Danskcolin: Sunday April 16th 2023

I'll be frank - Lois and I are not having a great weekend following our COVID booster jab yesterday. No devastating side-effects, other than general tiredness and achiness. And after our second afternoon-in-bed running since the jab (and our third running since Friday - although no excuse for the Friday one, that was sheer self-indulgence!), dare I say it? We're beginning to recover a bit more energy.

11:00 Lois doesn't feel like going over to Tewkesbury today, however, to take part in her church's two Sunday meetings, so she disappears into the kitchen-diner to take part on zoom.

Lois, in her red dress, disappears into the kitchen-diner to take part

in her church's two Sunday meetings on zoom

I've set up our stereo speakers for her, so the quality of the speech is first-class as usual. Unfortunately, as regards the hymn singing, once again it comes across as on-off (mostly off), with a syllable of singing coming through about every 10 seconds or so. This problem has been an issue for a few weeks now, Lois says.

It's complete madness, but Chief Elder Andy, who's also the church's IT trouble-shooter, doesn't seem to be able to solve the problem. Modern technology eh?!!!!

flashback to 2021: Chief Elder Andy baptises a new member

by full immersion in his garden hot-tub, as his wife Angie looks on

11:30 Meanwhile, after some difficult research, I order a lawn-mower cover for outside storage from Amazon. I don't know how long it's going to take to get a shed-base and a shed put up, so I figure the best stop-gap is to buy an all-weather external storage heavy-duty cover, which is only about £15, and then choose a not very expensive lawn-mower to go underneath it, on the patio like.

It seems like putting the cart before the horse, but I choose the biggest cover I can find on the website. It's one that has a piece of some sort of rope attached, so that you can tighten the cover's squeeze - and hey presto, our future mower will be all snug'n'warm, even at night, something which is always gratifying, isn't it, if you can get it haha!

a typical lawn-mower cover for external storage:

keeping it all snug'n'warm, which is nice!

Now I've just got to choose a mower - decisions, decisions! Everything was simpler at the house in Cheltenham that we left at the end of October last year. We had had things like lawn-mowers and sheds and shed-bases all organised years before - we'd been in the house for 36 years, so we had had plenty of time to do all that, gradually like. Now it seems we've got to start from scratch as regards so many things, and to do it all quickly. It's complete madness !!!!!

14:00 We go up to bed again.

We've had bad news and good news today as regards visitors. My sister Jill in Cambridge, together with Lucy, the youngest of Jill's 3 daughters, unfortunately won't now be able to visit us next weekend as originally planned. However, our daughter Alison can come with Josie, the eldest of hers and Ed's 3 children, can visit us for the weekend at the beginning of July.

flashback to February 2022: my sister Jill and her daughter Lucy visit us

at our old house in Cheltenham

flashback to December 2018: Ali and Josie (rightmost), with Lois (left) and Isaac

get ready for Christmas at their old house in Haslemere

It's lovely and warm in bed, however, and we feel quite a lot better by 4 pm when we get up.

Good!

21:00 We go to bed on Sara Pascoe's new series, "Last Woman on Earth" - tonight she's in Denmark.

As the blurb above implies, you'd think Sara would be the last person on earth to ask to present a programme where she goes around the world trying to acquire fast-disappearing skills. She's such a clumsy person, and we see her breaking some of the things she's been given to work on, even Lego bricks, which isn't easy, to put it mildly!

What madness! And, as the blurb above implies, she's the last person you'd want to have sticking tattoo needles into you. My goodness!

It's nevertheless nostalgic for Lois and me to see Sara trying to do a tattoo in a tattoo parlour in the port area of Copenhagen, Nyhavn, an area which we both know well from our frequent visits during our daughter Alison and family's residence in the city between 2012 and 2018.

Characteristically, Sara makes no attempt to pronounce Danish place-names properly - and she pronounces Nyhavn as Nye-haven, which is nothing like the way it should be pronounced, as I'm sure you know! What madness (again)! Doesn't the BBC have any foreign language advisors any more? I think we should be told, and quickly!

"Keep that woman away from my arm!" - accident-prone British comedienne Sara Pascoe (centre)

attempts to inflict a tattoo in "Tattoo Parlour Ole" in Nyhavn, Copenhagen.

Manager Majbritt is on the right, and trainee artist Sophia, Sara's victim, is on the left.

Tattoos are big in Denmark, and, as for a long time there weren't any tattoo parlours in Norway or Sweden, there was also plenty of Scandi-tourist business for Danish parlours in Nyhavn to make money from.

an artists's impression of the quayside at Nyhavn,

showing the Tattoo Ole Parlour, which Sara is visiting

Even the one-time King of Denmark, Frederick IX (reigned 1947-1972), was famous for his tattoos, and he got at least one of them in the parlour that Sara is visiting tonight in Nyhavn.

Remember when Lois and I first visited Nyhavn back in those cold days of February 2013? I'm sure you do haha!

We didn't have time, unfortunately, to get those matching "his and hers" tattoos that we've always fantasized about, but we "pencilled it in" for a later visit!