Danskcolin: Monday October 4th 2021

08:00 Our near-neighbour Frances rings our doorbell offering me a half-used pint of milk. She's off today on a coach trip to "The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham", a trip organised for the local Anglican churchgoers. It's a long way, so it's an early start for the trippers - my god!!!!

the Anglican shrine at Walsingham

The Walsingham phenomenon all started when an Anglo-Saxon woman saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1061, and it's been a centre for pilgrimage ever since. Lois says that these days there's a separate Anglican and Catholic shrine there.

11:30 It's going to be wet this afternoon and even worse overnight tonight, so Lois and I decide to get our walk done this morning. It goes all right, but there's a disappointment halfway round the football field when we realise that the Whiskers Coffee Stand is not open, for unexplained reasons. Perhaps the Polish girl who runs it isn't well? It's a pity but there's nothing there to explain why it's closed - and I think we should be told, don't you!

this is me, cutting a somewhat pathetic figure, when Lois and I

arrive, feeling really thirsty, at the Whiskers Coffee Stand

to find that it's not open, despite the sign - sob sob!!!

this is us in happier times - at an earlier stage in our walk this morning,

before we realise there's no coffee stand waiting for us - damn!

Look at our joyful little faces, not realising the disappointment that's to come!

[circled in white is the closed coffee stand, which we haven't noticed yet]

Poor us !!!!!!

We try desperately to cheer ourselves up by ducking behind a hedge instead, and enjoying the Old Codgers Soccer training session going on in the netball court. The Old Codgers can't see us because of the hedge, so we can make as many rude noises as we like haha!

we hide behind a thick hedge and spy on the Old Codgers Soccer

Training Session going on in the netball court - tee hee !!!!

12:30 We come home and have a lunch of sausage and tomato on toast, followed by fruit and a cup of tea - yum yum!

When we sit down on the couch, I see that there's a text that's come in from my sister Gill in Cambridge. Gill and I recently discovered that we have a cousin that we didn't know about: David, an online journalist in his early 60's.

Unknown to us, David had been born to our unmarried aunt, Aunty Joan, in 1959, and he was adopted as a baby. Gill discovered our connection to David after she sent a DNA test to a large DNA database, which found the match with David.

Gill and David got in touch with each other a few weeks ago, and have spoken a number of times on the phone. But today David and his wife actually visited Gill in person, at her home in Cambridge. They stayed for a couple of hours, and the three of them had a long long chat. I'll be speaking to Gill tomorrow and am looking forward to hearing all the details.

In the meantime Gill sends me a charming picture of herself and David taken this morning during the visit.

My sister Gill with our long-lost cousin David

during his visit to her this morning

How weird the whole thing has been, and it all came to light so suddenly and completely out of the blue. Until now David has spent the 60 plus years of his life having no idea about who his "real family" were. So, needless to say, it's a really big deal, particularly for him, but for Gill and me also.

Gill says that David has got my voice, which is weird too. My god! I thought I was the only person in the world with my voice, so it just shows you never to rule these things out - that's genetics in action, I guess !!!!!

14:00 After lunch we go up to bed and I give Lois another squirt of ear-drops in her ear. I think I'm getting better at it - once again I didn't refer to the instruction leaflet once: hurrah!

I give Lois one of her twice-daily squirts in her ear

19:30 After dinner, Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the couch and watch Episode 7 of Season 2 of the Danish crime series "The Killing", which Lois doesn't like.

It's an incredible statistic - I've seen all 20 episodes of Season 1, and all 10 episodes of Season 3, and so far 6 out of the 10 episodes of Season 2.

A Danish army squad got involved in some possible atrocities - the killing of civilians - in a remote village in Afghanistan a couple of years previously. They were subsequently all cleared of guilt by an official enquiry. But now that all the men from the squad are back in Denmark, someone is going around murdering them all.

At first, suspicion fell on Islamic extremist groups in Denmark, but now it seems that it's a Danish officer who's doing it: probably the man who guilty of killing the civilians, but we'll see!

Three Danish soldiers were killed - blown up - in the Afghan village, but now a whistle-blowing female civil servant has revealed that the bag containing the 3 men's remains had 7 hands in it. Did one of the men have 3 hands, or did the hand belong to a dead villager, and got included by mistake?

Rookie error there by somebody, seemingly !!!!

Plus, an interesting point to me, as a languages buff: the whistle-blowing woman uses the English word "mismatch", so I guess there isn't a word for this in Danish.

What madness !!!!

Also in this episode, the two detectives investigating the killings, Inspector Sarah Lund and her assistant Ulrik Strange, are spending the evening in Ulrik's flat.

Ulrik makes another attempt to get Sarah to go to bed with him, but he's thwarted by a ring at his doorbell.

Doorbell rings!!!

Poor Ulrik !!!!!!

The couple break off to answer the door, thinking it's the pizza delivery man. But in fact it's their big boss Ruth, who's come to tell Sarah that she's "back on the case" after being relieved of her duties by her little boss, Lennart Brix. Ruth is Brix's former lover. Gosh, it's hard keeping track of this series !!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we wind down with one of our favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking.

Lois and I find it quite hard trying to beat the 6 nimble, athletic, lateral-thinking minds of the contestants, but tonight we each spot a connection that none of the 6 contestants spots, which is nice.

I get this first one, which the two teams both strike out on:

The connection between these 4 things is that Bucharest was known as "Little Paris", Tchaikovsky's 2nd Symphony was known as the "Little Russian" symphony etc. So they're all "little" + nickname. Simples!

Lois gets this next one, which this time is a sequence where contestants have to guess the 4th element. Again both teams strike out:

Lois sees that Italian peppers = "peperoni", Italian beer brand = "Peroni", Mercury winner Size is "Roni", i.e. the DJ Roni Size.

So each time we're losing two letters off the front of the previous "thing". So the 4th element in the sequence has to be something that means "ni". We went with "Northern Ireland", but the show went instead with another alternative, "Thing that knights say".