Danskcolin: Friday September 1st 2023

Oh dear - another cousin of mine, Kate a.k.a. Kathleen, has dropped out of this month's grand "cousins get-together" in Beaconsfield, Bucks at my cousin Jeannette's house, in about 10 days' time. The guest list is getting shorter and shorter - oh dear!

It was potentially a big gathering, mainly because all the previous generation on the "Welsh side" were part of a (by today's standards) large number of siblings - nine siblings in all (7 daughters and 2 sons).

It sounds excessive, but that was how they "did" marriage in those crazy far off days of 1900 to 1921 - a baby every year or every other year, or so, and, above all, keep "churning them out". What a madness it was !!!!

flashback to Bridgend 1929: (back row) Uncle John, Auntie Betty, Auntie Kitt,

Aunty Mary, my grandmother, my grandfather, (middle row)

Auntie Ruth and my mother, and (front row) Uncle "Handsome Bob" Bob,

flanked by the twins, Aunty Babs and Aunty Joan

And later, all nine of these children had their own children of course, totally about 30 or so in all, and all but maybe one of these have had children... and so it goes on. And one sunny day in the late 1980's, my mother's generation and almost all my cousins and me, and almost all of the next generation, gathered in the Loughborough garden of my Aunty Babs, then in her 60's.

flashback to 1987: this is what happens if "you're fruitful

and you multiply" - what a madness it is !!!

However, unfortunately, Lois and I were counting the declared attendees at this month's get-together, and we make it 9 at most, including us, and maybe fewer even than that - oh dear! Maybe it was a mistake for my cousin Jeannette and husband Alan to schedule it for a Tuesday, because most of the cousins' children have jobs to go to, so the next generation will be absent en masse. But maybe a more fundamental problem is that the cousins' generation itself is all getting older, and several just aren't so enthusiastic about undertaking longer journeys any more - oh dear (again) !!!

16:00 Lois and I try to put our disappointment aside at 4 pm when we come down from our nap and settle down on the sofa with a cup of tea and a scone, to try our hand at the puzzles in this week's Radio Times.

Unfortunately more disappointment awaits for us in the magazine's pages. There's an obvious explanation, however, the magazine is making the questions harder - there's absolutely no doubt about this. My brain and Lois's brain are as sharp as they ever were, but these questions, honestly! They're becoming far too obscure - it's total madness !!!

It's not a good start when we score a pathetic 3 out of 10 on Popmaster.

There's nevertheless a nice moment of nostalgia, when I'm reminded of Italian singer Gigliola Cinquetti, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1964 with her charming song "Non ho l'eta per amarte" (I'm not old enough to love you).

Do you remember when my sister Kathy was 16, and studying Spanish? And remember how she went on a schools exchange trip to Barcelona that year and came back with her Spanish/Catalan exchange partner, Maria, and also a 45 rpm single of the Spanish version of the song, with the title "No tengo edad para amarte"?

Italian teenage singer Gigliola Cinquetti with the Spanish version

of her Italian Eurovision winning song "Non ho l'eta per amarti", rendered

in Spanish as "No tengo edad para amarte" (I'm not old enough to love you)

And remember how Kathy played the record till it broke, over and over, upstairs in her bedroom?

Happy days !!!!!

And do you remember also, 35 years later, when our daughter Alison was studying in Pisa, that Lois and I discovered we knew enough Italian to more or less understand most of the lyrics of the Italian version? "Non ho l'eta per amarti, non ho l'eta per uscire solo con te" ('I'm not old enough to love you, not old enough to go out on my own with you... but if you're prepared to wait till I'm older, I'll give you my love then, deal?' etc etc).

Grande canzone!!!! (Great song haha!!!!)

[Do you know, it's weird, but I don't remember any of those things! - Ed]

1615 Lois and I decide to soldier on with the Radio Times puzzles. We give up on Popmaster, but then we score a miserable 4 out of 10 on the intellectually more prestigious "Egghead" questions.

