It's the Borough Council's collection day today, for ordinary waste (green wheelie bin) and garden waste (brown wheelie bin), so I take the opportunity of stuffing the green one with books I want to get rid of. Ha!
a typical Cheltenham Borough Council wheelie-bin collector
Before you object, can I just say they are all books of mine - I haven't touched Lois's: it would be more than my life's worth haha - and rightly so!
Plus they're all books that even charity shops would refuse, because they're too obscure and they would just clog up their shelves for years to come: like, for instance my copy of the 1992 book "Old English and its Closest Relatives" by Orrin W. Robinson, onetime Professor of German Studies at Stanford University. Yes, I could sell books like this on Ebay, but as I've got hundreds of books like that, it would be prohibitively time-consuming, to put it mildly!
After all, later this year we may be moving into a house that's only a third the size of this one - yikes!
A particularly useful feature of the book is its maps, and I've many times checked Robinson's map of the movements of the Goths, because the Goths are so hard to keep track of, wandering about the Mediterranean area in an apparently random way, I suppose with the aim of throwing possible pursuers off the scent, but that's not something I'm completely sure about. Maybe I should be told!
So farewell, then, dear book! I've enjoyed you, and absorbed a lot of your contents. I won't be reading you again. And I don't think Orrin, the author, will mind too much about my disposal of the book. He looks like a nice guy, no doubt about that!
Orrin W. Robinson, Professor of German Studies, Stanford
On second thoughts: all right, I'll keep this book, but just this one, mind! I'm still going to throw away all the other fifty or so that I've earmarked for destruction in the last 24 hours.
Ha ! So there !!!!
our "crash diet" has become a "crashed diet" - oh dear!
Our so-called "crash diet" can more accurately be termed a "crashed diet" - we abandoned it after about 3 days this time. But as we always say, "In a pandemic it's above all important to keep up morale", so we've decided to give way to all impulses we have towards pleasure, which is a nice prospect, to put it mildly.
15:00 Lois has been planting seeds in little "pots" in the utility room: 12 x dwarf beans, 4 x courgettes and 2 x 2 cucumbers, which is nice [Stop saying that! - Ed]
I showcase the black "pots" that Lois has been
planting seeds in
Meanwhile I've been looking at my smartphone, and at the quora website forum.
I pleased to see a contribution from one of our favourite pundits, Ygor Coelho (crazy name, crazy guy!), who's been weighing in on the vexed subject of "Why have I heard a few people claim that Hungarians are Turkic, or descended from the Mongols, even though Hungarian is a Uralic language and not related to the Turkic languages nor Mongolian, and Hungarians are not genetically close to them?". Well, come on, how many times have you asked that very same question, I wonder!
It turns out, says Ygor, that unlike their Uralic cousins, many of whom moved from the Ural Mountains north-west into Finland and Estonia, the Proto-Hungarians uniquely decided to move south to the Steppes. And on the Steppes they found they could fit in much better with the Steppes culture of the mainly Turkic peoples who were living down there during the time up to and including the Early Middle Ages.
Yes, they liked the "vibe" of the Steppes, no doubt about that! All that pastoral way of life, with its semi-nomadic, highly militarised and horse-based way of life. What's not to like?!
And these Proto-Hungarians found loads of Turkic-speaking guys down there, and that's why the Hungarian language today displays a lot of Turkic influences. See?
So are today's Hungarians at all genetically similar to the Turks, or to the Finns and the Estonians, for that matter? Well it turns out they're not - they're only a little bit different genetically from all the people around about them in Central and Eastern Europe: the Slovaks, the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Czechs, the Austrians and the Germans.
And yet the population of Hungary today all speak this exotic Uralic language - so what's the explanation?
Well, the answer is that this is yet another case of "elite dominance" - a proto-Hungarian elite imposing its language on the natives who were already living in Hungary. And this process began when the Hungarian speaking horsemen etc arrived in the Carpathian Basin in the 10th century AD, and became the "new elite on the block".
See? Simples !!!!!
Proto-Hungarians arriving in the Carpathian Basin
in the 10th century AD - the "new elite on the block"
20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's monthly Business Meeting on zoom.
I settle down on the couch - I want to watch the rest of last Friday's Gogglebox programme, the series which films ordinary viewers watching, and commenting on, various TV programmes of the week.
I saw the first half of the show last night when Lois was doing her great-niece Molly's zoom chair yoga class, but I had to switch the programme off halfway through, when Lois came out and wanted to watch something else.
