Tuesday May 16th 2023

08:00 While Lois and I are still in bed, and not quite ready to get out of it, I do a little browsing on the quora forum website on my phone, and I'm happy to see that one of our favourite pundits, Ian MacKinnell, has been busy answering the vexed question of "Why has English lost its grammatical genders, while other Germanic languages have not?" 

Just the right "hot topic" to get us both very excited, no matter how early the hour!

Now Ian (crazy guy, crazy haircut!) knows more than you or I do - that's for sure! 

I'm certain that we all know already that if you learn German or Icelandic, you have to cope with 3 grammatical genders; masculine, feminine and neuter, whereas all the other ones, apart from English and Afrikaans, have just two genders: (1) the common gender, which is masculine and feminine combined, and (2) the neuter gender. English and Afrikaans, of course, have dispensed with grammatical genders altogether, which is nice.

Ian recalls how, as we all well know, English and Afrikaans both lost their genders due to excessive contact with other languages, a strong driver towards grammatical simplifications: English due to its contacts with the Danes and the Normans, and Afrikaans due to its contacts with native Africans. Makes sense to us! 

What we didn't know until Ian explains, is that Denmark is in itself a patchwork quilt of all 3 patterns: three genders, two genders and one gender, one being equivalent to none in this case.

As you see from the map, the blue area representing the western part of the Jutland Peninsular has coordinated all its grammatical genders into one, hence grammatical gender is no longer an issue in the local dialect of Danish.

But why did it happen? Did the Jutlanders have excessive contact with other languages, like English did? Lois suggests that the Jutlanders may have had excessive contact with the sparsely-populated area's cows: Jutlanders are often looked down on by Copenhageners for instance, due to their reputation of being country bumpkins.

Is that a valid theory, though? I this case I think we should definitely be told one way or the other haha!

typical Jutlanders with their cows

Answers please! And on a postcard if possible !

Fascinating stuff!!!! [If you say so! - Ed]

09:00 Isn't it nice to have reasons for postponing appointments! It gives more time to mentally prepare for them, especially if they're not very nice ones, I always think. 

In this case, postponing them isn't a particularly nice experience for Lois, however - because she's not been feeling so well yesterday and today, and that's the reason we decide she shouldn't go to her hair stylist today, and also that both of us shouldn't go tomorrow to an introductory check-up with our new dentist in Malvern, the town we recently moved to - we've finally decided to switch to a local dental surgery from the one we had in Cheltenham for nearly 50 years - my goodness! 

I'm not ill myself, so I could go to our new dentist on my own on Wednesday, but as it's our first time at this surgery, I think it would make better sense for us to have a double appointment for the first time. It's more fun being in a double, and also, I don't in the least bit mind waiting - who looks forward to being in the dentist's chair? 

So I postpone both appointments till more or less the same times next week, when Lois should hopefully be feeling better.

Good!

flashback to January - we stop by "Divine" to book

Lois's first ever hair-stylist appointment since we moved to Malvern

the Divine Hair Salon's Rachel

two of the staff at our new dental surgery

By the way, "Divine" is just the name of the hair salon - it doesn't necessarily mean that they promise a "divine" finish to your appearance. Just saying - I don't want you to be disappointed if you go there, and come out not looking like a goddess - I repeat, just saying! 

11:00 So, unexpectedly we have another free day. And it's sunny too, so we spend a lot of time on the patio, both for our mid-morning coffee and our late-afternoon tea and jaffa-cakes, as well as time in bed in the afternoon. Well, wouldn't you, if you had the choice haha!

Coffee break in the morning, after which Lois showcases some of the 12 irises she's got budding away quietly in her pots.

Lois showcases some of her 12 irises now in bud

Late afternoon tea and jaffa-cake...

Earl Grey tea and jaffa-cakes in the late afternoon

Steve, our American brother-in-law, emailed us yesterday with more of the amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors for us each week on the web. 

The third diagram here was a bit of a jolt to my memory, to put it mildly. "Eating your packed lunch at 10 am" is certainly not advisable as Steve points out. I retired in 2006, but I used to work in a big open-plan office where a lot of people used to get so engrossed in their work that they sometimes forgot to have their packed lunch and ended up taking it home with them. And there were others who refused even to "take a break from work for 5 minutes", breaks which management always tried to encourage, without much success. 

I remember that on some days I spaced out the various items in my packed lunch so that I ate one element - a tomato or half a tomato, for example - on the hour every hour, so I wouldn't have to stop work at lunchtime and have the complete lunch in one go. Not to be recommended, definitely!

What a crazy world it all seems now !!!!!

20:00 We go to bed on an interesting documentary about Rolling Stone member Brian Jones.

Brian Jones's story is particular interesting to Lois and me, because Brian grew up in Cheltenham, and went to Pate's Grammar School, as did our two daughters many years later. The school released footage of Brian's schooldays as their contribution to the documentary, which is nice.

Brian in his music class at school

And it's fascinating to see home movies of teenage Brian and his "posh" parents, with whom he had a difficult relationship growing up. It proved to be a relationship that dogged him for all of his short life - he was always trying to please his father and win his admiration, with little success. His father, however, to his credit, never entirely gave up on Brian and was writing him sympathetic and supportive letters right up to the time of Brian's death in 1969.

one of Brian's early letters home to his parents,

 after he had moved to London and formed the band.

Lois and I knew a lot of this story already, but some things were new to us. Brian started the Rolling Stones as a band, fired by his love of blues musicians like Muddy Waters, and fuelled by his gifted musicianship. However, Brian was eventually overshadowed, and elbowed out of that leadership, by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' superior talents at song-writing. 

His treatment over this by Mick and Keith was something that Brian resented for the rest of his life, even though it's clear that, while not being able to write songs, he made a  big impact on the band's record successes with his inspired arrangement of many of the songs: adding the flute accompaniment to "Ruby Tuesday", for instance, his "guitar slide" on "Little Red Rooster", or the incorporation of the sitar into "Paint It Black".

in tonight's programme band member Bill Wyman hums along with 

Brian's "flute part" on "Ruby Tuesday"

Brian died in 1969, only 3 weeks after he was kicked out of the band for the excessive drinking and drug-taking which had by now made him useless to the band on stage.

David Dalton, founder of Rolling Stone Magazine, says, "A rock group is sort of like a primitive tribe...." 

David continues: "People are often killed in tribes, psychically, if they're expelled. And a rock group is sort of like that. I mean their whole lifeblood comes from that bond. Once they're of not use, it's oddly fatal. Nobody wants to talk to them or deal with them. They just go off into the woods and die".

Fascinating stuff !!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!