Today is the first full day after Lois had one of her bottom teeth pulled, so conversations are revolving round appropriate food for her, and why not indeed! In the event she has porridge for breakfast, paté on bread for lunch plus soup, and a crumbly treacle tart for our teatime snack - all soft targets haha!
We spend most of the afternoon in bed again, but I get up at 3:30 pm to make us both some tea. And I carefully select a soft-looking treacle tart from "Margaret's Country Kitchen" as a suitable accompaniment.
I select one of our crumbliest treacle tarts from
the Margaret's Country Kitchen range for Lois to have with her cup of tea
16:00 Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, has sent me an interesting email bringing me up to date with events in Hungary, including the sad tale of how much democracy has disappeared there since former democracy champion Viktor Orbán came to power with his political party Fidesz.
In the dying days of Communism, Fidesz were once the "good guys" of Hungarian politics. Now, however, after being in power for so many years, they have gradually changed the rules of the game to favour themselves, and changed the constitution to keep themselves in power.
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"
At the time, the party's slogan was "If you tired of bananas, why not go for an orange", which somebody told me was a Hungarian women's prison joke. The Fidesz symbol has always been an orange, I believe.
In recent weeks, Fidesz has indulged in widespread bribery of key voter groups by pre-election tax concessions, and they have a stranglehold on the media. They spent 8 times as much on election advertising as the opposition. Surprisingly, in view of Orbán's close relationship with Putin, the war in Ukraine has actually increased Orbán's popularity even more, which is hard to believe. He seems to be unstoppable. Oh dear!
No wonder that Hungary has been taken off the official list of democratic countries - my god!!!
Tünde says that in his early days as a politician Orbán was a "gabbler", but he may have had some speech therapy, she thinks. Nowadays he speaks ultra-slowly, stressing every word to increase its importance, dwelling on simplistic slogans like "I'm a son of the people", and other such nonsense.
And, for my part, I'm also wondering whether, as well as speech therapy, he also has been getting some "hat advice", i.e. "Don't wear one!", if the evidence of these 2 photos is anything to go by. My god (again) ! Or "pipe advice"? Or "tie advice"? The list is endless!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
16:30 We have our tea and tart, and Lois reads me more bits out of her copy of "The Week", a magazine coming out every Friday, which gives a digest of the main news of the week from home and abroad.
A very distant relative of mine, Elizabeth, wife of disgraced former Tory Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, must have died recently. My maternal grandmother's family were all members of the Howell family, and at some stage in the 19th century, my great-great-uncle John Howell married a woman called Mary Ann David, cousin of Morgan David, who was Elizabeth's great grandfather.
See? Simples haha!
Elizabeth was the only person with a loose connection to my family tree that could reasonably have been said to have been famous, or at least married to famous men - a trio of them in fact: starting with the actors and film-stars Richard Harris and Rex Harrison (not at the same time).
Finally Elizabeth married disgraced former Tory Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, now a born-again Christian and Anglican vicar.
What madness !!!!!
And now finally, in Lois's copy of this week's "The Week", we hear that Elizabeth has died, although she lived to a reasonable age, at least - 85 years.
But who would have thought that Rex Harrison was such an unpleasant man to be married to? Lois says he always seemed a rather cuddly man on screen. It just shows you can't go by film appearances, that's for sure. And the story in "The Week"'s "gossip column" sheds new light on Harrison's famous song in "My Fair Lady" - "Why can't a woman be more like a man?".
My god! [Stop saying that! - Ed]
Earlier today, we just had a short session on zoom mid-morning with our daughter Sarah in Perth, Australia, and with our twin 8-year-old granddaughters Lily and Jessie. Lois didn't want to talk for too long, and Sarah's shoulder was feeling a bit stiff, so we kept it short.
Lily also texted us during the zoom session, which made it more complicated, and she also showed us how to find some emojis on our phone that we didn't know about - my god!
I wondered to myself what I would have made of smartphones and texts and emojis if you'd told me about them when I myself was 8 years old, back in 1954. It would have been totally mystifying, of course. It's a totally different world today, no doubt about that!
flashback to 1954: me (right), aged 8, with my brother
Steve (2) and my sister Kathy (6) - happy smartphone-free days!
