Danskcolin: Friday April 22nd 2022

08:00 Lois and I roll out of bed early. Today's the big, much feared, day when Lois has a tooth out. The appointment is for 10 am at our dental surgery.

Lois wants me with her, at least in the waiting-room, for moral support, but we know the surgery doesn't like "hangers-on" coming in with patients at the moment, because they have to seat everybody at a social distance, due to COVID. Luckily they aren't going to be too busy this morning, so I'm allowed to go along: and as we're a couple, we're allowed to sit together, which is nice!

the dental surgery's team, pictured here in the waiting-room,

with the reception desk to the right

The tooth extraction goes more easily than feared, but Lois comes out with a piece of gauze pressed up against the place where the tooth was. She also comes home with a list of instructions about what to eat and drink.

What to eat and drink - ay, there's the rub. What a good thing I keep this blog, because I can do a search to find out when I last had a tooth out, which turns out to be January 2020, just at the time when we'd been starting to hear about COVID going on in far-away China, so it was something we didn't feel too concerned about. What fools we were in those happy, carefree days haha !!!!!

flashback to January 2020: E-Day (extraction day) and my blog entry

flashback to E-Day + one

flashback to E-Day + two

After E-Day plus 2, I don't seem to mention the tooth in my blog, so the tooth area must have settled down by that time.

13:00 As it happens, Lois only wants a cup of rooibos tea for lunch, sucked through a straw. After lunch we go to bed, tired out by the stress of the morning. I get out of bed at 4 pm and make Lois another cup of rooibos tea with a couple of digestive biscuits to dip in her tea.

I get back into bed with her. While she "dunks" her biscuits, I look at my smartphone and the quora website's forum.

I'm pleased to see that one of our favourite quora forum pundits, Jason Almendra (crazy name, crazy guy!) has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "Why the Frisians and Franks, despite being closer to England than were the continental Saxons, Angles and Jutes, didn't themselves settle much in England during the migration period of the 5th century AD?"

Jason explains that "It was Old Anglia in northern Germany that suffered from some sort of ecological disaster in the 400s AD.

"Venerable Bede mentioned that the region was uninhabited for two centuries after the Angles, Saxons and Jutes left. The Danes were still in Zealand island. They later resettled Jutland peninsula. That being said, there were a few Frisian families that also migrated to the ex-Roman province of Britannia.

"My guess is the weather turned too cold to grow wheat. England is prime farmland for wheat growing."

And Jason adds an interesting map of European wheat production in our own day and age. The map shows that Frisia (along the North Sea coast of Holland etc) can't really be called "wheat country".

Jason's idea sounds like a good theory, although our old friend Noel Quinn has objected to quora website management that wheat was a Mediterranean crop, and that the Anglo-Saxons in Denmark and North Germany would more likely have been growing barley, but I suppose the principle's the same.

But what a crazy world we live in !!!!

It's fascinating to me (although possibly not to anybody else) that our ancestors, the Angles, came from an area of central Denmark that's shaped like a hook, a corner, or literally an "angle", and that's what has given us the name of our country England and its language, English.

And not a lot of people know that (phrase copyright: actor and film-star Michael Caine)

a recent tweet by actor and film-star Michael Caine,

as reported in the Danish media

16:00 We have a cup of tea on the sofa. Despite this morning's dental horror, it's Friday after all. So we relax by looking at the puzzles in next week's Radio Times. Bliss !!!!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in the current series of the reality-TV series, "Meet the Richardsons", in which a camera crew follow around stand-up comedian Jon Richardson and his stand-up comedian wife Lucy Beaumont.

We like this show, because it proves to us that the celebrity life isn't as glamorous as it's often thought to be - my god!

Tonight's show is a bit of a disaster, to put it mildly. The series' planners obviously thought that it would be a highlight of the series, to film the wedding of Lucy's mother Gill to crude stand-up comedian Johnny Vegas, but the whole event turns out to be one disaster after another.

The biggest snafu of all is when Lucy discovers on the actual morning of the wedding-day that her mother is already married to a man called Jack, that she has lost touch with.

Just after the discovery, we see Lucy on the sofa discussing this bombshell news with her husband Jon.

Jon, who always said the venture of marrying Gill to Johnny Vegas wouldn't end well, is at least confirmed in his suspicions by this point.

Yes, you can't go wrong if you stay in, watch a bit of TV, have a bit of tea, then go to bed - that's what Lois and I think too (although mostly that's me talking haha!).

So, Lucy's mother Gill and Johnny Vegas can't marry legally, and as the result the ceremony, and the couple's vows, have to be rewritten at the last minute, which is a bit stressful, to put it mildly!

First we hear Elisa the celebrant's hastily rewritten address to the 'congregation'. "Welcome, everyone. We're here to celebrate the friendship with sexual benefits of Gill and Johnny. Gill and Johnny don't feel the need to get legally married to demonstrate their deep and internal [sic] love....but wish instead to say personal vows in front of a congregation of loved ones, and then move swiftly to the celebration bit."

Then we hear Johnny's vows: "I, Johnny Vegas, take you, Gill, in good times and bad, and to use my body to service you emotionally, physically, sexually, whenever Guinness will allow."

Gill, inappropriately dressed in the gold lamé suit she found in a sex shop, then replies, "I just take you, Johnny. That's it. Every bit of you".

Personally written vows, rather than the traditional ones, can often be quite touching, that's for sure, but uppermost in mine and Lois's minds, we're thinking "What a shambles this whole thing was!"

And it shows that celebrity lives can go wrong just like ordinary people's can - no doubt about that!

Later on in the afternoon, as the celebrations begin to die down, Jon is just exiting the men's loo when he finds himself buttonholed by his and Lucy's family doctor, Dr Helen Maxwell, who recently treated Jon for haemorrhoids.

Dr Maxwell is apparently publishing a book about men's bottoms: "Your Hole Health - a bottom-up approach to living well", and she's included Jon's case in her book.

Now she wants Jon to write a foreword for the paperback edition.

And Lois and I didn't realise before how much celebrities are harassed about publicising private or commercial ventures, like, as here, an author trying to market her latest book. My god - is it worth being a "celeb", we ask ourselves!