However, we don't feel too bad about it, because so many of the questions are about things that nobody except a complete nerd or specialist would know the answers to. We think the various "Eggheads" - Olav Bjortomt (crazy name, crazy guy!), Chris Hughes and the rest - are simply trying to impress each other with the depths of their pointless knowledge. It's all total madness, really, isn't it !!!!

At least we manage the Only Connect puzzle with no problem, which is a morale-booster, to put it mildly!

Better luck next week perhaps !!!!

We don't want to get off the sofa just yet, so Lois reads me bits out of her copy of today's "The Week" magazine, which gives a digest of the week's news from home and abroad.

For two inveterate book-lovers like Lois and me, it's disappointing to see how little faith we can put in the blurbs you read on the back covers, when you're browsing the latest books in a bookshop.

The paperback version of one recent book, Jonathan Peters' latest, 'Beyond Order', had on its back cover the quote "Wisdom combined with good advice", apparently a quote from journalist Suzanne Moore in the Daily Telegraph, when Suzanne's actual words were "hokey wisdom combined with good advice", which isn't quite as glowing - my goodness no!

Another then there's the case of another recent book, Alain de Bouton's 'The Course of Love'

De Bouton's book 'The Course of Love' was described on the back-cover as "Moving - the Sunday Times". However, the full quote in the newspaper actually read, "Turning its pages you dread the sight of yet another chunk of de Bouton's italicised opinions moving towards you".

Hard-back books are even worse than paperbacks, apparently, because the reviews tend to have been written by the author's friends, according to the article.

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

21:00 We wind down for bed with a Channel Four documentary on "Secrets of the Female Orgasm", written and presented by former Love Island contestant Yewande Biala.

It's a bit of a surprise, somehow, to see this kind of a confession - "I have never climaxed" - from an apparently complete extrovert like the 26-year-old Yewande, maybe it shouldn't be. After all, however, she's somebody who signed up to appear in the overtly sexual TV game-show "Love Island", and who is so obviously willing to share pretty much everything about herself - no holds barred - with Channel Four viewers. And she's had plenty of sex, she says, but has just never had an orgasm with a man or with a woman, and has never tried to do it on her own.

We're told quite a lot about female orgasms in the course of the programme. Who knew that there are basically 3 types? And they are distinguishable by the graphs of their associated brain activity: "ocean wave", "avalanche" and "volcano".

the "three types" of female orgasm: the "ocean wave",

the "avalanche" and the "volcano"

Tonight we see Yewande trying in so many different ways to overcome this block she's got, over the course of 3 months, that we sort of expect there to be a "happy ending" to the programme, but no - at the end of the show, there's just an admission from her therapist that they've "just got to keep working on it".

In one counselling session with her therapist that we see tonight, Yewande again fails to "come", but during the session her therapist gets excited enough to climax in front of her, which must have been very annoying for Yewande - oh dear!

Yewande (right) in a consultation with her therapist

Poor Yewande!!!

It emerges that Yewande had a childhood that seems to have been the source of her problems maybe - her parents moved to Ireland from Nigeria when she was 3 years old, and she had a very strict Catholic upbringing. And at age 15, her mother "grounded" the young Yewande for a whole year, when she began to suspect - wrongly - that the her daughter was already sexually active - my goodness!

Tonight we see Yewande travelling back to Ireland to confront her mum.

Poor mum !!!!!

Poor mum (again) !!!!!!

Yewande also tells us that she has had a history from childhood of always trying to do what she thought would please others - hence her career as a biochemist and a writer, mainly, it seems, to please her parents.

So it's altogether a bit of an odd story, to put it mildly.

But fascinating stuff !!!!!

22:00 On our way up to bed, we look out of one of the guest bedroom windows to see what the rare "blue supermoon" is doing tonight. It's still a bit cloudy but we can see something of tonight's moon. It's a little bit big, although it isn't as big as the ones we saw on the web.

Is it on the wane already? I think we should be told, don't you, and quickly!