Danskcolin: Thursday September 9th 2022

At last the day dawns when, in the midst of all the hellish decluttering and downsizing, Lois and I can spend our time doing something with our brains. Yes, it's the day when our little local U3A Intermediate Danish group starts its so-called "autumn semester", and we can continue with our little Danish short story, written by young Danish writer Sissel Bjergfjord, the story with the unattractive and underwhelming title, "A Difficult Task".

Danish writer Sissel Bjergfjord with her book of short-stories

about the tempestuous lives of some passionate Danish vegetable-growers

Yes, what a dreadful title for a short story - "A Difficult Task"!

What madness!!!

Who in their right mind would call a story that? And it's a pity, because the actual story itself is a real "doozy", all about a teenage Danish girl, Liva, who's got her eye on a fellah that her mum doesn't like. But Liva really fancies the guy because he's so passionate when he speaks, although so far he's mostly been passionate about foundations - of the house-building type, not the garments.

And in the pages of the short story we are due to read later today in our little Danish group, Liva catches sight of this guy in the local shopping centre. As she watches him from inside a branch of the Running Sushi restaurant chain, Liva then sees this guy meet up with another guy who seems to be a bosom pal, until the two suddenly start fighting, pushing each other to the ground, rolling around, pinning each other to the floor, and punching each other etc, a right little old "ding-dong".

a typical restaurant in the "Running Sushi" chain

Lois thinks that the two men's warm and emotional camaraderie followed by the vicious fight means that the two men are a gay couple who have a sudden lovers' spat - the pal is specifically described as "beautiful". Is one of them playing around with "somebody else", a third guy, perhaps? And if so, exactly who is this "third guy"?

But we're not sure - the jury's still out on that one. Suggestions are welcome - but on a postcard please. Pity our poor local postman haha!

And if Liva's guy actually turns out to be gay, that's going to be a bit of a disappointment for Liva, no doubt about that - unless she can manage to "turn" him of course!

But that's for later - our little Danish group are due to meet this afternoon, at 2:30 pm, on Skype.

10:00 In the meantime the decluttering continues. For nearly 3 weeks now our little car has been packed with things we don't want - behind the front seats, on the back seat and in the boot - things that Lois wants to donate to her church's head-office in Birmingham: clothes (for refugees, Jewish (?), and lots of her lay-preacher father's old books, and tapes of his sermons, that kind of thing.

flashhback to 3 weeks ago: I stuff a bunch of bags full of baby clothes,

plus cassette tapes and books into our little car

At last today we can offload all this stuff. Alf, one of Lois's fellow church-members - has agreed to take it all up to the church's head office in Birmingham. We drive over to Alf's house - he works for the County Council as a health-and-safety guy, but he's working from home today.

I imagine that Alf did a double-take internally when he saw how much stuff we were handing over to him, but he didn't bat an eyelid, just taking it from us and dumping it all in his front room, without a murmur. He says he and Mari-Ann will be travelling up tomorrow to the church's head office in Birmingham, and they will offload it all then.

I admire Alf's sang-froid and "stiff upper lip": he doesn't

make a murmur when we dump all this stuff in his front room

But what a madness it all is!!!

We make quite a mess of what Alf calls his "office" whenever he works from home. See his little laptop languishing there in the corner of the room.

Poor Alf !!!!

Still all that stuff is off our hands, anyway, which is the main thing! You acquire that kind of desperation when you're doing any serious downsizing. You just want people to take stuff away and do whatever they want to with it. "Just take it!" "Get it out of our sight!" is what we want to say. And you'll see that and feel like that yourself some day, if ever you've got to downsize. Remember, you've been warned haha!!!

13:00 After lunch I go up to bed for a quick nap. I've got to be in good form for our Danish group meeting, because I'm the chairman - I have to call on members to read and translate and I have to lead the discussion. Yes, it's a vital role - I'm very important, no doubt about that haha!

Meanwhile Lois hurries into the kitchen starts work on another of her most sought-after tarts. It's another Laxton: yum yum! Later she showcases it for the cameras.

Lois showcases the Laxton Tart she's been

making this afternoon - yum yum!

