Danskcolin: Thursday March 24th 2022

11:00 We're living in exciting times in our little parish - the great £35k Parish Plan for the football field is beginning to take shape - yikes!!! When Lois and I go for our usual walk we see visible signs [Those are always the best ones! - Ed] that the parish councillors, officials and sub-contractors mean business, that's for sure!

The big question is "Where has the parish got £35k from?". Have they been dabbling in money-laundering, or have they sold the football field to some Russian "oligarch" perhaps? I think we should be told!

This morning, however, we limit ourselves to inspecting the work in progress. Then we sit and drink our coffees and eat our raspberry flapjack, lost in wonder at how lucky we are to have lived long enough to witness this great project begin...

"Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be retired on a pension was very heaven!" (Partial copyright William Wordsworth).

This morning activity is going on all over the field!

Lois showcases the M.Powell & Sons subcontractor (just about visible through

his van's windows), painting the entrance railings a pleasant and relaxing green

...and work has started on installing new play equipment for

youngsters who have now passed the toddler stage

flashback to February, when news of the project

was revealed to the world's press by Parish Councillor Hamish Beach

(crazy name, crazy guy haha !!!!

12:00 Lois and I get a bit overexcited seeing the parish project materialising before our very eyes. We come home and try to calm down on the sofa.

excitement over, we try to calm down

on the sofa with our phones:

we're so modern haha !!!!

Then we speak on whatsapp to our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia. Sarah, her husband Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica are hoping to move back to the UK later this year after about years down under.

Before that happens Lois and I are going to have to downsize, sell our house and buy a smaller one, probably in the Bournemouth area, near where Sarah and family are hoping to settle. Yikes!!! And before we can do that, we've got 36 years of accumulated clutter and junk to dispose of first - my god, that's scary, to put it mildly!!!!

Busy busy busy!!!

14:30 Lois and I run the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, the only one of its kind in the UK, and this afternoon it's our fortnightly meeting. And it's a momentous meeting, no doubt about that.

Why momentous? Well, at last today our group reaches the end of the gigantic Danish whodunnit novel, "Dybt at falde" (The Further You Fall), by Danish crime-writer Anna Grue.

The novel has been about two grisly murders in the Danish sex industry. And now, at last, we're at the end of the book: the Danish police have all they need, and the two murderers involved have been effectively neutralised: the second murderer murdered the first murderer, and now the second murderer is in a coma, from which she probably won't recover.

Sorted !!!! And no messy court proceedings needed, which is a relief.

Yes, that's how they do things in Denmark! And this, I'm afraid, is the sort of story that our group, we old crows and old codgers like, that's for sure.

And we've learnt a lot about the Danish sex industry, which is a bonus. In this story the prostitutes are mostly East European or Nigerian, and they seem to move effortlessly between cleaning jobs and prostitution.

All good crime stories, whether in books or on television end up with a heart-warming wind-down scene in which the crime-solvers, together with their friends and family, can finally relax and have a bit of a chat and a joke about the case they have "put to bed".

This book's wind-down scene takes place around the family dinner-table of amateur crime-buster Dan and his wife Marianne, plus their grown-up son and daughter.

the scene at a typical family dinner table, where the amateur detectives

can at last relax and laugh about the sex murders they have just "put to bed"

Dan and Marianne's daughter Laura asks about what is going to happen to all these foreign prostitutes now that their sex ring has been "busted". The answer is apparently that after 100 days they'll all be sent back to their home countries.

But then somebody around the table asks, "How will the Danes in this prosperous Copenhagen suburb find anybody to do their cleaning if these women are sent home?" And daughter Laura comments: "Sex and cleaning - that's what the Danes use these foreign women for: to do the things Danish women don't want to do!" Her mother Marianne responds that it's only the cleaning that she personally has got tired of [raucous laughter round the table].

16:00 At the end of our group meeting, we members briefly discuss our next project: we've decided to go for something next time that hasn't got any dead bodies in it, which will make a pleasant change - oh dear!

The meeting ends and Lois and I collapse in a heap on the sofa - we find these meetings totally exhausting. We're getting old, no doubt about that!

20:00 We badly need to relax, but we try to stay awake till out usual 10 pm bedtime.

We watch an interesting documentary about the Bayeux Tapestry, made by unknown Anglo-French feminine hands in the 11th century to commemorate William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066.

A fascinating programme. Who knew that the Bayeux Tapestry is so useful to historians trying to uncover the minutiae of daily life in those far-off times? Everyday things like how people built ships, prepared meals, made weapons etc etc are graphically depicted [that's always the best way to depict things! - Ed].

That's why this tapestry is so useful. Most contemporary paintings from the 11th century, if they exist, tend to be depictions of bible stories etc: not very useful for social historians researching the everyday life of the medieval period in Europe, that's for sure!

Fascinating stuff !!!!

Also, tonight, in this documentary, Lois and I notice that although most of the talking-head experts featured are French academics, not a single one of them speaks to us in English - so we have to read subtitles to see what they're saying. You'd imagine that French academics would have to have pretty good English because of having to attend international history conferences etc.

By contrast when the programme features a bunch of Danish carpenters working on the relic of a Viking ship in Denmark similar to the Normans' long-ships, we find that they speak English as well as you and me!

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

But Lois and I aren't surprised - we spoke to some Danish carpenters in Denmark 9 years ago when we visited Ladby, Denmark, where there's a Viking ship burial, and also a boatyard where Viking ships are being re-created.

This guy in the white baseball hat told us proudly that these were the ships that the Danes had used to conquer England in the 10th century, an achievement that the Germans in two world wars had never quite managed - thank God for that haha!