A thoroughly wet and windy day, with Alison spending her time ferrying the children to their piano lessons, or collecting young Isaac from his sleep-over with his friend Ned.
I decide to spend the morning in the bedroom working on material for the local U3A Intermediate Danish group that Lois and I run. The group is currently reading a book of short stories by Danish author Sissel Bjergfjord, all about the owners of some allotments with summer-houses in a complex just outside Copenhagen.
It's my job to prepare the next 5 pages of our current story, entitled "Venner" (Friends), which is all about a party at an allotment complex, a party which quickly has a damper put on it, when one of the guests, by the name of Kola, a long-standing alcoholic, dies and is carried out on a stretcher by ambulance staff, an event which, in the words of the writer, "puts a bit of a damper on the festivities". However the guests do their best not to let it spoil things too much, which is nice!
Unfortunately one of my jobs is to censor, or bowdlerise, passages in the stories which may be rather too much in the way of "strong meat" for our members. Lois and I don't want anybody to be made to feel embarrassed by having to translate and read out anything that's a bit raunchy. And I don't want to be accused of sexual harassment by making particularly any of our female members say things they wouldn't say in English in a million years, that's for sure.
If you were in my position, what would you do about this passage?
If your Danish is a bit rusty, I'll help you a bit. Lasse, one of the party guests, is sitting with his partner Julie at one of the tables, the alcohol is flowing and people are getting up to dance to what Lasse calls "crap music from the 1980's" like Rod Stewart's "Do ya think I'm Sexy?"
Lasse is meanwhile acutely aware, more aware than he really wants to be, of the damper that the ambulance men's removal of Kola's dead body has placed on the party, and he wants to think about something more pleasant. He lays his hand on Julie's thigh and starts imagining he's having his way with her up against the wall of their little wooden summerhouse, "making the house's wooden boards go bang bang bang [some details omitted]". I mean - how can Lois and I ask our members to translate that sort of stuff?
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
I get through 4 of the 5 pages I've got to produce vocab lists for, when Lois comes upstairs and says she's got nothing to do, so I decide to leave the fifth page till another time. My goodness !!!!
13:00 After lunch we watch again last night's episode 2 of the 3-part Agatha Christie serial "Why Didn't They Ask Evans", hoping to work out what is going on. It's not surprising that it's all a bit puzzling, when you think that they've condensed a whole book into 3 hours of TV. When you're reading it in a book you've got time to reflect and absorb new revelations as they arise, or even look back at earlier pages, but that's not possible when you're watching a scatter-gun of revelations coming thick and fast on the screen.
20:00 So we're a bit more clued-up (haha) when we settle down in the evening to watch the third and final episode, of "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?".
It's so cold tonight that Ed has lit a fire in the grate.
Otto, the family's British cat, has caught 3 mice today and brought each one into the house and tried to eat them, in at least one case throwing up afterwards.
My goodness!!! So Ali has decided that enough is enough, and she is going to make him wear his little purple bell from now on, so that the mice will hear him coming.
Poor Otto!!!!
Ali falls asleep on the sofa while the Agatha Christie is on, so she'll watch it again tomorrow when Lois and I do, which is nice!
Poor Ali !!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!
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