Wednesday September 21st 2022

08:00 Lois and I stagger out of bed and I check the Danish news media - as you do haha! And yes, they are reporting that Queen Margrethe, now Europe's only queen regnant and the continent's longest serving head of state, has again tested positive for COVID, this time immediately after her visit to the UK to attend Queen Elizabeth's funeral.

"Get well soon, Daisy!" is the influential Danish website Ekstra Bladet's

cheery message to Queen Margrethe this morning

I'm not at all pleased by the news - even though I think Queen Margrethe's symptoms have so far been mild. But I am pleased that the story has pushed the BBC into - at last - providing a full guide to all the crowned heads of Europe who attended Monday's funeral service in Westminster Abbey.

For people like Lois and me, whose failing memories and eyesight now makes it difficult for us to identify most foreign leaders apart from Liz Truss, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau, this diagram is a godsend, to put it mildly. 

It's definitely a "cut-out-and-keep" souvenir of this week's funeral, that's for sure!

You may not recognise the man standing next to Margrethe, but in fact it's Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, you know, the one who married an Australian, Princess Mary in 2004. In case you don't know, Danish crown princes are always called either Frederik or Christian.

Frederik met his wife, who was born Mary Donaldson, while attending the Sydney Olympics in 2000. She regards it as important for her role to learn to speak Danish, although her daughter Josephine says she still speaks it with an Australian accent - Lois and I have learnt a bit of Danish ourselves, when our daughter Alison lived in Copenhagen for 6 years (2012-2018) but we're finding it hard to imagine what Mary's Danish voice must sound like. 

Spoken Danish has been compared to "speaking as if you've got a hot potato in your mouth", which might help you to imagine it. Maybe Princess Mary's version is "speaking as if you've got a hot witchetty grub in your mouth", do you think?

some typical "witchetty grubs", as eaten by Australia's

indigenous community for thousands of years - yum yum!

10:00 Lois and I have started to memorise the crowned heads pictured, without testing each other yet on it, but at the same time we've just to get on also with our downsizing work - we're hoping to move from Cheltenham into a much smaller house in Malvern in the next couple of months.

On Tuesday Mark the Gardener helped us empty our attic, but one of the unpleasant by-products of this work was a plethora of large stout, but empty, cardboard boxes. And we spend most of this morning tearing these boxes up for tomorrow's kerbside collection, or loading them into the car for taking to the recycling centre at some point. 

What a madness it all is!!!

Our greatest achievement this morning is undoubtedly to cram far more cardboard into the blue bag supplied by the Borough Council than the bag was obviously meant to contain, which is nice!

One question remains, however. Will the recycling guys refuse to take the bag away, on the grounds that its canvas "lid" won't shut?

There's so much uncertainty surrounding kerbside recycling collections, isn't there! Lois and I had a lot of praise for an initiative rolled out in the US a few years ago, a scheme to supply householders with bins for materials that look recyclable. The story was first broken 7 years ago on the influential American news website, Onion News.

Remember this headline?

WASHINGTON—Praising the initiatives for taking the guesswork out of the often confusing process of household waste disposal, a report released Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency noted that more cities are providing bins to residents for materials that look like they’re probably recyclable.

“We realize it can be difficult to tell whether those grease-stained pizza boxes or cardboard orange juice cartons with plastic spouts can be salvaged or not, so with the rollout of these new bins, we’re encouraging residents to just toss them in and not worry about it,” said Rosa Fernandez, a spokesperson for the city of Seattle, which has encouraged its citizens to use the new bins to discard any plastic bags, wrapping paper, or other articles that they think could conceivably be repurposed, and place them on curbs beside their usual recycling and trash receptacles.

“Whether you’re trying to figure out if your city takes plastics bearing the number 4 or higher, or you can’t remember if you’re allowed to recycle books, don’t fret—just look for the purple bins with the question mark.” 

Fernandez added that the city was currently considering providing an additional bin for items that residents know aren’t recyclable but which they nevertheless feel bad about throwing out.

It all seemed like a "brave new world" was coming about, way back in 2017, didn't it! Yet, to my knowledge not one single local authority in the UK has yet adopted the scheme.

Wake up, Britain!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch and watch the first episode of Philomena Cunk's ambitious new series about the History of Civilisation.

Perhaps because Lois and I have been retired for 16 years and we watch a lot of history documentaries, I find that I already know a lot of Cunk's stuff about the early  years of civilisation on earth. 

However, I don't know a lot about the early history of China, so I pay special attention when Cunk says a word or two about China during her amazing "gallop-through" the first 10 or 20 millennia of civilisation in this brisk 30-minute opener to her new series.

And there's a fascinating interview with historian John Man, author of "The Great Wall: the Extraordinary Story of China's Wonder of the World".

John starts by laying to rest the common myth that the Wall is "audible from space" - he says you definitely can't hear it from up there. Perhaps a greater surprise, though, is that John says it isn't visible from space, either!

Cunk then takes the argument a step further with this fascinating hypothesis.

