Danskcolin: Wednesday October 6th 2021

08:00 Lois and I have to tumble out of bed really early today, for a daft reason. It's exactly six weeks since Lois last had her hair styled locally, although not by James her usual stylist, because he had just contracted COVID: yikes narrow escape there! A stand-in woman styled Lois's hair instead, somebody whose name she can't remember.

Lois's stylist James's hair salon (2nd store on left)

Flashback to August 25th: Lois after her last appointment

for a hair styling

Usually Lois books her hair appointments 6 weeks apart, so she suspects her next appointment may be today, October 6th, although she can't find the little card with the date and time on. At 9 am she rings through to the stylist's salon, but it turns out she must have completely forgotten to book her next appointment: another senior moment - oh dear!

But anyway it means we can both go back to bed, which is nice !!!! Lois will now see James next Wednesday 11:30am for their next session together.

11:00 We go out for our walk over the local football field, and have a coffee and a Kit-Kat at the now re-opened Whiskers Coffee Stand.

I reserve two places on the so-called "Buddy Bench", while

Lois gets 2 coffees and a Kit-Kat at the Whiskers Coffee Stand

we each have 2 fingers of a Kit-Kat chocolate bar

I can't resist taking a couple of "Big Sky" photos

12:00 We come home and I dive into the garage to make a reading of our electric and gas meters. Our energy company, Enstroga, is one of the small companies that have gone bust in the last couple of weeks: they can't make a profit any more because the price of fuel has gone up but there are price caps on what they can charge, Lois says.

Our new company is E.ON . I can understand that they now want me to supply them with up-to-date meter readings, but why do I need to tell them my address, email address, Enstroga account number, and meter serial numbers? Why can't they have got those from Enstroga?

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

14:00 After lunch we go to bed and I give Lois her twice-daily squirt of ear-drops. We get up at 3pm because I want to get started on my letter to my cousin Liz.

My sister Gill and I recently discovered, thanks to a DNA test, that we have a new cousin that we didn't previously know about. His name is David and he's a 62-year-old online journalist. He was born in 1959 to our unmarried aunt, Joan, but Joan had David adopted as a baby: David's father, Peter, was a married man, so it was all a bit awkward - oh dear!

David lives in north Oxfordshire. He and his wife Zanne have this week met my sister Gill in Cambridge. Gill is the first of his true relatives on his mother's side that David has met, but there are loads more of us around, that's for sure!

flashback to Monday: David and his wife Zanne (centre)

meet my sister Gill for the first time at her home in Cambridge

David has expressed the desire to meet more of his cousins, particularly any that live in the county of Oxfordshire, as they would be so close to where he and Zanne live. Gill has approached our cousin John, who lives in Witney and she's asked me to contact Liz, who lives in Headington, Oxford.

I've decided to write a letter to Liz rather than phone her or email her, because we think she's probably about 80 years old, and we don't know about her internet skills, or whether the news will come as too much of a surprise for a phone call. I can include the above photo of David and his wife in with the letter, which will be nice. Basically I need to ask Liz if she'd be happy for David to contact her.

David has been shocked (but delighted, I hope!) to discover that he has a huge number of cousins on his mother's side: there are about 30 of us and we live all over the UK, plus there's one in Ireland, one in Australia, and one in the US.

The last time there was anything of an event where a few of us met up was June 2019, for the funeral of our Aunty Bobbie, mother of my cousins John and Susan, in Headington, Oxford: Bobbie was the last member of that generation of our family to pass away. The end of an era.

my cousin Susan from Colorado USA and my cousin Roger's wife Maria

flashback to June 2019: a few of the 30 or so cousins manage to make it to the funeral of our

Aunty Bobbie: (left to right) Chris (John's wife), Liz, Alan (my cousin Jeannette's husband, and John.

Gill has this week contacted John, and he's very happy to meet David. I've now got to contact Liz - yikes !!! It's ages since I wrote anybody a proper letter!!!!

16:00 I don't get very far with writing my letter to Liz, however, because I have to ring Scilla. Lois and I run a local U3A Danish group, the only one in the UK, and I ring Scilla, who's the group's Old Norse expert, every couple of weeks to check if she's okay. She hasn't been well, and she's currently living with her son in Frome, Somerset with her son Tom.

I agree to send Scilla my recent so-called presentation on "How the Vikings Changed Our Language". And I tell her to feel free to criticise it if she wants. I've become quite thick-skinned, but anyway I've been emboldened by the enthusiastic reception I got for the talk when I delivered it to Lynda's U3A Middle English group. But we'll see !!!

16:30 Lois reads me out an article from next week's Radio Times. The famous actress Dame Judi Dench is appearing next week on the genealogical programme "Who Do You Think You Are?", which investigates celebrities' family trees.

