Danskcolin: Saturday August 12th 2023

I need to get on with my so-called "presentation" on Shakespearean English to Lynda's local U3A "Making of English" group, so Lois and our daughter Sarah are going to take our 10-year-old twin grandchildren Lily and Jessica over to Cob House Country Park to see the animals etc, having lunch there.

The weather forecast isn't too wonderful and the twins haven't got any raincoats, so they try on Lois's and mine, as a stopgap remedy, with the sleeves rolled right up, which is nice!

As it turns out, they don't get a drop of rain - still if they hadn't taken the coats, they would have been deluged, there's absolutely not a shadow of doubt on that score!

More alpacas - awww, how cute they are!!!!

There are also some cute donkeys, and one of the farm guys lets the twins feed them some hay - awwwww (again) !!!!

And there's even a little reindeer, which was a bit of a surprise, to put it mildly!

And Lois, Sarah and the twins don't forget to feed themselves - a nice lunch followed by ice-creams

They watch one of the farm guys collecting the eggs from the hen-coop, and he lets them take a couple home with them, which is nice!

11:00 Meanwhile, while they've all been out at Cob House, I have stayed indoors and done some work on my so-called "presentation" on Shakespearean English, but progress is painfully slow. The more I delve into it, the more complicated the subject seems to be, and I am forced to tear up some of my previous notes on the subject, as being somehow "too simplistic" - oh dear!

I find out lots of interesting things, however. For one thing, I'd forgotten that, at around the time that Shakespeare started writing his plays, the word "are" as in "we are", "you are", "they are", had only recently been accepted into the standard language - as far as there WAS a standard in those crazy, far-off times. This word "are" is one of the many words that we borrowed from the Danes, who had settled in Eastern England 600 years earlier. The word had been been used for centuries in the north-country and in the east of England, but was only just being accepted down south and in particular in the London area.

In London and the south, people had been saying "we be", "you be" and "they be" instead. And do you know, there's only one relic from those crazy times that we still use as a phrase today - we still talk about "the powers that be", don't we, used as a kind of fossilised pseudo-legal term.

And "The Powers That Are" just doesn't sound as good does it - be honest! Apologies to all you Danes in the Danelaw! [I don't think there are many of those left who are going to care about that, to be honest! - Ed]

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

21:00 Sarah gets the twins to bed a bit earlier tonight, but I notice that later, at 10pm, when Lois and I climb the stairs to go to bed ourselves, the twins have still got their bedside light on and are both reading their books of the moment, the little rascals !!!!!

Before that, Lois and I manage to see half of an interesting documentary about the Everly Brothers, first shown in 1984, after Don and Phil had got together again after their long-standing rift, and had a played a reunion concert at the Albert Hall in London.

This is them going out on stage at the Albert Hall, London, and greeting the audience:

flashback to 1984: the Everly Brothers play a reunion concert

at the Albert Hall, London

And it's fascinating tonight to hear about their parents, who were both in show-business locally in a coal-mining area of Kentucky. They had a 15-minute local radio show, and we hear an audio clip of the show from the time when Don (15) and Phil (13) were also taking part.

The Everly Family's shows were on early in the morning, 5 am or 5:30 am. Their audience was mainly the farmers getting ready to milk their cows, Don says. And when the two boys got back home after the show each day, they had to start getting ready to go off to school.

What crazy times they were!

One crazy time from my own childhood was the month of April 1960 - do you remember it? My father, a headteacher, left his job in Altrincham Cheshire for a job in Bristol where he was going to become the first ever headteacher of a brand-new school. And we kids spent the Easter school holidays feeling nervous about starting yet another new school for the summer term. Yikes - not another one !!!!

flashback to 1960: me with my baby sister Jill

on the beach at Weston-super-mare

flashback to 1960: my sister Kathy with baby sister Jill

in the back garden of our house in Redland, Bristol

And the same month that we moved to Bristol, my late sister Kathy went out to a local shop on Whiteladies Road, and bought a copy of the Everly Brothers' single "Cathy's Clown", which had just been released. She liked the song anyway, but the name connection meant that she just had to buy it.

Remember? I'm sure you do! [Not me! - Ed]

And guess what, the very same month - April 1960, US rock'n'roller Eddie Cochran had played a concert locally to us, in the city, at the Bristol Hippodrome, and had then been killed in a car accident near Chippenham when being driven to his next venue, which was going to be in London. He was 21 when he died, but to the press of the day he was still "a boy rock star".

Different times!