Wednesday April 13th 2022

A productive day - we ring up Webbs Garden Centre and order some panels of garden trellis 6ft x 6ft, and two 8 ft posts, to replace the panels and posts blown down in last week's storm. 

On their website Webbs  say that have 3 different sizes of panels, but when you try and investigate them online, it turns out that they have only the 1 ft x 6 ft in stock. What madness!!! Who'd want a trellis that size - it's totally crazy !!!! 

However, Webbs say they will order some 6 ft x 6 ft ones for us, and these should arrive sometime next week. They'll give us a call when they arrive, so that's good!

flashback to last week: Lois and handyman Stephen 

assess the storm damage

And Lois succeeds in ordering a new driving licence online from the DVLA in Swansea. It seems that they don't trust us over-seventies old codgers and old crows - every 3 years you have to confirm that you're still safe to be on the road. What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

a typical old codger, trying to prove he's still 

"safe to be allowed on the road" - yikes!

12:00 We go out for a late morning walk - the local football field and netball court are full with junior soccer coaches managing their local young soccer-players: this week schools are off for the start of the Easter break.

across the road we spy one of the tell-tale yellow temporary

traffic signs, which can only mean one thing: there's

racing on today at the town's racecourse - damn!

I showcase a lovely cherry tree in bloom

We come home and have lunch.

14:00 Lois goes round to see two of our neighbours, Frances and Nikki, to warn them that we may be selling our house this year, because we'll be trying to downsize to a smaller house. It's especially important to tell Nikki about our plans, so that she can hurry up and fix the fence between our two properties, a fence which was also half blown down in the storm last week - it looks bad to potential house-buyers if a fence is leaning badly, no doubt about that!!!!

15:00 Meanwhile I sit down at the laptop and read a bit more of a Danish short story, "Mandalay". Lois and I run the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, and we're currently reading a set of short stories written by Danish writer Sissel Bergfjord. As group leader it's my job to provide the group members with vocabulary sheets to help them read the text.

Danish short story-writer Sissel Bjergfjord, who wrote the

collection of short stories that our Danish group are studying

flashback to March 27th: I receive my copy of the book by post

from the saxo.dk website

We started the story a couple of weeks ago, and we've already had a nude bathing scene, which is of course totally natural to the Danes, though a bit unusual from the viewpoint of a bunch of 70-something Brits, to put it mildly!

flashback to 2013: Lois and I relax on a picnic bench by a lake,

while, in the background, a bunch of Danes prepare to strip off 

for a bit of nude bathing - my god !!!!!!

But let's get back to the book! This week the moment I've been dreading has arrived. We've come to the first sex-scene in the book. I've always tended to worry over the sex-scenes, particularly through the fear of embarrassing Scilla, the group's Old Norse expert, who's in her 80's. At the moment, however, Scilla is not joining in our zoom sessions due to lack of IT skills, so I think we can get away with it.

Luckily it's not too raunchy a scene anyway. A man, Albert, is reminiscing about a holiday in Norway he took a few years ago with his estranged wife, Lise. He says that they were camping on top of a cliff and he describes a boiling hot day when they had sweaty sex "on top of the sleeping bag", and that they both "came" more or less at the same time -  no other details, so I think that, as unofficial group censor, I can pass this scene for the group to translate into English. 

Unfortunately for Albert, Lise appears to have drawn on her experiences with Albert on the holiday to write a prize-winning novel, "Thrilling Cliff", which sounds rubbish in English as a book title, but I'm going to let that one slide for now, because it's true that it does sound much better in Danish: "Gysende klippe" - wow-ee hot stuff haha !!!!! 

a typically "thrilling cliff" for a couple to have experiences on in Norway 

As yet we haven't heard how much of the detail of hers and Albert's sex life that Lise has decided to include in her book. 

But what madness !!!!!

I remember that it's sometimes dangerous if I censor the Danish novels we read: on one occasion, Jeanette, the group's only genuine Danish member, found about my "redacted version of the text" and challenged me about it - my god!!!   I later explained to her that it was to protect our eldest group member, Scilla, from possible embarrassment, and I think I got away with it in the end. 

