Danskcolin: Wednesday December 15th 2021

Today has been all about June's funeral - not that we went to it! What madness! June was a member of Lois's sect.

Poor Lois has spent a day and a half baking and assembling eats destined to be supplied to the post-funeral get-together. These were some of the scenes in our kitchen yesterday and this morning.

flashback to yesterday - the cake Lois has baked,

and some of the "boughten" [copyright David Dunstan] stuff as well, haha!

..and this morning - Lois showcases the stuff she has assembled or made

10:30 After Ian the Window-Cleaner has cleared off with the Christmas card and Christmas tip that we presented him with, we drive over to June's house with the food to lay it all out on tables inside the house, ready for when June's family and friends come back from the funeral and burial.

We arrive at the house and we find that Hilary, another sect-member, is already there outside June's house waiting for us. I'm not happy about this because Hilary is known to have a very heavy cold, and yet insisted on making a cake for the occasion, which we think was madness!

There's a kerfuffle trying to get into the house. June's daughters were asked to leave the key under the doormat, but Lois and Hilary can't seem to find it - it appears eventually like manna from heaven, just to the side of the mat. Lois thinks the key must somehow have been got stuck to the bottom of the mat, and so wasn't noticed, although Hilary thinks that God provided it when he saw their distress! Well, whichever!

I'm glad to see Hilary eventually depart. Who wants to catch a cold just before Christmas?!

with some relief we see the coughing-and-sneezing

Hilary leave and drive away

We set to work to lay out all the food. The family and the other sect-members are all still at the funeral service, which will be followed by the burial - at least that's the conventional order.

We want to get the food all ready and to get out of there before they arrive, obviously. It's a really small house and we don't want to take any risks about catching anything, be it just a cold or COVID, that's for sure!

we bustle around laying out the food and plastic plates etc

It's easy to forget that this is a sad day, because of all the work it's brought Lois in particular, but we're reminded that a woman has been lost to this world by some of the photo frames around the house. These catch our eye as we bustle about on our own in this house where June and husband Peter many years ago brought up their 2 daughters Deborah and Rebecca. Peter died several years ago.

Peter and June were a very likeable couple, although Peter's relations with the daughters didn't always run smoothly - but then in what families do things like that not happen from time to time?

photo-frames showing a very young-looking Peter and June

Peter and June on their wedding-day

pictures of daughters Debbie and Rebecca, when they were small, on one shelf,

with some of the sympathy cards for June's death on the shelf beneath

12:00 We sneak away!

15:00 A phone call from our old friend Anne-Marie. Yesterday she looked through our front window when Lois and I were doing our "bit of Danish". She delivered her Christmas card, saying she'd give us a ring sometime soon for a chat.

We first met Anne-Marie when we were living in the US 1982-5. She worked for the British Embassy, and started a relationship with one of my British work colleagues over there, Stephen, and they eventually got married.

I remember going on Stephen's "stag do", and having a meal at "Bertha's Mussels" in the Baltimore Inner Harbour area with him and other work colleagues.

"Bertha's Mussels", Fells Point, Baltimore

Happy days !!!!!

Anne-Marie is only 70 - what a youngster! And Stephen's mother up in Lincoln is still alive at 98. Stephen and Anne-Marie visit her every 2 weeks to "do things for her" in the house. And in-between times neighbours pop in, apparently. What madness !!!!!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom.

I have been feeling a bit annoyed that nobody from the sect has called or messaged Lois to thank her for all the work she did on preparing food for June's funeral, or even just to say how it all went. But Lois tells me later that Mari-Ann thanks her after the Bible Class.

While Lois is busy I watch some of a Mads Mikkelsen film, "Arctic", on the Great Movies channel.

The film is described in the Radio Times as "gruelling and gripping", but I think this is going to be a bit too gruelling for me. But we'll see!

When the film starts we see that Danish film-star Mads's small plane has come down somewhere in the Arctic wastes, and he's struggling to survive, catching the occasional fish from under the ice, and sending out some sort of weak SOS messages.

Mads's little plane has come down somewhere in the Arctic wastes

Heart-wrenchingly, when at last a passing helicopter sees him, in a blizzard, the helicopter also crashes immediately afterwards, killing its Icelandic-Eskimo pilot and injuring the pilot's Icelandic-Eskimo girlfriend. Let's call her "Nell", for the sake of this blog.

Nell, the dead helicopter pilot's girlfriend, survives their crash, but is badly

injured. Mads stashes her initially inside the wreck of his own small plane

Mads eventually decides he has to just strike out across the frozen wastes, dragging the helicopter pilot's girlfriend behind him on a makeshift sledge.

My god, it's gruelling too, to put it mildly!

Mads carries Nell out of the wreck of his plane...

...and scrawls a message in English on the fuselage

He strikes out, over the frozen wastes, pulling Nell behind him

on a makeshift sledge

he digs out a cave on the side of a mountain

where he and Nell can spend the night.

My god! I wanted to watch this film because it's said to feature dialogue in Danish, Icelandic and English. But so far there hasn't been any dialogue to speak of, other than a few bits of English that Mads uses to communicate with Nell.

I don't manage to finish the film tonight, but I manage to see a lot of it - and I make good progress after I realise I can watch most of the action at twice line-speed and not miss very much haha!!!

Lois and I have always had a soft spot for Mads Mikkelsen, and we've seen a lot of his films. Our daughter Alison and her family lived in Copenhagen for 6 years from 2012 to 2018, and one evening Ali and husband Ed were dining in a local restaurant when they spotted Mads eating with friends at a table at the back of the room. So she took this sneaky picture over her right shoulder:

flashback to March 2017: our daughter Alison takes a sneaky

picture of Mads Mikkelsen sitting at the back of a Copenhagen restaurant

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we watch a retrospective on the life and career of film-star Lana Turner.

Lois and I know Lana, the so-called "Sweater Girl", best from the original version of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" from 1946. But what we didn't know was that at first she really didn't like actor John Garfield, who played her lover, Frank: she complained to the studio that they "could have found somebody a bit more handsome" to play the role - oh dear!

Lana Turner and John Garfield as the young wife and her lover,

in the original of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946)

the moment that Cora (Lana Turner) suggests to her lover Frank (John Garfield)

that the lovers could be together if they "just" murdered her much older husband,

the "stodgy" Nick Smith - yikes, this isn't going to end well haha!

Turner and Garfield's relationship started off on the wrong foot, that's for sure. However, Garfield must have won her round, because during the months of filming, they are believed to have sneaked/snuck away (copyright me) and had sex on the beach - the activity, that is, not the cocktail.

They may have had the cocktail too, perhaps, although after some discussion Lois and I are not sure that the drink was around in 1946 - we were both new-born babes at the time the film came out, and we normally only ordered milk drinks on our nights out. Was this cocktail around then? We don't know for certain - but perhaps we should be told?