At the point when I had to switch off, the Goggleboxers were halfway through watching, and commenting on, part one of a drama based on the real-life story of John Darwin and his wife Anne. This was the couple who in 2002 dreamed up a scam to fake John's death in a North Sea canoe accident and then claim the life insurance money. The couple planned to meet up later, when the heat had died down, and live a life together somewhere overseas.
Last night I saw the bit of the drama where John Darwin is leaving his seaside home carrying his canoe down to the shore, and somewhat amateurishly making sure that his neighbour sees him doing it, so that there'd be a "witness" to it later, when the police and the insurance company people started investigating - my god!
John's wife Anne reports his disappearance to the police, but John himself is by now actually lying low somewhere out in the wilds of Yorkshire. We see him ringing Anne from a remote call-box out on the moors, and complaining about the wretched circumstances he is having to put up with.
That was all last night, and tonight I'm looking forward to seeing a bit more of the drama, through the Goggleboxers' cynical eyes, of course, which is nice.
Eventually John decides that the heat has died down enough, and, somewhat brazenly, he decides to risk returning to his old house and life with his wife Anne. And we see a relaxed-looking John enjoying his breakfast, and broaching with Anne the next step in their plan: "We should probably talk about getting the insurance claim done", he tells her.
Eventually the police find John's canoe, and have to "break the (sad) news" to John's wife Anne. A local policewoman takes Anne down to the store-room where John's red canoe can be seen stashed up against a wall. The police have already noted that it was surprising that John apparently got into difficulties with his canoe, because the North Sea was "unusually calm" at the time.
Anne visits the local police station, where a policewoman shows her
the red canoe that John was using when he apparently drowned
At this point, the interesting question arises. If you had to fake your own death, how would you go about it?
As always the Siddiqui family from Derby, dad Sid (74) and brothers Baasit (35) and Umar (42), have some good ideas that they kick around.
Fascinating stuff !!!!
21:15 Lois emerges from her sect's monthly Business Meeting on zoom.
She says that the sect's business is now almost completely dominated by the question of what to do with all the Iranian Christian refugees who are arriving in the area: i.e. which halls to hire where the sect can hold religious meetings for them, and how to make sure they have sufficient food and clothing - the Government only gives these refugees a meagre allowance apparently, and they're not allowed to work until their requests for residence permits or asylum have been approved - what madness!!!!
What a business it all is - and it's blown up out of nowhere just in the last few months!!!!
21:30 We wind down with an old episode of "Yes Prime Minister", the political sitcom from the 1980's.
It's quite nostalgic to see this programme, set in the 1980's when the UK was still in the EU, and the Channel Tunnel was first being talked about as a project that was hard to imagine ever coming to fruition.
Just yesterday in my blog I was reminiscing about a visit to Paris by Lois and myself in March 1992 - the trip where we found ourselves sharing a railway carriage with veteran actress Miriam Margoyles - and the trip where we, like all the other passengers, had to get off the train at Dover and get on a ferry to cross the Channel itself: we had decided to take the hovercraft to Boulogne, and then board a train there bound for Paris.
Yikes, that's 30 years ago now - YIKES (again and louder) !!!!!!
I remember we were feeling particularly fancy-free, because it was pretty much our first holiday on the Continent without kids since our honeymoon in Norway in 1972
flashback to March 1992: Lois on the balcony of our
little hotel room in Montmartre, Paris...
,,,and opposite the Moulin Rouge
How young we were in those days!!!!! Yikes !!!! [That's enough yikeses! - Ed]
In tonight's "Yes Prime Minister" re-run, we see UK Prime Minister Jim Hacker being vexed about French demands that the "border" should be at the Dover end of the Channel Tunnel, and that menus on the trains should be in French first and English second - all that kind of "argy-bargy".
In this scene we see Hacker expressing his frustration over the Anglo-French negotiations to his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby:
And it's nice again tonight to see Hacker's Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley displaying his usual verbal dexterity and flair for always using the right term.
The French President is coming to London by car to attend a state funeral, and he's suspected by UK Intelligence of planning to bring a puppy with him (illegally, in order to bypass UK quarantine restrictions), hidden in a diplomatic bag, as a present to the Queen.
Sir Humphrey asks Hacker if he'd be prepared to order police to search the French President's car, which gives Bernard the chance to correct the two men's use of language again, which is nice.
Tremendous fun !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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