09:00 It's only 9 am, but Lois and I are busy on the couch already, enjoying a bit of "Danish" - not the pastries, but the latest developments in the crime story being read by the local U3A Intermediate Danish group that we lead. - "Judaskysset" (The Judas Kiss), by Danish writer Anna Grue.
It's a bit racy, but that's what our group of local Worcestershire and Gloucestershire old codgers like about it, so fair enough!
"Hot books you can't put down" - some of the typically
racy Danish novels favoured by our members
The group's current novel, "Judaskysset", features a passionate relationship between a 52-year-old menopausal art teacher called Ursula and her young lover Jakob (29), so you can be sure it's certainly fulfilling the fantasies of our group's elderly, and mostly female, membership - my goodness, yes!
In the story, Ursula, despite her age, seniority and experience, has become completely besotted with young Jakob. She's willing to put up with all the backache that their very physical affair is giving rise to, and she's eager to have sex with Jakob all over the place, on tables in the college visual-arts room where Ursula teaches, on the couple's clifftop walks etc etc.
a typical college arts-room
Those Danes, eh?!!!!
Today, Lois and I read that Ursula has now decided to give up her college teaching job, pool her savings with young Jakob, so that they can buy a hotel together in Nice in the south of France. She has a plan to have the rooms individually decorated by local French artists, who, as their reward, will have the right to stay in that particular room free of charge for one week out of every year, on a kind of a weird Danish-style timeshare basis.
Young Jakob comments that it's going to be like a hotel his parents once stayed at in Berlin, And Lois and I read today on page 17 that the couple's hotel in Nice is going to be modelled on the Hotel Arte Luise in Berlin.
I quickly assume that this is a fictitious hotel, but Lois suggests googling it, and what do you know? It is a real place, and it looks quite unusual to put it mildly. My goodness, yes! Every window is made to look like an artwork.
the Arte Luise Kunsthotel (i.e. ''art hotel') in Berlin,
where all the windows look like artworks
a typical room at the Arte-Luise Kunsthotel
Ursula's dream is to employ local French artists to convert the French hotel that she and Jakob are buying into something similar. But, for the moment, the hotel is currently in a bit of a state - I suppose it was going cheap maybe?
And Ursula also says that some of the rooms are currently in a dangerous state - there are pebbles on a lot of the room-floors and iron chains are liable to fall on you as you make your way across the room to get to your wardrobe.
What does that signify? Lois and I are quite innocent when it comes to today's sexual mores - but does all this mean that the hotel had been used by its French owners as some kind of a brothel or as a sex-fantasy hotel, or that kind of malarkey?
We're afraid that our members will expect us, as group leaders to know, and we haven't got the faintest idea, so answers on a postcard please, if you understand about these things!
11:00 Lois and I break for coffee, and I check my smartphone. I see that an email has come in from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, all about further compliments that Donald Trump has paid to Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, this time on the campaign trail at Sioux City, Iowa.
Trump is an admirer of Orbán, but he tends to forget exactly who he is. He's previously referred to him as "Orbán, the Turkish leader ". This time he got the country right, but placed the country in the wrong geographical framework, as a country bordering Ukraine "and Russia" [sic], my italics.
Oh dear! And you know, the Hungarians are quick to pick up on these kinds of mistakes. Well, wouldn't you, if he described the UK as bordering Ireland [correct] and Italy [incorrect], say?
Factcheck: Hungary does indeed border the Ukraine,
but it's hundreds of miles away from Russia, that's for sure
- and let's hope it stays that way!
Lois and I sympathise a bit with Donald, however, who's similar to us in age. We don't tend to recognise most of today's celebrities either, for example, and to us, "celebrity editions" of game-shows and the like, are no different from the ordinary versions.
And it's so easy to fall into the trap of feeling that foreign countries are all pretty much "much-of-a-muchness", isn't it. Do you remember when UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, speaking in 1938, described the Nazi incursion into Czechoslovakia as "a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing".
Crazy times.
10:30 An email comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law, with another of the amusing Venn diagrams that he monitors on our behalf on the web. The diagrams have recently been taking an apparent extended summer break, which has given me withdrawal symptoms, no doubt about that.
Thank goodness that that particular nightmare is now over!
This time it's the middle diagram that particularly resonates with me - Lois and I have been retired for over 17 years now, but I still get the occasional nightmares when I'm stuck in one of boss-man Martin's awful meetings, wishing I were somewhere else.