But oh dear - what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive haha!!!!

20:00 Lois is too tired tonight to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom, so we settle down on the couch to watch a bit more of the PBS America channel's mammoth 5-hour documentary about Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).

We rejoin the programme amid Franklin's last-ditch efforts in London to avoid a conflict between Britain and her 13 American colonies. Franklin's biographer HW Brands emphasises that "the British Government was never a monolith".

Brands says that it's sometimes forgotten that "there were always dissenters, sympathizers with America, people who thought that Americans were justified in their opposition. There were people, well-placed in the British Government, who believed, with Franklin, that the future of the British Empire could be great, and could be bright, if the British Government recognised that America could be this second pillar of a transatlantic empire."

However, Franklin and the British Government's pro-American sympathisers did not succeed in preventing a war. And when Franklin left England for Philadelphia in 1775, he felt an enormous sense of failure.  Not only had he failed to achieve a compromise in the dispute, but also his personal life was falling apart: his neglected wife Deborah had died back home in Philadelphia while Benjamin had been in England, and he had also become estranged from his son William, the loyalist Royal Governor of New Jersey.

But what a guy he still was - now 69: my god!  And still with all his scientific curiosity still burning inside him. On the voyage home to Philadelphia, he took time out with his grandson Temple to investigate the Gulf Stream, lowering barrels into the ocean to take the temperature of the water, to see where the Gulf Stream could be - my god (again) !!!!!

When Franklin got back to Philadelphia he received the startling news that the war had already started in Massachusetts. And a week after he arrived, delegates to the Second Continental Congress began arriving in Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Assembly elected Franklin as one of their representatives.

Other delegates were suspicious of "old man" Franklin, however, still anxious that he might be a British spy. The Congress was a gathering of mostly young men, by contrast. William Bradford observed that Franklin was quiet during the Congress's sessions, asleep a lot of the time, and that he preferred to spend his evenings at home, while the others congregated in taverns. My god - Franklin sounds just like me!!!

John Adams, by contrast, was 39, Patrick Henry and John Hancock were 38, and Thomas Jefferson was only 32 - my god, just a bunch of young whippersnappers haha !!!

It was too soon to write Franklin off however, because his greatest achievement in the political realm was still to come - securing France's crucial help in America's fight for independence.

In October 1776 Franklin crossed the Atlantic again, this time bound for France. In the past the passage of his ship had always been protected by the Royal Navy but this time he had to avoid the Navy at all costs - my god! And when he arrived he found an atmosphere of Franklin-mania surging among the French and other continental nations, who greeted the this world-famous scientist with a wave of hero-worship, accompanied by sales of hastily manufactured souvenir items like Jefferson medallions etc.

The hysteria annoyed King Louis XVI, however, and as a private protest, he had Jefferson's face imprinted on the bottom of the inside of his chamber-pot, which wasn't very nice, Lois and I think!

And what do you know, the atmosphere in Europe was the same as it is today - with everybody hating the English!!  What's wrong with us? We seem to be nice reasonable people to Lois and me. 

What madness!!!

And Franklin found that a bunch of celebrity continentals were queuing up to volunteer to help the Americans, often just to spite the English!

Lois and I have heard about Lafayette, who, aged jut 19, wanted to revenge the death of his father at British hands in the Seven Years' War. But who knew about Count Casimir Pulaski of Poland, who organised the American cavalry, or foul-mouthed Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who developed a new system of military discipline and drilling. [I expect a lot of people knew about them! - Ed]

A lot of the other European volunteers were useless good-for-nothings, however, and eventually General Washington begged Franklin to "please don't send me any more"!!!!

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

22:00 At 10 o'clock Lois and I decide to call it a day and go to bed. Only another 90 minutes to go now, in this mammoth Franklin tele-biography - my god !!!!!   Zzzzzzzzz!!!!