Danskcolin: Saturday January 28th 2023

08:00 Lois and I roll out of bed quite early again to be able to wash, dress and have breakfast before a 9 o'clock zoom call with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, and with her husband Francis and their 9-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.

Lily showcases the Australian flag she painted herself

The family all went down to the water this week to see the Australia Day fireworks, and Sarah put these great pictures up on social media:

Australia Day isn't made as much of as it used to be, Sarah says. The reason is that it specifically commemorates the day of the year that the first British settlers arrived by ship in what's now called New South Wales - it's felt that this is a snub to the country's indigenous peoples. Sarah thinks they should just change the date and, if they did that, the Anglocentric connotation is wiped out at a stroke.

Simples, really, isn't it. It's not exactly rocket science!

Next weekend the family plan to be "glamping" (glamorous camping, or de luxe camping) at the Mandalay campsite near Busselton.

Lois and I remember Busselton very well. We passed through there on our last visit to Australia in 2018 during out exploration of the Margaret River region - it's a town that's particularly noted for having the longest pier or jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. There's a railway line along the pier that takes tourists to the end of the pier, but it wasn't running when Lois and I stopped by, which was a pity.

Sarah and me at the World Surf League Margaret River Pro championships

flashback to April 2018: us on our Margaret River road trip

15:00 We recently came back to our recently-bought new-build home in Malvern, after spending 5 days in Eastern England attending the funeral for my sister Jill's husband Peter, who sadly died just before Christmas.

One result of this trip is that we haven't got a lot of food in the house till we go shopping next week, so Lois set to work this afternoon to do some biscuit baking - yum yum!

Lois makes 3 batches of her delicious peanut butter biscuits - yum yum!

20:00 We realise we're got behind with our latest Scandi-series, Atlantic Crossing, so we belatedly watch last Saturday's episode.

This series is all about the Nazi invasion of Norway and the threat it posed not just to the people, but to its royal family. In the first episode, King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav fled their Oslo palace for the frozen wastes in the north of the country, and Crown Princess Martha sought refuge in her native Sweden.

This series is pretty much a "this is what happened" series, so it's very educational for Lois and me, but it doesn't have much in the way of subtexts. So if you are still awake at the end you will have become aware that King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav have finally decided to flee to London, and before the end of the episode we see them having tea in Buckingham Palace, not with Paddington Bear, but with their relative King George VI, or "Bertie" as he was known to his family and intimates.

Olav was George's cousin, so this is a nice reminder how interrelated many of Europe's royal families have been, ever since the days of Queen Victoria.

Meanwhile Crown Princess Martha has been getting more and more uneasy in Sweden because of the attitude of her uncle, the Swedish King, Gustav V.

Gustav has been getting more and more nervous about the possibility that Martha's presence could bring the wrath of Hitler down on Sweden. The RAF were asked if they could pick her up and bring her to London, but they too were ambivalent, thinking that her escape flight could become an obvious target for the Luftwaffe. In the end she escapes to the US in a ship supposedly carrying Americans only, on a voyage that Hitler had agreed to, not knowing that Crown Princess was aboard.

Complicated, isn't it!

King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav with

the King and Queen in Buckingham Palace, taking tea perhaps,

or is it something stronger? I think we should be told!

The main thing that Lois and I have taken from the series so far is the dilemma faced by the Scandinavian royals. Should they flee to the UK or to the US and be an inspiration to their peoples from afar? Or should they show solidarity with their subjects and stay in place, and face the same deprivations that their peoples were facing?

We know that our own royal family was offered a home in exile in Canada, but chose to remain in Buckingham Palace, which suffered German bombing just like other targets in London. After the palace was bombed for the first time, the Queen said that she felt could finally look the residents of London's East End in the eye.

It's interesting that in 1939 when the war started, the Scandinavian countries were just as wary, if not more wary, about Britain's actions than about the German ones, fearing that if they got too close to Britain, their natural ally, that this would provoke Hitler to punish them.

Fascinating stuff !!!!

21:00 We go to bed on the second part of a retrospective on the Stock Aitken Waterman "hit factory" of the 1980's.

I expect you were watching this programme too, weren't you! Go on, admit it !!!

And wasn't it nice to see the BBC's current female go-to wildlife programme presenter, Michaela Strachan, in her wilder, younger days in the late 1980's, co-presenting the disco-show "The Hit Man and Her" with record producer Pete Waterman?