Danskcolin: Tuesday July 12th 2022

The day starts positively, but soon descends into deep gloom when we start reading the Building Surveyor's report on the house we're hoping to buy in Malvern. Oh dear!!!

We live in a 1930's house in Cheltenham, so when we saw that 1950's house in Malvern, we thought, "Oh! What a nice 'modern' house - that won't need much doing to it!" Unfortunately, although the nineteen-fifties seem like just yesterday to us, they aren't really "just yesterday", are they.

You do the maths haha!

Lois around 1950...

flashback to 1950: me (4), and my sister Kathy (2)

with our mother (36), at our house just outside Dover

Happy days!!!

09:00 Apart from the gloom of the house survey, it's a good start to the day in other respects - I do my weekly check of our car's tyre pressures and then we take the car for its weekly "spin", just to stop it turning into a fossilised ruin. We can't afford to do too many joy-rides, however, with petrol the price it is at present, that's for sure.

our friendly local Murco petrol station

And as if to underline this, this morning we pull in at our local Murco petrol station to fill up - the guy from Honda Blade is coming tomorrow to pick up the car for its annual service and MOT. It would be embarrassing if he found that the car was out of petrol. And tomorrow night, when the Honda bill is received, there will much anger, not to mention tears.

And yes, there'll be empty wallets again by bedtime, you mark my words - sob, sob!!!!

As you can see, it's "only" £8.63 for an imperial gallon, or £1.90 per litre. What madness !!!!

11:00 We come home and do some miscellaneous "downsizing" work - Lois is clearing out her various editions of her county family history society journals, and meanwhile I destroy about 25 "historical" cheque books - and it's surprising how long it takes, tearing them apart and then shredding them, making sure to remove all the staples first. My god!!!!!

But that's the modern world for you isn't it. You can't afford to leave behind even the individual stubs of cheques - there are people hiding behind every bush trying to steal your so-called "identity" these days. Nobody had thought of the idea of stealing identities 36 years ago when we bought our current house.

chaos and mayhem in our front toom as we work to "downsize"

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

13:00 One o'clock and some light relief at last. Steve, our American brother-in-law sends us news of a world tournament taking place in Wiltshire at the same time as Wimbledon, but it's a tournament that the BBC has studiously ignored, as Steve points out.

It's a sad reflection on our society that these events are taking a back seat to tennis - what madness !!!! And Lois and I feel that maybe the sport needs a high profile sports commentator to raise awareness of the lawn-mowing season. After all, winter events could take place in Australia, couldn't they?

Could Lawn Mowing Commentary be a job for Sue Barker, now that she's "retired" from commentating on Wimbledon? We don't know, but we think perhaps we should be told. Is that too much to ask? [Yes! - Ed]

19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's chair yoga class on zoom, followed by her sect's weekly Bible Seminar, also on zoom.

I settle down on the couch and watch the first episode of a new Scandinavian thriller series, Trom, all about an investigative journalist, Trom, trying to find out why his daughter, and other anti-whale-hunting animal-rights activists are being threatened and possibly even murdered, on the Faroe Islands.

This is the kind of drama I wouldn't normally watch if it were just in English, but, since Lois and I are running the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, I was attracted by the line in the Radio Times "subtitles in Danish and Faroese".

the far-away Faroe Islands, which were occupied by Britain

in World War II, to keep them out of German hands

I see the first episode, but it's a bit of a disappointment from the language viewpoint. I think I'm right in saying that it's pretty much all in Faroese, with only one of the major characters - Karla, the local police chief in the Faroese town of Torshavn - who actually speaks Danish.

The two languages are obviously mutually comprehensible for the Danes and the Faroese, but I'm disappointed to find that Faroese is not really at all understandable to me. It's pretty much a closed book for me, in fact - damn! And damn again!

It's interesting, however, to pick up a few things from the English subtitles. Who knew that the Faroese refer to their homeland as "The Rocks" ? I pick this up when Trom, the investigating journalist, bumps into an acquaintance, Ragnar, on the plane from Denmark to the Faroes.

Ragnar asks Trom, "What brings you back to The Rocks?"

What a great song it would have been for the Beach Boys!

"I've been all around this great big world

And I've seen all kinds of girls,

But I can't wait to get back to The Rocks,

Back to the cutest girls in the world.

"I wish they all could be Faroe Island girls...." etc etc

21:00 Lois emerges from her multiple zoom sessions and we see an old episode of the 1990's sitcom "Third Rock from the Sun". The series was based around the adventures of 4 aliens from a superior civilisation, who settle on the earth, but remain incognito as a supposed "family of four", "the Solomons", in order to study earthling civilisation and society.

This is a fascinating episode, the one where the Solomons decide that the most convenient way to start researching Earth's civilisation will be to get to know their neighbours, the Mullers.

In this clip, "Sally Solomon" gets to bond with Mrs Muller, when the two women exchange their feelings of frustrations over the "lazy men" they have to "look after".

And it's fascinating also to see "Dick Solomon" as the physics professor teaching his class at Pendleton State University. Dick, like all the Solomons, as a visitor from an advanced alien civilisation, have a detailed knowledge of the past, and the future, of Planet Earth, which is very helpful to Dick in his work with his students - no doubt about that!