslim League, who have claimed responsibility for the killings
However, I've learnt from experience watching "The Killing", that they are always presenting you with the apparently guilty men before revealing that they must be totally innocent, leaving the way clear for other suspects to come into the frame who in turn prove to be innocent, and so it goes on. What madness!!!!
So we'll just have to wait and see on this one. Damn!
21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch the latest programme in Margaret Thatcher's ex-cabinet minister Michael Portillo's series "Coastal Devon and Cornwall".
It's rather sad that this coast used to be packed with fishing ports, but now there's only one really thriving: Newlyn. Other former ports now live off the tourist trade. Fishermen tend to be old guys these days, and their sons don't want to follow them into the job as they used to in the past.
We're getting a more reflective Portillo in this series, and tonight we hear him recalling how it was his father that got him into politics.
His father's experience of politics, however, wasn't a happy one, because he was a Spaniard involved in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's. He was on the losing side, with five brothers fighting on the other side. And it was catastrophic for him, says Portillo, because he had to leave Spain and come to the UK, leaving his parents and his brothers and sisters behind.
Also his father was a pacifist who really believed that all our differences should be resolved not by killing each other, but by argument and debate.
"So that left me with two very strong impressions," says Portillo.
"That there must be something very important about democracy for my father to value it so much, even though he'd lost so much in his life. And secondly, a love of words, a love of debate, which of course has guided my life."
It's nostalgic for Lois and me tonight to see Portillo visit St Michaels Mount, which we know well.
We had a memorable visit to the island and its castle one sunny day in 1979 when we were staying at St Ives with our two daughters, Alison (4) and Sarah (2). I think we must have left little Sarah behind with my parents, who were also visiting St Ives, because only Alison appears on these photos.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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