Yet another quiet day for Lois and me, as we recharge our batteries and gear up to host our daughter Sarah and the twins again from Friday evening to Sunday evening.
Lois manages to plant some Bizzy Lizzies in an additional pot that she places outside our front door - the idea is to give a lovely, albeit restrained and not too effusive, welcome to visitors, which is a nice touch. We both like people, but we don't want, say, several hundred people seeing the plants this evening as they drive by, and thinking we're giving them a green light to come and bother us haha!
Lois's new Bizzy Lizzy plantings - as a welcome
to guests but hopefully not too warm a one haha!
in my opinion Lois strikes just the right balance between
"Come on in and have a cup of tea!" and "Naff off!" haha!
And another achievement from today: since we jointly lead the local U3A Intermediate Danish Group (as you do), and it's the group's fortnightly meeting tomorrow on Skype, Lois and I have a session on the couch at 4pm teatime to go through the ghost story that the group is going to be looking at during the meeting.
Our current story is all about a bunch of Danish weekend gardeners, who've died recently, some from overindulgence in beer, but who are loth to leave their allotments outside Copenhagen: as a result they keep going back to the allotments in the evenings to haunt their friends there who haven't died yet, and then they go to sleep in the trees there overnight, every night, so as to be fresh and ready for a new day's haunting the following morning.
Yes, it's a bit of a weird one, no question about that, but then that's those crazy Danes for you isn't it! It couldn't happen here, could it !!!!
the ghosts of some typically dead Danish weekend gardeners
- those crazy Danes haha!!!!
However, to put things into perspective, did you know that writers, even in the UK, have been "stressing" for many years on how best to represent ghosts in their stories? It's nothing new, honestly!
Just the other day I was browsing the influential American news website "Onion News" and came across this story about Charles Dickens' early drafts of his ghost story novel "A Christmas Carol".
And it's a world that Lois and I had never even dreamt of, when we paid our respects at Scrooge's grave in Shrewsbury many years ago.
16:00 As you've guessed, probably, Lois and I are trying to maintain a slower pace of life today again - after all, come Friday evening this tiny new-build house with its tiny rooms will be heaving with people and chat again, and we need to recharge our batteries ready for all that, my goodness yes!
Lois need all the help we can get to preserve our cognitive health, that's for sure - we can feel the whatsitcalled-cells dropping off our brains daily, no doubt about that - my goodness, yes (again)!
If there's anything that makes Lois really angry, it's unfairness in life in general, and above all unfairness to women, or to "people assigned female at birth" as cautious writers say nowadays. And in the medical world there's plenty of unfairness to women going on - make no mistake about that!
Flashback to 2013: Lois and I visit Shrewsbury
and see Scrooge's tombstone in a churchyard in the middle of town
And just imagine - this heavy brute of a tombstone is what Dickens was envisaging that ghost bashing Scrooge's head in with. It hardly bears thinking about, does it!
[I think you're starting to lose all touch with reality now, Colin. Just get a grip, will you! - Ed]
Lois is reading her copy of "The Week" magazine from last Friday and showing me some of the articles that have caught her eye. And this week there's a piece on the science page that seems to suggest that we old folks should be taking multivitamins to protect out cognitive health.
That's one for our next online order to "ChemistDirect" - and that's a "cert"!!!!
Lois also thinks that, as old codgers, we're not eating as much fermented food as we should. So we're adding sauerkraut to our Morrisons shopping list this week - makes sense to us!
21:00 When Lois emerges from the zoom session, we wind down by doing more preparations for seeing Davina McCall's promised revelations, airing tomorrow night on Channel 4, about the contraceptive pill and its side-effects on women. And we decide to prepare by watching Davina's earlier programme, which we somehow managed to miss, all about sex and the menopause.
20:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom.
Lois taking part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom
Tonight's theme is the book of Ruth in the Old Testament, and the speaker references one of Lois's father's books, which is nice, although he gets the title of the book wrong, Lois says. Still, it's the thought that counts isn't it, so she doesn't mind about that! It's actually called "Of Hearts and Minds".
For a few years now we've been hearing about all the new medication that gets tested only on men, for instance - cheaper for the drug companies, because women's bodies are more complicated than men's, as the result of having to give birth. What a madness !!!!
And in "Sex, Mind and the Menopause", that we watch tonight, there are more angles on this theme that get Lois angry all over again - oh yes, believe me!
For starters, there's been a pitiful lack of research in general in the UK about the effects of the menopause, and Davina has to travel to the US to talk to a couple of scientists whose results on the perimenopause - the preparatory phase to menopause - and on other aspects of the problem haven't been taken on board here yet. And we see Davina talking by video link to neuroscientists Dr Lisa Mosconi and Dr Roberta Brinton at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
Davina also does some of her own research on the web, and finds only one passing mention of the menopause on the NHS website - what madness!!!! The US research suggests that hormone treatment starting in the "perimenopause" - the preparatory phase - can be enormously beneficial, and yet GPs over here won't sanction the treatment before the menopause proper sets in - what madness (again) !!!!!
The use of testosterone to boost libido hasn't been well publicised here either - in a survey, 61% of menopausal women in the UK said they had never heard of its use for their condition. And yet it's been shown to have spectacular results.
And the use of the powerful progesterone hormone has been deemed "too expensive" by the NHS, despite its costing only an estimated £18 a year for each patient.
What madness again again again!!!!
We hear about the difficulties of the menopause for working women in particular, and how many women, including programme presenter Davina herself, felt that they couldn't carry on with their jobs, due to lack of sleep, depression etc or particularly the so-called "brain fog". Yet there is no protection for menopausal women in UK employment law, and workplaces that offer support to menopausal employees are few and far between.
Finally, despite the fact that Alzheimer's is much more common in women than in men, the medical profession has been saying for years that this is simply due to the fact that women live longer into old age. The stats, however, simply don't support this as a reason, as we hear tonight.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
So bring on your next blockbuster, Davina. We'll be waiting!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
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