17:00 Lois and I run the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, the only one of its kind in the UK - no surprise there! At the moment we're reading a Danish short-story about some passionate allotment holders growing vegetables in their little plots just outside Copenhagen, and it's my job as group-leader to prepare vocabulary lists to save the other members looking all the words up - what madness!!!!
In the section I'm doing at the moment, Albert and his partner Lise are spending some time out at their allotment. She's taking Albert by the hand to show him her kitchen-garden and explain to him what's in her little bed.
”Her har jeg sået timian [Here have I sown thyme], det her er en kornblomst [This here is a cornflower],
skvalderkål kan spises [goutweed can be eaten], men breder sig [but it spreads], og det her er kongekokleare [and this here is "kongekokleare"], se hvor
fine de er [see how fine/delicate they are]”.
Lois and I have never heard of "goutweed", also called "goutwort", but I'm going to let that one slide, because it's in all the reference books. It's maybe the same as ground-elder, or similar.
'goutweed' or 'goutwort'
But what in heaven's name are the plants that Lise refers to as "kongekokleare"? Google-translate says it means "king-cockles", but I can't find that as a plant-name anywhere on the web. And the Danish word "kongekokleare" doesn't exist on the web either - what madness !!!! How often does that happen - that you can't find a word anywhere on the web?
It's total web madness, I tell you!!!
Then Lois tells me that although the English word "cockle" normally refers to a mollusc (from the French "coquille"), there's another, older, Anglo-Saxon word "cockle" which refers to a cornfield weed, nowadays called a corncockle. And given our shared linguistic history with the Danes I'm assuming that the Danish "kokleare" is probably connected with that old Anglo-Saxon word.
See? Simples !!!!
flashback to 2014: the only time to our knowledge that "corncockle" has hit the headlines - what madness !!!!!
In reality of course many of our familiar flowers are mildly poisonous, the daffodil for example, especially if you were to go crazy and decide to eat a big pile of them. So don't panic, as the Guardian says.
20:00 We relax on the sofa with a bit of TV, the second programme in the series "Art That Made Us", which goes through a history of art and artefacts found in the British Isles over the last 1600 years or so, and invites modern-day artists, sculptors etc to comment on them and maybe use them as inspiration for new works.
Tonight we're transported back to a previous pandemic, the 14th century "Black Death", which killed a third to a half of Britain's population and disrupted both art and society in surprising ways. Basically labour became in short supply, which gave ordinary people a power that they had never had before to challenge existing norms.
This was reflected in what the programme calls "disruptive art", and all sorts of daring innovations like women becoming writers and generally throwing their weight about etc. My god, whatever next !!!!
We hear about Malvern man William Longland's late 14th century poem "Piers Plowman", and about radical priest John Ball's speech at Blackheath, in which he challenges the rights of the nobility to lord it over the poor.
Women's voices also were heard for the first time during this period, like Julian of Norwich's "Revelations of Divine Love" (c.1373), and the first female autobiography, "The Book of Margery Kempe" (c. 1436-8).
The most famous work from the times was Chaucer's satirical Canterbury Tales, and the pundits in tonight's programme name the Wife of Bath as the book's most memorable character. "She's loud, she's large, she wears 'statement clothes' ", they say.
The Wife of Bath had five husbands, taking the first one at age 12, and she drove them all to their graves, "nagging and shagging them to death", and making more and more money from her inheritances.
"In wifehood, I will use my instrument
As freely as my Maker me it sent.
I never would abide
In bed with them when hands began to slide,
Till they had promised ransom, paid a fee
And then I'll let them do their nicety".
What a woman haha!!!!
Chaucer is describing, and satirising the times, with their increased social mobility. The Wife of Bath is using her wits and guiles to get rich, and, once she's rich, she doesn't see why she shouldn't act like a noblewoman. I'm as good as they are, she thought.
What a crazy world they lived in, in those far-off days!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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