It's one of the hallmarks of Cunk's many historical series, I think, that she quickly "cuts to the chase" and that she can, in a few seconds, make a thorny subject seem much more simple than it's ever appeared before.

Fascinating stuff!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we wind down with an old episode of the 1990's sitcom "Third Rock from the Sun", about a group of aliens from outer space, Dick, Sally, Harry and Tommy, who settle in Rutherford, Ohio, and infiltrate Earth society to study our ways.

In a complicated plot, at times hard to follow, the women turn out to be from Venus. And when these Venusian women capture Sally and take her out to California, Dick, Harry and Tommy drive there from Ohio to try and rescue her.

On the way out west, they stop at a Native American trading post to get supplies.

Tremendous fun !!!!!!

22:00 We've got a lot to do in the next few days. You would not BELIEVE!!!! So I may have to pause my blog for a while But I'll be back [Is that a promise or a threat? - Ed]

Or will I? Well, we'll see!

We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!

Tuesday September 20th 2022

08:00 AfterLois and I struggle out of bed this morning we scan the Radio Times TV listings for today, and I think for the first time for a week or more, there are no special programmes about our late Queen Elizabeth today, so I guess we're getting back to normal now.

Reverberations from yesterday continue on news websites however - Joe Biden is using his presence at the funeral yesterday to duck out of his usual morning slot as a speaker to the UN General Assembly today, according to Steve, our American brother-in-law.  However, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's bad boy president, is taking his own morning slot at the UN as usual, so Steve concludes that Biden chose not to speak there today. I wonder why?

Brazilian bad boy-president Jair Bolsonaro (centre) at the Queen's funeral yesterday

Bolsonaro attended the Queen's funeral, although sadly for Lois and me, he's one of the many world leaders that Lois and I don't know from Adam. He looks a bit like a lot of politicians, we think, and almost looks like he could have been related to most of the other leaders present there yesterday for the funeral. Is this failure to recognise him a serious deficiency on our part? We're not quite sure: but perhaps we should be told, and quickly!

Meanwhile, Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, tells me that, according to the influential Hungarian website 24.hu, an estimated 50% of the world's population watched the funeral on TV yesterday, making it the TV event of the year, possibly of the decade, and possibly of all time. I'm not sure I necessarily accept "estimates" like this "50%" one necessarily, but I'm guessing that probably a significant proportion of the Hungarian population must have watched the funeral, or otherwise this story would have lacked credibility with the website's Hungarian readers.

Lois and I are trying to downsize our belongings here in Cheltenham so as to be able to fit into a smaller house in Malvern, Worcestershire. This morning we realised that we've taken too many far too photos over the years. AS a result, we've starting taking the photos out of our far-too-big-and-heavy photo albums, so that they can be slipped into modest A4-size envelopes. We're starting with our 1998 visit to Hungary. It's a crazy job but it's also quite nostalgic at the same time - the trick is not to dwell too much on any one photo, but try and keep working - not always easy, however.

For my choice of the photo that best brings back the thrill of this 1998 Hungarian holiday, I can't beat this one (see below). We'd just rented a big Austrian car at Vienna Airport, and trembling with excitement, we had driven over the border into Hungary for the first time. 

After a while we had pulled off the motorway, into a little layby, one of the little "resting places" (pihenőhely), as the Hungarians call them. We wanted to go to the loo and to get our breath back generally. We'd already been stopped by a Hungarian policeman, who had advised us, in German, thinking we were Austrians, of the fact that we needed to drive with headlights on all the time in Hungary, which we didn't know.

Yikes, so exciting! And all on "the wrong side of the road", what's more!

this close-up shows Lois: it looks like she's driving, 

but in fact she's only in the "passenger seat" haha!

This was also the holiday when Lois and I met Tünde, my penfriend, for the first time, in Budapest.

Lois and I, with our friends "Magyar" Mike and "Magyar" Mary, 

meeting Tünde for the first time, in Budapest: 

(left to right) Mary, Lois, Tünde, and Mike

Happy days!!!!

In other downsizing news, Mark the Gardener has helped us to clear the remaining "junk" - oops, sorry I mean "important souvenirs" - from the attic so they could be added to the "junk mountain" in our garage. But what a madness it all is!

15:00 This afternoon, two guys from the British Heart Foundation come with a big van. We want them to take away 2 single beds and a dressing-table. They take the beds but they reject the dressing table, because it's "too scratched" apparently. They tell us that the charity put the stuff straight into their charity shops, so it can't be in the least bit sub-standard. Oh dear!

Still at least we've got rid of the beds, as these telling photos prove:

before the BHF guys arrive, I here showcase the two

single beds, and, behind me, the dressing-table

they accept the two beds - here we see them loading

one of them into their van....

...but they reject the dressing-table as being "too scratched",

although it looks all right to me. Oh dear!

Oh dear, you win some, you lose some.

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her church's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. When she emerges we wind down on the couch by watching last Friday's edition of Gogglebox, in which ordinary viewers are filmed watching, and reacting to, some of the week's TV programmes.