My colleagues and I often used to sneak a peak at Martin's online office-calendar, and it was just wall-to-wall meetings from clocking-in time to clocking-out time. The rest of us just wanted to get on with our "proper work", but Martin wouldn't have had anything to do all day if he hadn't set up a full 7.5 hours of meetings. I suppose it was the only way he could justify his position, though, wasn't it.
Poor Martin !!!!!!!
But what a madness it all was, looking back!!!!
a typical office meeting
And hopefully we've got enough treats in the larder for any "trick-or-treaters", who stop by here tomorrow evening. This is our first Halloween since downsizing to this new-build house in Malvern, and we're not sure how many times our door-bell will ring, if indeed it rings at all.
flashback to earlier this month, we order a Fun-Size Party Mix a
and 3 bags of little Milky Way chocolates for the local trick-or-treaters
With hindsight we may have over-prepared. With the Party Mix and the 3 multi-packs of Milky Ways, I calculate (and I've got a maths degree, mind!) that we have enough in theory for up to 80 trick-or-treaters, although I dare say we'll give them each a bunch to take away, if we get any callers at all, that is.
The upside is that we'll have plenty over for ourselves, afterwards. And don't worry - we're not going to binge-eat them. Lois is a stern mistress-of-the-larder, and she tends to strictly ration treats, citing the risk of diabetes, so fair enough!
14:00 Lois and I go upstairs to bed, as usual. And we have another excuse today for spending the whole afternoon there - the clocks changed yesterday, back an hour to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), and we're trying to "embrace" it all, and fit our old ways to the new times.
The whole malarkey is taking its toll, however. We feel generally a bit out of sorts, waking up too early, getting hungry at the wrong times etc - you know the kind of thing.
So it's 2pm GMT now, and it's time to relax, and we've got so that we can effortlessly screen out, as we lie here, the spasmodic sound of pneumatic drills, which is the price you pay sometimes for living on a half-finished 300-house new-build housing estate.
Also we can keep half an eye on what they're up to from our bed, as they make their holes or fill them in, whichever it is they're doing on a particular afternoon - and we don't even have to move, which is nice!
But they can't see us, we know because we've checked. Our bedroom windows just reflect the sky over the Vale of Evesham to the north and east, so there's no need to stick up pictures of giant bananas, like the Arte Luise Kunsthotel in Berlin does, which is nice!
the view from our bed this afternoon - and what a madness it all is !!!!!
Yes, what a madness it all is !!!! [That's enough madness for today. I don't want you getting overexcited again, Colin - go and fetch your medication, and let me watch you taking it! - Ed]
20:00 We relax on the couch with tonight's edition of Only Connect, one of our favourite TV quizzes, the one that tests lateral thinking.
And tonight we're delighted to see a question that involves Bertha Benz (1849-1944), our favourite pioneering motor-car daredevil..
Can YOU see the link between actor/film-maker/etc comedian Mel Brooks, eccentric cult popstar Peter Doherty, Bertha Benz and Washington Post investigative journalist Bob Woodward?
Enough said! And of course the answer is that they were all "paired with Carls" - kind of obvious when you know, isn't it!
Mel Brooks was comedy partners with film director Carl Reiner. Peter Doherty was in the punkish "Libertines" rock band with Carl Barat, Bertha was married to Carl Benz and was also his business-partner, and Bob Woodward's partner in the Watergate investigation was Carl Bernstein.
However, none of the other three had the stature of Bertha Benz, Lois and I think.
Bertha Benz
As presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell explains, Bertha took the world's first-ever long-distance car journey, without telling her husband, in their newly-developed car, which wasn't really ready to go anywhere yet.
She just put her kids in the back of the car and set off on the road, just like that. The car only had two gears, so when they were going uphill, the kids had to get out and push the car up the hill. And of course, there weren't any petrol-stations, so they would have to stop at apothecaries on the way to buy a bottle of something Bertha could put in the tank as fuel.
What a woman !!!!
flashback to 1894: Carl and Bertha Benz in their car
Bertha also had a habit of fixing fuel-lines and suchlike with just her garter-belt and a hat-pin.
Was there no end to her ingenuity? [Woaaaaah! It's getting near your bedtime, Colin, so don't start on that one now - another evening perhaps! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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