14:30 We sit down in front of the laptop waiting to start our Danish group meeting. First to arrive on screen is our only genuine Danish member, Jeanette who puts us right on pronunciation worries, and fills us in on the Danish social background to these short stories.

We wait to start our little Intermediate Danish group meeting -

Jeanette, our only genuinely Danish member, is the first to join us

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. These U3A meetings are, in practice, more a chance for a bunch of oldies to natter - in English - about the kind of thing that all we "crumblies" and "crinklies" like to talk about: complaining about modern ways and sloppy English, and talking about our children and grandchildren, although it's true that now and then we do devote a little bit of time also to studying Danish.

We find out today, for instance, from another member, Joy, about her troubles with her 37-year-old daughter. The daughter, having split up from her husband while they were both working in Singapore, has been living back at home with Joy again, but is behaving like she did when she was a teenager: staying out late, and going to night-clubs with her old school friends. This morning she came home at 6:30 am, but luckily she was quiet coming into the house and Joy didn't hear her.

Takes you back, doesn't it! And Joy's daughter's favourite night-club is one that our own daughter Sarah, now in Australia, used to go to when she was single in the 1990's, although it has a different name now. Who'd be a parent to teenagers or even to 38-year-olds today? Lois and I will tell you frankly - we're too old for all that trauma now. That ship has sailed!!!

Cheltenham's "Moomoo" night-club, the one our daughter Sarah

used to go to, under a different name, when she was young and single in the 1990's

But what a crazy world we live in !!!!! And us old people have got to stick together. Nobody else is going to listen to us after all, are they!

Poor us haha!!!!!

18:30 In the back of our minds today has been the news about the Queen's critical state of health, and every time I hear the "newsflash" signal coming from my phone, I quickly check, and finally, at 6:30 pm, just as we finish our dinner tonight, the sad news comes in.

For Lois and me, as for others of our generation, it will take a long time before the news that Elizabeth is no longer on the throne really sinks in. We can both remember the day when her father, George VI, died in 1952, and she has been a deeply reassuring fixture of our lives ever since. We mourn the loss of the embodiment of humanity and reasonableness that Elizabeth has always represented - qualities so lacking in so many world leaders.

And gosh -it's only 3 months since we TV viewers saw her on the balcony at Buckingham Palace for her Platinum Jubilee: the only Platinum Jubilee there's ever been, and something that will never be seen again.

Flashback to June 2nd 2022:

This programme, which Lois and I watched while house-sitting at our daughter Alison's house in Hampshire, perhaps more than anything sustained our childlike belief in the Queen's "immortality". It was impossible to believe somehow, that she wouldn't be there for ever.

20:00 After dinner we settle down on the couch to watch the first 2 hours of a hastily prepared Channel 5 documentary on the Queen's life and reign.

And interestingly, we hear that one of the new queen's first tasks in 1953 was to persuade her Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, that she would be every bit as capable as her father. Emma Soames, Winston's granddaughter, tells us tonight that initially he wasn't thrilled at the thought of dealing with a new, young - very young - woman as his monarch.

However, when Churchill met her and started having audiences with her, Emma's mother tells us that he very quickly melted. "She charmed him, you know, with her youth and beauty, but also, I think, with her sense of seriousness, and her complete recognition of what her role was, right from the beginning."

Churchill was then 77 and a towering political figure, while the Queen was only 26.

However, Lois and I didn't know that the Queen and Churchill quickly bonded, on a more personal level, through a shared interest in horse-racing. And their private weekly meetings gradually grew from 30 minutes to 2 hours.

And royal author Robert Jobson says that Churchill soon began to see himself as a sort of paternal figure to the Queen after the death of her father. He was an elder statesman - no doubt very daunting at first to a young woman in her mid-20s.

However Churchill believed it was important that he should guide Elizabeth through the huge constitutional implications of beginning her reign at such an early age.

Fascinating stuff!!!

And to think that, after a very routine start to our day, Lois and I have just witnessed something that for us is such a huge event in our lives. Things will never seem quite the same again for us, or for the people of Britain, that's for sure.

It's not often that events can be at the same time both inevitable and somehow unthinkable.

Ten o' clock is approaching however, and this retrospective compilation, I later realise, is going to be on all night - and indeed it's still going on next morning when I get up. Goodness me!

But as the great Paul Simon once wrote....