Given that this was filmed in the week that the Queen died, we wondered if Channel 4 would pull Gogglebox from the schedules, given that the Goggleboxers are usually a pretty foul-mouthed and irreverent in their comments about what they're watching on TV.

We can see how it wasn't necessary to scrap the programme, however, and it's really quite moving to see the Goggleboxers hearing the news about the Queen's death last week and reacting with genuine sadness and tears. 

And they say a lot of the things that Lois and I said, about believing somehow that the Queen would just go on for ever.

22:00 Enough said. We go to bed.

Monday September 19th 2022

10:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch the Queen's funeral. We're interested also to see the foreign leaders, but we realise how few of these we're going to recognise anyway Years ago there used to be several world leaders whose faces were really well known, but is this still the case? 

Of course we'll recognise Biden and Macron, and Justin Trudeau; maybe even Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand. I think I may recognise Anthony Albanese, the Australian premier, but he hasn't figured much in the news over here as yet - he's still fairly new in office, and he isn't yet a familiar face, to put it mildly. 

We think that in the old days there also used to be several European leaders with well-known faces: that's definitely not the case now, as far as we're concerned. Remember the good old days with Franco, Salazar, Adenauer, Ulbricht, Queen Juliana, King Baudoin of the Belgians, King Haakon of Norway etc etc? Come back, old familiar faces - all is forgiven (except in the case of Ulbricht, Franco and Salazar obviously!).

Luckily we see the foreign leaders that we do know, plus of course Liz Truss, and all the British ex-prime ministers, who enter in a group - they're probably forming close friendships with each other after all the events of the past few days!

Here's Macron...

...and the Bidens...

...and all the UK ex-Prime Ministers...

...Liz Truss.....

...Justin Trudeau...

...PM Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand...

..and PM Anthony Albanese of Australia

The other foreign leader we're looking out for is Queen Margrethe of Denmark. Lois and I take a special interest in Denmark because our daughter Alison and her family lived in Copenhagen for 6 years from 2012 to 2018.

We don't notice her, but when I check the Danish news media it seems that she got a really good seat in the Abbey, right opposite the British royals.

Reading between the lines, I can see that the Danish media are a bit puzzled but also flattered, that Queen Margrethe, along with Crown Prince Frederik, were assigned such a favourable seat for the service.

The Danish media speculate that the reason for the privileged seating was that Margrethe and Elizabeth had such a close personal relationship going back several years - they used the nicknames Lilibet and Daisy when talking or writing letters to each other.  And a little-known fact is that with Elizabeth's death, Margrethe herself becomes the longest serving monarch in the world: she succeeded to the Danish throne in 1972, so 50 years ago.

11:00 We watch the funeral service, ending with the National Anthem, before having lunch.

15:00 After another nap in bed, we watch the arrival of the hearse at Windsor followed by the final service at the castle chapel. And although nobody could love or respect the late Queen Elizabeth more than Lois and I,  we think it's fair to say that, at the same time, we're starting to get a touch of "funeral fatigue" by this point. Our own fault, maybe, for watching TV for too long today.

Nevertheless we're definitely starting to feel rather sorry for the Queen's children because of all the walking they're having to do behind the Queen's coffin. And we're also feeling sorry for the poor pall-bearers, carrying the coffin up and down so many treacherous steps. 

Call us a couple of softies if you like!

Lois and I are starting to feel sorry for the Queen's children

and also for the pall-bearers

We wonder, however, whether Charles also is perhaps feeling that it's all been too much of an ordeal for him and his siblings? Will he take all that into account when planning his own funeral maybe?

However, I guess one of the main objectives has been to give as many ordinary people as possible the chance to see the Queen's coffin as it travels on its way to the final committal, and Lois and I respect that. And we're sure that the Queen would have approved of that too.

20:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch. We've mostly had a day off from decluttering because of the funeral. And the road outside has been eerily quiet at times, as the local press also reports:

And we wonder who that "odd person" was, who braved the streets alone. Could it have been the man Lois and I call "beenie man", for example? Well, there are plenty of peculiar characters around these days, that's for sure!

Tomorrow the decluttering and downsizing will start again, which will be a shock to the system to put it mildly. But tonight we relax with the TV watching one of our favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect, which tests lateral thinking.

And for the first time for weeks, I work out a connection that both teams just fail to get, which is nice.

Strigiformes team's answer: they all received medals for bravery.

Cryptics team's answer: they all have medals named after them.

Colin's answer: they're all crosses. The last two have a reference to medals, it's true: the George Cross and the Maltese Cross. But the first one is the Cross of Lorraine, associated with the Knights Templar and the Freemasons. And Eleanor of Castile was the wife of Edward I, and there are Eleanor Crosses, constructed at places where Eleanor's body rested overnight on the way to its burial place, which is nice and topical. 

See? It's "simples", isn't it, when I explain it nice and slowly!

It's a small point, but it sends me to bed in a good mood, which is the important thing!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!