Who knew that Judi had a Danish ancestor in the late 17th century - one who lived at Elsinore Castle north of Copenhagen, which Lois and I visited a few years ago while staying with our daughter Alison and her family in the Gentofte suburb of the Danish capital? Her ancestor was there at around the time that Shakespeare himself visited the castle - did it give him the inspiration to write "Hamlet"? I don't know, but I think we should be told!!!

flashback to June 2017: Lois and I visit "Elsinore Castle"

with our daughter Alison, and see lots of mini-Shakespearean playlets

- happy times !!!!!

17:00 Lois says there's a lot of speculation in the media about possible shortages of Christmas fare at Christmas time, so just to be on the safe side I reserve a delivery slot with the local branch of CookShop for their Christmas dinner for 2, the one we had last year.

The delivery slot is for December 13th, so that we can stash the meal away in the freezer in advance. We don't know if we'll be staying with our daughter Alison and her family, in Headley, Hampshire, over Christmas, but if we are, we can have a second Christmas dinner back here in Cheltenham later on - in January perhaps!

Yum yum !!!!!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part n her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch and watch Episode 9 of the 2nd season of "The Killing", the Danish crime series that Lois doesn't like.

A small Danish army unit in Afghanistan got mixed up with alleged atrocities against civilians in some remote Afghan village a couple of years ago. They were subsequently all cleared of guilt by an official inquiry, but now that the unit's soldiers are all back in Denmark, somebody is going around murdering them all.

Suspicion fell first on Islamic extremist groups in Denmark, but that was a few episodes ago now! How long ago that seems haha!!!

For the last few episodes, the suspects have all been Danish soldiers. Each episode brings a new suspect to the fore, who is then subsequently cleared, so that a new suspect can be showcased.

What madness !!!!

In this penultimate episode, Episode 9, the detectives Inspector Sarah Lund and her sidekick Inspector Ulrik Strange, fly to Afghanistan to interview Frederik Holst, a Danish Army surgeon, who is the "suspect of the moment".

The two Inspectors soon eliminate Surgeon Holst from their inquiries, however. If you ask me, Holt is far too skinny and ill-looking to have ever been likely to murdered 6 or so people during his recent 3-weeks leave back in Denmark (see picture above - my god !!!!! - that's two a week! Yikes !!!!!).

I'm not too sure who the current suspect is. I think it may be Bilal, a Danish soldier, who happens to be a Moslem, but I doubt it if it's him who's the real murderer. The series is bound to reveal somebody totally unexpected as the murderer in the final episode, perhaps Queen Margrethe, or the Danish tennis star Caroline Wozniacki perhaps??? [I think you're losing touch with reality now! - Ed]

The two inspectors, Sarah and Ulrik, are also getting closer to each other emotionally, I notice in this episode. Inspector Ulrik has been trying to get Inspector Sarah to go to bed with him for some weeks now.

A couple of episodes ago it almost happened, but they were interrupted by a visit from Ruth, their boss's boss, and the mood was kind of killed from that moment on.

flashback to Episode 7: Inspector Ulrik almost gets Inspector Sarah to go to bed with him, when the doorbell rings - it's their boss's boss Ruth, with some important new information on the murders

Poor Ulrik !!!!!

In tonight's episode, the two Inspectors are being driven away from the village in Helmand Province where the alleged atrocities occurred, and there's a touching moment on the back seat when Sarah takes hold of Ulrik's hand and squeezes it.

the touching moment when Inspector Sarah squeezes Inspector Ulrik's hand

on the back seat of a Danish Army jeep

Awwwww!!!!

Colin's prediction for Episode 10, the final episode: the two Inspectors have one more night in romantic Afghanistan before flying back to Denmark. I predict the two detectives will finally get into bed with each other, but that Ulrik will be killed in the final episode. I've seen the next season of episodes already and Ulrik isn't in it, so it's a no-brainer, if you ask me!

Ha !!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch an interesting documentary about film star Cary Grant, so we can wind down for bedtime.

Apparently Grant (real name Archibald Leach), who was born in Bristol, England, had a thick English west-country accent when he first arrived in the US. He quickly set about creating his own unique "Cary Grant accent", a variety of mid-Atlantic accent, so that he could get parts in Hollywood films.

Who knew that Grant was the first choice to play James Bond when the Bond films were first made in the early 1960's? [I expect a lot of people knew that! - Ed] He told the studio he wouldn't mind doing one film but he didn't want to do a whole series, so they got Sean Connery instead.

Grant had an unsettled childhood: he came from a broken home. His father had his mother put into a lunatic asylum when Grant was still a baby, so he never knew her growing up. Then later in life, after his father died, the found out that his mother was still alive.