Wednesday January 12th 2022

08:00 Lois and I can't stay in bed again - she has her monthly appointment at 9:30 am with James, her hair stylist, who's the lead stylist at the local branch of Billy Shears. 

James, Lois's hair stylist, caught here on surveillance cameras

Lois comes home looking good, as always after a session with James.

Lois, home from her hair appointment, glances through

last week's copy of "The Week" with its digest of the big news stories

Both James and everybody else at the salon, staff and customers are wearing masks, Lois reports.

This is good to hear, especially after the news story that Steve, our American brother-in-law alerts us to, from the Guardian newspaper.

It's an interesting study from Bristol University. It suggests that wearing masks and not getting too close to other people are the key factors in avoiding getting infected. 

Covid loses 90% of its ability to infect within 20 minutes of being exhaled into the air, and most of that infectability actually disappears even more quickly than that - within 5 minutes. So wearing a mask and keeping your distance are the key factors in not spreading infection. 

Being in a ventilated room is still important, but less important than the above, which is nice to know. And as regards ventilation, dry air is better than moist, humid air in killing off Covid's power to infect in the first few minutes, although after 20 minutes the effects of dry and humid air are more or less the same.

See? Simples!

10:30 We go for our usual walk on the local football field. It's pretty cold but the sun is shining and the sky is blue, which is nice, and the hills are looking good too. We get coffees from Monica at the Whiskers Coffee Stand, and share a slice of carrot cake: yes, we're really living it up haha!

14:30 Lois and I run the local U3A Danish group, the only one of its kind in the UK, and this afternoon it's the group's fortnightly meeting. 

As usual more time is spent on chatting - in English - and laughing, than on studying our "Danish Noir" crime novel. But I'm going to let that slide, because we have all been living through nearly 2 years of lockdown, and for one of our members, it's been her first Christmas after losing her husband to cancer, which can't have been easy, to put it mildly. 

As usual we come across Danish expressions that we can't really find an equivalent for in natural English.

About every other page in our Danish novel, somebody or other "smiles wryly" or "smiles crookedly", literally "smiles skewed" (smiler skævt). 

The online dictionary gives the definition "med den ene mundvig trukket længere op end den anden, som udtryk for ironi, overbærenhed, kritik el.lign. om smil eller grin", which translates to "with one corner of the mouth drawn further up than the other, as an expression of irony, indulgence, criticism, etc. used in relation to smiles or laughs".

However, all of us group members are agreed that in English we don't say "smiles wryly" or "smiles crookedly" very often. So if the writer of this Danish novel uses the expression on almost every other page, our only conclusion is that it must be something that the Danes do a lot of, but that we Brits don't do nearly so much.

American film-star Leonardo DiCaprio, demonstrates the typical

Danish "crooked smile" at a "European Smile Seminar"

What a crazy world we live in !!!

Another expression we have trouble in translating is when a thin, slight woman is described as being like "a little splinter-of-wood" (en lille splint). We don't think there's an equivalent to this in English, although Lois says she's heard the expression "a rasher of wind" in this kind of context, although nobody else, including me, has ever heard that one: maybe it's an old Oxfordshire expression perhaps? 

A woman called "Countrymouse" on a genealogy website long ago contributed "a matchstick with the wood scraped off", which I quite like.

Suggestions on a postcard please haha!

20:00 Lois ducks out of her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom tonight, and we settle down on the sofa and watch the latest programme in Alice Roberts's series "Digging for Britain", that reviews archaeological digs and discoveries in the UK over the last 12 months. Tonight's programme concentrates on the west of England and Northern Ireland.

There's an interesting item tonight about the large chalk hillside drawing of the so-called Cerne Abbas Giant, and some progress to report this year on efforts to date when the carving was done.

Across southern England and extending into the west there's a huge band of chalk underfoot, making the perfect canvas for primitive art on a grand scale. From horses to warriors, these huge chalk figures have decorated our hillsides for centuries. The problem is, how can archaeologists date the approximate time that these figures were created? 

The Cerne Abbas Giant is one of the largest of these chalk figures, at 180 feet tall (55m) and with a 36 ft phallus (11m).

Until this year, theories about the date of the Cerne Abbas Giant have ranged from "prehistoric" to "17th century". We know it must have existed by 1694, because somebody actually wrote about it in that year.

We hear tonight that two studies undertaken in the last 12 months have helped to narrow down the possible dates, however. 

The first study is based on an analysis of the species of snail shells found in the carving. To get to the earliest phases of its construction, archaeologists had to dig 3 feet down to its bottom layer. 

Some of the snail shells found in the study - helicellids - pinpoint the medieval period or later, it seems. This at last rules out the old theory that the carvings are prehistoric.

So it's "medieval or later", but that's still a bit vague. To try and get a more precise date, Philip Toms of University of Gloucestershire has been using a type of "luminescence dating" to find out precisely when the sediment underneath the Giant was last exposed to sunlight.

The researchers were looking for sand-sized grains of quartz, and it's the quartz that contains the signal that will tell them how old their samples are. They fire a green laser onto each grain of sand and out comes the luminescence signal.

The results came out as between 700 and 1100 AD, which more or less surprised everyone, and the theorists have had to go back to the drawing board. Some are wondering if there is a connection between the Giant and Cerne Abbey, a Benedictine monastery, founded in 987AD, the scant remains of which lie just behind the Giant. 

just behind the Giant lie the scant remains of Cerne Abbey,

founded in 987 AD, in the middle of the period in which the Giant was carved

 

The abbey was created by pilgrims venerating the local holy man, St Eadwold of Cerne. Legend has it that Eadwold lived as a hermit in this area, after he planted his wooden staff in the ground there, and it miraculously grew into a tree. Perhaps the Giant's staff is really a staff sprouting leaves, say some. Is the Giant really Eadwold?

Mine and Lois's gut feeling, however, is that this theory is all a bit farfetched and fanciful. Call us hard-nosed sceptics if you like haha !!!!

And why put a 36 foot phallus on a hermit "saint"? We don't know but we think we should be told. Perhaps we need to do a hagiology course. 

Fascinating stuff !!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!