Danskcolin: Saturday August 27th 2022

06:00 I wake up and see on the computer that Tünde, my Hungarian penpal, has sent me the latest crazy news from her country. The government is worried that too many women in higher education will mean a drop in the birth-rate. What madness!!!

a typical Hungarian degree ceremony

The proportion of women in Hungarian higher education institutes is now running at about 55%, and among graduates, it's 60%, because men are more likely to drop out. The government thinks that this is partly because "feminine traits" and the humanities get preferential treatment in state education, where high school graduation calls for 3 humanities subjects and only one science subject.

And what's the result of all this? A decline in marriage and the birth-rate, says the Government, because the women then don't want to leave university and have babies, which presumably is what the Government considers to be "their proper job".

Present policies also mean a general downgrading of traditional male skills, says the Government. And where you don't have men, you have "homes with dripping taps, or furniture which has arrived flat-packed and there is nobody to put it together".

the hell of flat-pack furniture - oh dear!

Funnily enough, I personally, and my siblings, would have grown up in one of those "dripping tap" homes if we'd been dependent on my father's practical skills, which were non-existent. Luckily my mother was handier with a screwdriver than my father was, so all was not lost. Thanks, mum!!!!

Tünde, my penpal, however, despairs of her country - she says it's galloping swiftly back into the Middle Ages.

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

09:45 Lois and I talk on zoom to Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, and to hers and Francis's 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.

we talk on zoom with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia,

and with her 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica

It's odd that, while Lois and I are busy downsizing and throwing tons of belongings away or giving them to charity, in preparation for our move from Cheltenham to Malvern, Sarah and Francis are doing something similar. They're currently packing everything up in their house in the northern suburb of Tapping, and in a week's time they'll be getting the keys to their new rental home nearer the coast, at Eglinton.

The family are planning to move back to the UK next spring, after 6 years down under. Sarah is going to be taking her old job back at an accountancy firm in Evesham, and by coincidence today she got an email to say the firm was putting her name back on the "staff planner" chart starting April 2023, which is nice.

11:00 As regards Lois's and my move to Malvern, we're hoping it's back on track. Our buyers were concerned last weekend by a survey report that recommended essential work being done on our roof and garage. This week I found out how much the work would cost, and then I offered our buyers a small reduction in the price of our house to allow for that. And they said "Thanks, that'll be fine!"

See? Simples - that's the way you do it !!!!!

13:30 I'm still sifting through the suggestions I've received for what President Joe Biden might do to erase the memory of the Trump years. My own suggestion, for example, was to bury Trump's estate at Mar-a-Lago under a billion tons of rubble, and then build a football stadium on top of it, much as Emperor Vespasian did when he decided to obliterate his predecessor Nero's lavish palace in the centre of Rome, and replace it with the Colosseum.

computer reconstruction of part of Nero's palace in Rome,

with its "hard-to-miss" bronze statue of the great man.

Steve, our American brother-in-law, suggests that Mar-a-Lago should be converted to a home for retired British nannies, and administered by the Daughters of the British Empire.

I bet nobody's thought of that, although now that the suggestion's been made by Steve, you have to admit that it is kind of obvious, isn't it!

Steve appends some fascinating information about the origins of Mar-a-Lago. Lois and I didn't know that the estate was originally commissioned by Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the "Post cereal" fortune. She was at one point America's wealthiest woman, and quite a business-woman too, a much better one than Donald Trump, we suspect, and she bought up such well-known brands as Birds Eye, Maxwell House, and Hellman's Mayonnaise, to name but a few.

Lois and I lived in a town called Columbia, in Maryland, about 25 miles south of Baltimore, for 3 years from 1982 to 1985, and we often used to hear Marjorie's name, without really being aware of who she was.

flashback to July 4th 1983: my late sister Kathy,

standing near the entrance to Columbia Mall

Why did we keep hearing Marjorie's name? Well, there was a big open-air theatre and show venue there in the middle of town, called the Merriweather Post Pavilion, where there were frequent concerts, and appearances by big names from the world of popular music.

a typical concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia Md

some of the acts appearing at Columbia's Merriweather Post Pavilion

during our stay in the town

Sadly, Lois and I never went to a concert there, but then we did have our two young daughters to look after at the time.

To my shame, I never realised that Merriweather Post was somebody's name - the Merriweather bit, yes, I always assumed that must have been somebody's name. But I vaguely thought that "Post" meant that the Pavilion had a lot of posts in it, or near it, or something of the sort.

I'd completely forgotten that "Post" is a name. Who can forget Stella Gibbons' novel "Cold Comfort Farm", in which sophisticated London socialite Flora Poste ventures into deepest Sussex to try and sort out the chaotic lives of her medieval country cousins, who all refer to her as "Robert Poste's child"?

sophisticated London socialite Flora Poste, known to her

country cousins as "Robert Poste's child"

And here's a reminder of one of the classic rows indulged in by Flora's country cousins, that she is forced to witness: -

Tremendous fun !!!!!!

So, Merriweather Post was the name of Mar-a-Lago's creator. Well, it's never too late to learn, and I'm not too proud to admit it, which is probably very much to my credit [Can you please talk about something else now? - Ed]

21:00 We decide to go to bed on a bit of modernist poetry - never a wise thing. It's the first part of a two-part BBC series on poetry in the 20th century.

We only have time to see Part One of this 2-part series, but we feel we've got to get through these mostly rather obscure, turgid, impossible-to-understand poems from the period 1908-1955, in order to get to the more enjoyable stuff from the 1950's and 1960's.

It's a bit like how I remember school dinners - they used to make you eat the horrible first course - which in a worst-case scenario might have been liver or something similar - before they would let you have the pudding.

For me, the poems from this era mostly make dire reading - why would you want to read a poem without rhyme, rhythm, sadness, joy or humour? I'd rather read the phone book, to be frank. Call me a hopeless philistine if you like. But it's total madness, I tell you!

Just like modern composers they succeeded in alienating the general public, but possibly it was just their own standing amongst fellow modernist poets that they cared about. Perhaps we should be told haha!

The modernist poets wanted to rebel, which is all right, I suppose, but if your poems aren't really readable or understandable, who's going to want to read them, unless they just want to show off about it?

At one point in tonight's programme, writer Germaine Greer neatly summarises what the modernist phase was all about - mainly a spirit of rebellion against the poets of all previous generations.

There are one or two bright spots for me tonight, however, especially when we see suburbanite poet John Betjeman reciting his "Subaltern's Love Song" about his friend Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Betjeman had a much more benign vision for the world, which comes as a bit of a relief, to put it mildly, and his benign-ness was especially on view if he could write about some strong, athletic woman or other.