Not much of a day for Lois and me because we're both suffering with heavy colds. However, Lois manages to take part in her church's two meetings today on zoom. She's muted, of course, so nobody can hear the coughing, which is probably for the best!
So the main extraneous noises during the services turn out to be those made by the 3 or 4 dogs who attend "in person" at the village hall, or should that be "attend in dog"? I don't know, but maybe I should be told, and quickly!
flashback to August 2021: we visit the Village Hall
where Lois's church holds its services
And despite my own travails with the cold today, I manage to finish off the vocab lists for our U3A Danish group meeting on January 13th. I just need to check them now and then I can email them off to group members tomorrow.
In our little group, we're currently reading some short stories by Sissel Bergfjord about a set of passionate Danish vegetable growers who all have summer-houses attached to their little allotments, in a big allotment complex somewhere outside Copenhagen.
Insects are a constant threat and prove to be some of the most consistently prominent characters in the book, like the slug on the book's cover (see picture below), but ants, greenfly and other garden pests etc also make a big contribution and are a constant threat, which is a bit off-putting until you get used to it haha!
Danish writer Sissel Bergfjord
We've just finished one story about a woman who has run away from a violent partner, and who finds solace in a nice young man who owns the neighbouring allotment.
And we'll be starting a new story this time, all about a woman who chain-smokes and goes through a lot of beer-cans from early morning. But she hides her smoking habit from her 8-year-old daughter, by always concealing her current cigarette "at thigh level". Luckily the daughter is easily fooled by such simplistic trickery!
But what a wonderful language Danish is! No wonder that English borrowed so many words and grammar rules from the Danes 1000 years ago, when we found ourselves living next door to a lot of them in the Danelaw areas of Eastern England.
I've studied a lot of languages in my long life, but I'm pretty sure that Danish is the only language with a word for "thigh level" (lårhojde). What a pity that the English language neglected to borrow that word during Danelaw times - it has obvious potential, doesn't it! Or has it? Probably the jury is still out on that one.
The woman in our short story, the one with the naive 8-year-old daughter and the secret smoking habit, seems to have a partner who is away on a business trip at the moment. He's sent her a text with a cheery "Wish You Were Here" message and a "smiley", but the woman notices from the photo he sends of his accommodation that there are not one but two wine glasses on the man's balcony.
Uh-oh!! What's going on there, we wonder!
20:00 We have a quiet evening in front of the telly, watching the first of Alice Roberts' new series "Digging for Britain", which takes an annual look at the most exciting archaeological digs going on in the UK, region by region. This first programme is all about digs in the south of England.
There are lots of interesting items tonight, but our favourite is one about a mysterious matriarchal Iron Age culture in Dorset, the Durotriges tribe, who settled in the area of present-day village Winterbourne Kingston, which is 20 miles west of Bournemouth.
How did it come about that you got these minority women-dominated cultures popping up, so different from the norm?
The dig currently in progress at the site has discovered that whenever you find graves with high-status "grave goods", it's always in the graves of women. Like in this grave, where archaeologists found, among other treasures, a beautiful glass bead, coloured blue with cobalt oxide.
The dig leader says that, with the Durotriges tribe, power seemed to have been passed down through the female line.
Life wasn't all rosy for these high-status women, however. This one (see picture below) died before she was 25, but she had wonderful teeth. Archaeologists believe that she routinely must have eaten very few vegetables, and used to go instead for the really nice stuff, with the result that despite her dazzling smile, she probably died of scurvy from a Vitamin C deficiency - oh dear!
Poor high-status Durotriges woman!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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