08:00 At last a day when Lois and I can stay in bed a while and not leap out. At last we can enjoy our cup of tea and do a bit of reading, which is nice.
Lois is still dipping into her mammoth book about what it was like to live in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars by Jenny Uglow. It was kind of a first real "world war" waged against France by Britain and her allies, and it was going on for over 20 years all over the world.
Imagine that! World War I was 4 years, World War II was 6 years, but Napoleonic Wars was 22 years - my goodness!!!!
Lois's copy of "In These Times"
I will say one thing for those times - jail regimes could be fairly liberal. Hunt was allowed to bring into his roomy cell a nice bed and many other favourite items of furniture; also his wife. I don't know what they did in there, but she did have a baby during his prison term, which gives some sort of a clue. My goodness!!!!
What madness !!!! [That's enough madness! - Ed]
On a lighter note, Lois is also reading some of PG Wodehouse's early "Psmith" comic novels about fictional journalist Rupert Psmith [the 'P' in Psmith is silent, having been added by Rupert himself, to distinguish himself from all the other hundreds of thousands of Smiths in Britain].
Like the author Wodehouse himself, Psmith spends a lot of time in the US, where he uses the expression "simoleons" when he's talking about "dollars". This morning Lois asks me where this word comes from so I look it up on my phone.
Aren't smartphones useful? You can instantly find answers to questions without having to go into town and look through several reference books in the public reference library, like we used to in the old days!
And who knew that "simoleons" is a portmanteau word, combining "simon", which apparently was 17th century British slang for a sixpenny bit, and "napoleon", a French gold coin. The word is believed to have come out of New Orleans at some point. And "simon" itself derives from the Simon in the New Testament who tried to get money for religious services, a practice that became known as "simony".
What a crazy... [Don't you dare! - Ed]
11:00 The day goes quickly - the morning taken up with crossing items off our respective "to-do-lists", and the afternoon spent on Skype with the U3A Danish group that Lois and I lead. We started learning Danish ourselves in 2012 when our daughter Alison and her family moved to Denmark, after Alison's husband Ed got a legal job in Copenhagen.
Our Danish group has been going now for over 10 years, with a mixed and fluctuating cast of members over the years, including an actual Danish person Jeanette, and a woman, Diane, whose husband worked in Denmark for NATO. Also Scilla, an expert in Old Norse, who studied at university in Iceland in her youth, and is an expert in the Norse sagas, and in the Viking discovery of North America.
In 2012 the group started off by "just" teaching ourselves the language - Jeanette wasn't with us at that stage, so we just had to set to, and do all the hard graft ourselves.
And then, when learning the language became too easy haha - (only joking!), we gravitated into group readings of Danish crime literature, supplementing this by watching some of the many "Danish noir" crime series being shown on TV by the BBC and other channels.
And now we're entering the next phase when we don't do a lot of Danish but spend most of our 2-hour Skype sessions chatting - in English - about the kind of things that all grandparents talk about: mostly about what their children and grandchildren are up to, and also complaining about modern technology.
Well, it's just a natural progression really, isn't it!
Obviously the next logical step for the group ought to be to embark on our own crime spree in Denmark, but so far we've resisted that, which has probably been for the best, on reflection.
But it's all been the most tremendous fun!!!!
14:30 We settle down for our Danish group meeting on Skype.
We decide to do it on the sofa. These meetings are getting longer and longer, nearly two hours last time, so we need to be comfortable. At the same time we don't want to be leaning forward all the time, because that gives us both back pain. We're getting old, no doubt about that!
We stuff 3 big cushions behind our backs, hoping to stave off the back pain, and this time it seems to work, which is nice.
21:00 We're exhausted, as always after a "Danish day", so we unwind before bedtime by looking at the last in the current series of "Madame Blanc Mysteries", set around the life of Jean White [hence the "Blanc"], a Manchester antiques-dealer, who settles in the south of France, and who, with the help of her English friend Dom, solves lots of antiques-related murders, in an effort to help the local police, represented by the friendly local gendarme, Caron.
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