Danskcolin: Friday January 28th 2021

10:00 I complete my revision of our Address List - all the people that Lois and I normally communicate with, in each case detailing their names, postal addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.

For our interest, I mark out the people who didn't send us Christmas cards last month, not with any idea of "punishing" them in any way, I hasten to say! We'll still be sending them all cards next year - as long as they're still alive, though, of course. We're all heart haha!

some of the Christmas cards we received last month

We mostly need to make sure that nobody's died without our knowing about it. And it's useful in a way to identify also the people for whom we've perhaps "fallen below the radar", which is a perfectly acceptable reason not to send a card, let's face it. We've all got our radars after all, it's not just the RAF !

my personal radar - a souvenir cup from a World War II RAF base

flashback to October 2014: Lois and I visit the RAF Air Defence

Radar Museum at RAF Neatisham

the Neatishead Control Room - this was the first base

that the RAF used radar from during World War II,

to track German bombers coming over from the Continent.

Talking point: in the above photo, 2 out of the 4 people pictured behind Lois are wax dummies. Can you identify them? [Answers in next week's blog]

Neither Lois nor I have never done this kind of exercise before with our Christmas cards, but it's nice to see that almost everybody we sent cards to actually replied in kind, whether with hard-copy cards or online greetings. Most importantly, it doesn't look as if any of the "no-shows" have died. So all's right with the world, which is a relief haha!!!

11:00 We go for our regular walk on the local football field, and inspect the Parish's latest venture: a so-called sensory garden. Lois inspected it yesterday, and she says it "hasn't grown much in the last 24 hours", which is perhaps not surprising. Are there any gardening experts around to advise? I think we should be told!

Some of the plants look a little stressed, but it seems to calm them down a bit to see us smiling at them and talking a little to them. I guess that's what "sensory gardens" are all about maybe! I must ask Prince Charles.

Later we share a slice of chocolate cake on the so-called "Pirie Bench" - just Lois and me, not Prince Charles, who's not here, perhaps unsurprisingly!

we order 2 hot chocolates and share a chocolate cake - yum yum!

17:00 The BBC is still harrying poor old Boris on tonight's 5 o'clock news.

Now the BBC are saying that the "lockdown party" accusations are "getting in the way" of the Government solving all the important problems, so to put that right, Boris must go. But whose fault is it that they're getting in the way? It's the BBC's fault of course, because they tend to focus on trivialities at the expense of the important stories!!!

What madness!!!!!

Poor Boris!!!!!!!

17:30 I get a long, interesting email today from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, detailing the incredible mismanagement of the pandemic by crazy Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Government, hoodwinking the population into thinking there was nothing to worry about, and protecting, first and foremost, the money-making operations of his family and friends above all else.

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

flashback to me on my first visit to Hungary in 1994: notice

the advert for the Fidesz party (above and behind me to the left),

at a time when Fidesz, the so-called "Young Democrats", were still "the good guys"

20:00 We sit back on the sofa and watch the latest programme in Margaret Thatcher's ex-Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo's new series on Great Coastal Railway Journeys.

Tonight we see the University of Aberdeen, founded in 1495, and its Elphinstone Institute, which researches and promotes the culture of north and north-east Scotland. Here, Michael meets Iona Fyfe, to talk about the languages of Scotland.

Iona is one of Scotland's ballad-singers, and Michael asks her what official languages Scotland has, and this is her answer:

And here, Lois and I notice at once that Iona is not going to be speaking in exactly standard English, because she says "hae" instead of "have". We're very quick at spotting that kind of thing! And, as she explains, "leids" is a Scottish word for "languages" - who knew that? [Well, Iona did for a start! - Ed]

She continues, "We hae Gaelic, which is a Celtic language quite similar to Irish Gaelic, and then we hae English, but we hae this third national leid, which is something that half the time Scots dinnae ken [= don't know] that they're actually speaking, it's Scots.

"Now Scots is an amalgam of all the different dialects, so Orkney, Shetland, Doric - the north-east dialect, Ayrshire Scots - the language of Rabbie Burns. But Scots unfortunately is not actually recognised as a legal, lawfu' [sic] official language in Scotland."

But, as she tells us, you can, for instance, still read Harry Potter books or Peppa Pig books in this Scots language:

Lois and I are quite superficial people, so we spend a lot of time discussing Iona's thin little white legs. Compare what Michael is wearing for this interview. Surely Iona must be freezing to death there in those bare legs, which we also notice are spattered with mud in places for some reason - why is that? I think we should be told! [health warning: the mud isn't visible in these screenshots]

Michael asks Iona what language she spoke when she was growing up. She replies, "So, when I was in the hame [= at home] with my mither and faither [mother and father], we were speaking Doric. And then in the playground at school we were speaking Doric, but then in the classroom we were telt [told] to 'speak properly'.

Iona thinks that that was a shame, "because there's a huge issue wae [with] Scots and class stigmatism. Folk think that if you're speaking Scots, you're uneducated, you're uncouth. you're no [sic] speaking 'proper English'. A lot of folk think it's slang, when it's actually a real language with a real dictionary".

For the interview with Michael, Iona admits she has modified her dialect slightly so that it's a bit of a hybrid. This was to help Michael (and his TV audience) get her drift fairly easily, which is nice.

But what fascinating stuff !!!!

Iona is a ballad singer, so it's nice at the end of this segment to hear her singing unaccompanied or "acapella" [or "acapulco" as Lois and I call it], the lovely old traditional Scots folk ballad or 'muckle sang', entitled "The Mill o' Tifty's Annie" [??? - Ed].

This song, which dates back to 1673, is all about the true story of a horrific 'honour killing' in the nearby town of Fyvie. A young woman named Agnes Smith was murdered by her family for "falling in love with the wrong lad". Her family wanted her to marry Lord Fyvie, but she fell in love with a man named Andrew Lammie, who was one of Lord Fyvie's servants. Oh dear, they didn't like that kind of thing in those crazy far-off days, that's for sure!