08:00 Lois and I tumble out of bed early again. Together, we run the local U3A Danish group, which has its fortnightly meeting today on Skype, and tomorrow there's a meeting of Lynda's U3A Middle English group on zoom - busy, busy, busy!
a typical U3A meeting on zoom - not ours!
Usually Lois and I haven't got that much to do, and we can please ourselves and stay in bed when we don't feel like getting up, so it's a shock when we can't - damn! It's almost like being back at work still!
There's just time this morning for a brisk walk round the football field this morning and a coffee and Kit-Kat chocolate bar at the little stand, before we plunge into an early lunch. We want a early lunch so we've got time to go to bed afterwards and get a little nap in before our Danish meeting.
Poor us !!!!
we grab a coffee and a Kit-Kat chocolate bar at the local football field
We feel safe at the Fire Station because you sit in gigantic spaces designed to accommodate the county's fire engines, and the fire service keep the doors and windows wide open - it's freezing cold, but who cares? It's much safer, that's for sure, when it comes to COVID.
flashback to April: we get our second jabs at the County Fire Station
People are saying that the Government hasn't been as efficient in organising these booster jabs as they were with the first and second jabs. What madness! Still, it's only just over a week for us to wait, and we'll be really glad when we've got it - and we're getting our general flu jab at the same time, which will be nice.
16:15 The Danish meeting ends, and Lois and I feel as limp as two wet rags at the end of it, as we always do.
There were a few interruptions during the meeting, as usual.
Scilla, the group's Old Norse expert, rang our number in the middle of the meeting from Frome, Somerset, where she's now semi-permanently living with her librarian son Tom. Scilla isn't IT-aware enough to join us on zoom, but it was nice that she could talk briefly to us and to the other members this afternoon, so we kept up the connection with her.
Also the USB-charger plug for our new bedside light was delivered by Amazon during the meeting, so Lois had to go to the front door to greet the delivery guy. Lois and I started using a new bedroom light a few days ago. It's nice to have it, because it's incredibly lightweight - like a little foam rugby ball. And it has no trailing wires, so you can pick it up and put it where you want it, so, for instance, it can be positioned either side of the bed, as we want, which is nice.
Our bedside tables, which measure about 18 x 15 inches are both crammed with stuff. At night I keep a clock radio/cd player, landline phone, mobile phone, box of tissues, medications, comb, pen, notebook, glass of water, glasses holder, electric shaver and a bunch of other things. I am currently trying to cut down so I can bring in my mini-dvd player, so the rugby ball light is useful. If necessary I can balance it on the box of tissues, which is nice.
But what madness!!!!
a typical morning scene on my bedside table
17:00 My "new" cousin David, the online journalist, has messaged me on Facebook. I didn't know of his existence until a month or two ago, when my sister Gill, who lives in Cambridge, was given a DNA testing kit by her husband Peter. David was the illegitimate son of our Aunty Joan, and he was adopted as a baby after his birth in 1959.
flashback to last month: David and his wife Zanne (centre)
meets up with my sister Gill (right) at her Cambridge home
Fascinating stuff !!!!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch and watch TV, an interesting drama-documentary about the life and work of the poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744).
What madness !!!! And we comment to each other at the end that we'll have to watch it again to get the full value out of it.
Pope thought the rhyming couplet was the best form, if you want to make the lines memorable - and that's probably why he managed to write so many lines that figure in the Oxford Book of Quotations: he has the most entries after Shakespeare.
And it's clear that he was a very clever man, who outshone his contemporaries for sheer genius, no doubt about that. You get these people popping up occasionally in history - Benjamin Franklin was another.
I didn't realise that Pope was born a Catholic in London. And as Catholics, the family were subjected to all sorts of restrictions: they could not own land, or a horse. or reside within 5 miles of Queen Anne's Protestant court. They were eventually forced to move out to the country, to Windsor Forest.
Pope contracted tuberculosis of the spine at an early age, and that affected his whole life, eventually killing him at the age of 56. He was barred from most schools because of his religion, and so was largely self-taught.
The disease made him short in stature and hunchbacked and subjected him to a lifetime of pain, chills and headaches. He never married.
Poor Pope!!!!
He was consistently cheated by publishers and book-sellers who published unauthorised versions of his works, and in the end he went into the publishing and book-selling business himself, a bit like Donald Trump trying to start his own social media platform.
Pope's plight on copyright issues seems to have hit a nerve with ageing comedy star John Cleese, who pops up in this drama-doc as himself, and not dressed up in some silly 18th or 17th century costume, which is nice!
The "punchline" of Pope's poem "The Rape of the Lock" and the punchline of his whole life was "Keep your good humour, keep your self-control and your sense of proportion, and keep your sense of self, whatever else you lose. And keep smiling"!
What a guy!!!!
Harriet Walter, as the Duchess of Marlborough, reading
lines from "The Rape of the Lock"
Altogether, fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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