Lois and I spend much of the morning exchanging messages with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, trying to work out best arrangements for when she and Francis, plus their 9-year-old twin daughters Lily and Jessica, move back to the UK after 7 years down under. They're hoping to buy a house near Evesham, not far from here, and Sarah will hopefully take back her old accountancy job in Evesham.
flashback to Christmas 2021: (left to right) Sarah, Jessica,
Francis and Lily
Yikes, though!!! Let's hope nothing goes wrong with the house purchase at this stage. Sarah is supposed to start back at her old job at the start of May, so not very far into the future.
a house similar to the one our daughter Sarah and son-in-law Francis
are hoping to buy in the next month or so, when they move back from Australia
Dear Google Blogspot, has any other reader noticed how much Colin resembles Father Blount, the experienced exorcist? I wonder if by any chance they could be related? Yours faithfully Ena Sharples (Mrs), Coronation St, Weatherfield.
James Blount, exorcist with over 40 years' experience
in casting out devils
Colin (left), in talks with Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán
at his official residence in the Carmelite Monastery of Buda, Budapest
Feeling frustrated, Lois and I go for a walk on the common
and see the highly recommended Bluebell Inn in the distance
Sissel Bjergfjord, Danish writer and author of the book our
Danish group is currently reading
The story follows the life of a woman with an 8-year-old daughter Elvira. The woman drinks beer all day, and is suppressing a lot of anger against her husband Mads, who is away on business a lot and who sleeps with a lot of women when he's away.
We read a weird episode today when the woman sees a slug in her garden and decides to chop them in two, just when they're in the middle of mating. She says the slugs remind her of her husband Mads's penis "in its flaccid state".
Luckily the book isn't illustrated at this point, which is a relief!
some typical garden slugs
The double-slug murder would be weird enough in itself, but the woman then goes on to chop hundreds of other slugs in two, taking a particular delight in it, and encouraging her daughter Elvira to join in the mass "slugslaughter". Even more weirdly, by the end of the evening, Elvira the daughter seems to be transforming herself into a giant slug too.
The members of our group are quite confused at this point. Is the woman asleep and having a dream, is she stoned out of her mind, or is she just going mad? We don't know, but we wish we could be told, and quickly!
And oh! Those poor little slugs !!!!! [Don't you go getting upset again, Colin! Remember it's only a story!!!!]
One of our members doesn't want to translate the paragraph which describes the path littered with "shrivelled penises" with their "furrowed lines". My goodness, I don't blame the person concerned for not wanting to read all this out in English - after all we are all refined older people, all having had quiet upbringings. However, the downside of this is, that as group leader I feel I have to "step up to the plate" and do the honours, which is a pity!
16:30 After two hours the Skype session ends, and as usual on a "Danish day", Lois and I are feeling completely shattered. We decide to chill out on the sofa with a scone and a cup of Earl Grey tea. Bliss !!!!
21:00 We wind down by watching the latest episode of "Atlantic Crossing", a Norwegian series which chronicles the activities of Norway's royal family during their exile in the UK and US during World War II.
Apart from "the little matter" of the US entering the war, events in the programme go on pretty much as before, however, with FDR's life being less dominated by politics and more dominated by cocktail parties and country drives, often with the Swedish-born Norwegian Crown Princess Martha, just the two of them.
Can I say right now that I don't think this series will ever go down well in the States, if the Norwegians ever try to sell it over there? It's hard to accept seriously its depiction of FDR, for starters. It depicts Roosevelt as having to have his nerves settled by Princess Martha's little lectures: lectures about how it's important to keep fighting and never to give up, like she says the Norwegian royals had to do, when their country was attacked without warning by the German air force the previous year.
What madness !!!!
But Lois and I didn't know, as shown in tonight's programme, that soon after Germany declared war on the US, Nazi spies and Nazi sympathisers extremely quickly became active on America's East Coast, and also that, as early as Christmas 1941, a month or so after the Pearl Harbour attack, a submarine landed German troops on Long Island, near where Princess Martha was staying.
Fascinating stuff!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!!
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