Danskcolin: Sunday August 28th 2022

Another day of downsizing for Lois and me starts with the realisation that we possess about 200 spare light bulbs, most of them of the old-fashioned non-long-life sort.

What utter madness !!!!! I think a lot of them were inherited by me from my mother (just informally, they were never "willed" to me in any legal sense!) - my mother always liked to have a huge stash of spare bulbs, which was fair enough - she was of the generation that lived through World War II, after all, so who are we to point the finger !

I start the morning sorting these out and decide to just keep a modest stash of about 60. Still too many do you think? Well, I've probably inherited a lot of my mother's obsessions as well, no doubt about that!

I showcase in our under-stairs cupboard, an old blender box with some of the modest

stash of 60 spare light-bulbs that I've decided to keep, just to be on the safe side

After that, I sort out what I laughingly call my "tool box" and try to throw out anything I'm not likely to use in a million years - I judge that interval, i.e. one million years, to be the right threshold in this case haha!

Oh dear, downsizing is so difficult isn't it!

10:45 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in the first of her church's two Sunday Morning Meetings on zoom. I settle down on the couch with a cup of coffee and switch on my smartphone.

I'm delighted to see that one of our favourite quora forum pundits, Jakob Thusgard (crazy name, crazy guy), has been weighing in on the vexed subject of why it is that the Danes are so relatively good at speaking English.

Jakob begins his answer by pointing to the superior qualities of the Danish education system, pointing out also that Denmark is a small market, making it non-cost-effective to produce Danish-language versions of things.

But he admits that the Danes, like all Scandinavians have quite an advantage, because when it comes to vocabulary, many of the most common English words are similar to the equivalent Scandinavian ones.

And Jakob appends a diagram, showing relative lexical "distances" between various European languages.

As you might expect, English is placed relatively near to all the other Germanic languages, but I was surprised to see that the absolute nearest languages of all to English are Faroese and Frisian, followed by Icelandic. Who would have guessed?

And one of the most distant languages to English turns out to be Hungarian, and, more surprisingly still, Russian isn't much better. But I started studying Hungarian in about 1992, in company with my old friend "Magyar" Mike, and I've been doing it too long to stop now!

Some of my brushes with "difficult languages":

flashback to 1994: me (left) and my friend "Magyar" Mike on my first visit

to Hungary. We're showcasing our second-hand "excellent co-worker"

medals from the communist era, bought at a flea market in Pécs in southern Hungary

flashback to 1971 - I pass through Moscow airport

on my way home to London from Tokyo

[Can I just say I don't think those pictures are at all relevant! - Ed] [No, sorry we haven't got time for negative comments just at the moment! - Colin]

But thanks again for the diagram, Jakob. Fascinating stuff !!!!

13:00 After lunch I go to bed for my afternoon nap, and Lois joins me at 2 pm, as usual. We get up about 3 o'clock and have tea and a currant bun on the patio.

we enjoy a cup of Earl Grey tea and a currant bun on the patio

After that, I start some more downsizing.

We have about 7 bags of toys for young children, which all of our grandchildren have played with at various times, and I put them in the garage. In theory anything put in the garage is something we're determined not to take with us when we move to a smaller house in Malvern in the next few months. The rule is, "What goes in the garage can't come back in the house". Makes sense, doesn't it. It would take forever to declutter otherwise, if it was all "on a loop" - that's for sure!

We've got a logical system, see? It's not so disorganised as it probably appears.

I put 7 bags of toys for young children in the garage.

20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, this week's edition of "Countryfile", which is a "drought special" - a bit "dry" as a subject, perhaps, but we've each got a glass of something to see us through to 8 pm, which is nice!

Who knew that the River Thames is 5 miles shorter than it was last year? Yes, the "source", i.e. the first place where you can detect any water, is now 5 miles nearer London than last year.

What a crazy world we live in!

the source of the River Thames, near Kemble, Gloucestershire,

has now moved 5 miles towards London - what madness !!!!!

There are one or two plus points to the drought, however.

Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, one of the UK's largest and best known stately homes, has parched-looking lawns this summer, just like ours, only considerably bigger haha!

But Lois and I didn't know that, at Chatsworth, the drought has uncovered the layout of an older 17th century formal garden, visible from above.

the gardens at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, where the drought

has revealed the layout of a previous 17th century formal garden

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

21:15 We go to bed on an old episode of the 1990's sitcom "Third Rock from the Sun", a series featuring a group of aliens from outer space - Dick, Sally, Harry and Tommy - who land on Earth with a mission to live among us incognito and to study our society.

In this episode, the commander of the alien group, Dick Solomon, who is working under cover as a physics professor, is concerned that everybody thinks he is "whipped" by his girl-friend, the academic Mary Albright, who he stares an office with at the university.

Tonight Dick announces to his fellow aliens Harry, Sally and Tommy, that he's come to a decision - he's not going to be "whipped" by Mary any more, "because", he says, "I'm the man".