Danskcolin: Tuesday August 22nd 2023

What a day! Lois and I get the chance to talk over a gastropub lunch to a couple who went to the Abba Voyage avatar-concert in Stratford, East London on Saturday!

And it's not just any old couple, it's my "new" cousin David and his wife Zanne - David was discovered, a couple of years ago, to be a cousin, not just to me but also to my 30 plus already existing cousins, thanks to a random DNA test on a family history site.

What are the chances of that happening, eh?!!!!

What is an avatar exactly? Well, Lois and I are quite old, so we're not really sure, but David says he couldn't tell the difference between the avatars projected "on stage", and the real thing, i.e. "de fantastiske fyre" (The Fab Four) as they were in their heyday, as the so it must have been something pretty lifelike, that's for sure!

Also on Saturday, while David and Zanne were boogieing in the aisles to "Dancing Queen" and other Abba classics, Lois and I were celebrating our belated Golden Wedding in Headley, Hampshire, on Saturday, kindly hosted by our daughter Alison and son-in-law Ed. But David and Zanne, although invited to the golden wedding party, weren't able to come, because of their Abba Voyage tickets.

one of the great cards we received for our Golden Wedding -

this one from our friend Jen and family, prepared by her graphics team.

Lois and I had forgotten all about the time we stole that bus - marvellous stuff !!!!

flashback to Saturday: Mine and Lois's belated Golden Wedding

at our daughter and son-in-law's house in Headley, Hampshire

However, as their anniversary present to us, David and Zanne have offered to drive over from their home in Woodstock, Oxfordshire today and take us out to lunch at a venue of our choice, so we have chosen a nearby gastro-pub, The Swan, at the charming village of Hanley Swan, about 3 miles from here, a pub which we've never been to before.

What could have been nicer haha! And Lois and I didn't even have to pay the bill, which was nice too haha! [That's enough gloating! - Ed]

The white-walled Swan gastropub, in the charming village of

Hanley Swan, just opposite the famous duck pond

And the pub must be really popular - there are always loads of cars parked in their car-park and on the street outside, and when David booked the table, they said to turn up on time, because they can only hold the table for 15 minutes.

What total madness !!!!

my "new" cousin David, and his wife Zanne

And here's a close-up of David's right eye, in case you're curious! I don't mean curious about his actual eye, needless to say, I think it's fairly normal, although I'm no expert. But yes, by a weird fluke we can see something of the rest of the pub reflected in the right-hand lens of his glasses, which gives you an even better idea of how the pub looks as a whole, which could be useful if you ever happen to go there!

close examination of David's right glasses lens

reveals another part of this gastro-pub

[I don't think it helps really, does it, if we're being brutally frank! - Ed]

David was the son of my Aunty Joan, a hotel receptionist, and her boss Peter, a hotel manager.

Peter had 2 legitimate children with his half-Sarawakian wife Elizabeth: a daughter Elizabeth Anne and a son, Anthony, as well as 2 children with my Aunty Joan: David in Woodstock, and Jonathan who lives in Spain.

my Auntie Joan, David's mother, in the 1950's,

when David was born

How we are related:

Peter's first two children, one by his wife and one by my Auntie Joan, were born in the same year - 1949.

Joan and Peter worked together, as receptionist and manager, in many hotels, including the 16th century Gupshill Manor, Tewkesbury, where Lois and I have often been for meals, And Peter and his wife Elizabeth even lived in Cheltenham for a time, only about a mile from the house where Lois and I were living in at the time, completely unknown to us. What a small world it is.

It's also interesting today to chat to David and Zanne about their 3 children. David is a retired BBC journalist, who was based in Spain's Balearic Islands for many years. Their children went to Spanish schools in Majorca, and did all their basic education in Spanish. And they had to transfer back to England just as they were about to take some of their most important school exams GCSEs and A-levels and apply to colleges etc.

This pales into insignificance any minor difficulties faced by mine and Lois's own children and by our grandchildren, who also spent some time abroad as children, but mainly in the "Anglosphere". Our daughters went to school in the US, and Sarah's daughters went to school in Australia. Alison's children went to school in Denmark, but to an international school where all the instruction was in English.

Easy, or what haha!!!

In Denmark everybody speaks English anyway, and it's used as the "lingua franca" by all of the many non-Scandinavian foreigners living and/or working there, and is even used in this way by Swedes: the Swedes have no difficulty understanding written Danish, but they struggle with the spoken form of the language, which famously sounds like "somebody trying to speak with a hot potato in their mouth".

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

15:00 We finish up our meal at The Swan, and Lois and I had been thinking we would see David and Zanne for a bit more chat over a slice of our Golden Wedding cake at our house in Malvern. However we'd forgotten that the couple have a dog, and of course dogs can't be left alone for too long, so they have to hurry back on their 55-mile journey to Woodstock, Oxfordshire.

This is something which shows the advantage of having a cat as a pet rather than a dog - cats can look after themselves, and they don't really care, as long as you feed them when you get home, do they, let's be honest!

20:00 We wind down for bed with yesterday's edition of the TV quiz show, "Only Connect" which tests lateral thinking.

When presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell introduces the two teams, Lois and I are delighted to see that one of the teams is a family affair, the Gardners, and also includes another Abba fan, Kate Gardner.

Good point, though, Victoria, why would ANYONE start with this show?!!!!!

Would YOU have guessed the fourth in this sequence of clues? Neither team get this one.

The answer is October, and the sequence is "months in order of length".

Discounting February, we find that April June September and November are the shortest months because they're only 30 days. After those, the next shortest month is March, which has 31 days but we lose an hour when the clocks go forward, so it's shorter than January, May etc - I expect you can work out the rest for yourselves, hopefully!

And would YOU have guessed the connection between these apparently random clues? Well, the marvellous Grinning Gardners guess the link after only seeing 3 clues, and they don't need the fourth clue, which is "electronic bank transfer system".