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.
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!!!!!
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