Danskcolin: Thursday November16th 2023

Life is going to be hell for Lois and me today - I don't think that's too much of an exaggeration! The "Orelly men" are coming to resurface the road outside our house on this new-build estate in Malvern, and I have to get dressed and out of the house by 7:30 am to move our car round the corner to a so-called "safe place", where the car won't be "tarred over" when they're "tarring over the road".

What madness that I should have to do that, when I'm 77 and I've been retired for 17 years! I object!!!

Luckily there's also some good news today - the day of the big contest has arrived, the contest to find the World's Best Franco Joke. And once again I'm the sole judge on the panel. All my fellow judges have "bottled out" again, which is a pity, but then it makes the decision-making easier, which is nice!

I'm a bit in demand for serving on judging panels at the moment, following my admired judging of the "World's Best-Dressed Barbie Contest" last Sunday. And yes, the rumours are true - like with the Barbie Contest, I'm going to be awarding this year's Franco prize also to another of my relatives, but what can you do when you happen to be in such a talented family!

I'm grateful to Steve, my brother-in-law in Pennsylvania, for telling me about this one.

Steve writes: this was a catchphrase that originated in November 1975 during the first season of NBC's satirical Saturday Night Live (SNL) programme, and which mocked the weeks-long media reports of the impending death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

The presumed imminent death of Spanish dictator Franco had been a headline story on US news bulletins for several weeks. On slow news days, TV newscasters sometimes paused to note that Franco was still alive.

Following Franco's eventual death, Chevy Chase, host of SNL, parodied the earlier news coverage of Franco's illness, treating his death as the top story. "This breaking news just in", Chase would announce – "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead" .

Chase gave several further updates to this "developing story" in subsequent weeks, to keep Americans informed, which was nice.

Here's one of the updates.....

...and this one, a week later:

Incidentally, did you know that Queen Anne is dead too?

She died in 1714 in Kensington Palace, London, but there have been no updates to this news since then, so people here have tended to forget about it, which is a pity.

The Government had tried unsuccessfully to keep the news quiet initially, because Anne had died without an heir, and ministers were negotiating for some protestant royal from Europe to agree to come here and do the job - George, the Elector of Hanover, was the front-runner, but the Government had to make sure he was coming, in case people started worrying about a possible Catholic take-over - you know how nervous people used to be about all that sort of malarkey!

Since then there has been a bit of a news blackout on the Anne story, with any reminders coming just from the very occasional conference, like this one...

...or from this rare 2021 tweet from film-star Michael Caine on the Danish version of twitter:

...and with only the very occasional dissenting voice, like this John Palmer article in the Evangelical Times:

[That's enough whimsy! - Ed]

07:30 And now, back to our main story today, the so-called "Orelly men" and their planned resurfacing of our road. When I go out to move our car "out of harm's way", I take this souvenir picture of the road as it looks in its natural state:

our road, in its natural state: souvenir picture taken

at about 7:30 this morning

Lois and I think the "Orelly men" are fully aware that we are normally in bed in the afternoon, and so, predictably perhaps, they maximise their noise between 2 and 4 o'clock, which is a pity, but it'll be nice when the work's done - that's what we tell ourselves anyway.

2:30 pm: the view from our bed - the Orelly men are

just outside now, resurfacing the road

Also there's a bit of a surprise later when we notice that they're planting some trees on our side of the road. Up till now, and for the last 12 months, the only trees on this street have been by the houses on the opposite side of the street - the so-called "odd numbered houses", and this has tended to cause a lot of jealousy among householders on our side - the so-called "even numbers".

And here it is, a picture of our shiny-new tree - it's a betula albosinensis (crazy name, crazy tree!), another sort of birch. According to wikipedia, it can grow to 82 feet, which is a bit of a worry, but it'll lend a much-needed atmosphere of greater grace to the street, and when it grows it'll provide a bit more privacy for our front windows, which will be good.

16:00 A charming picture has come in today from my sister Jill, who lives in Cambridge, but she's up north in Cheshire this week helping her eldest daughter Zoe, who has just given birth to her first child, little Conor. He's Jill's first grandchild, and incidentally he's also my first great-nephew - so keep those souvenir "world's best great-uncle" mugs coming in, won't you. I've checked with our local postman, and he says he can carry a few more in his bag if anybody's got one but hasn't posted it to me yet.

Just saying !!!!!

a picture worth a thousand words - see the joy in my

younger sister Jill's face as she holds her first grandchild

17:00 An email has come in today from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, referring me to an article on the influential Hungarian news website, nlc.hu, giving 10 disturbing graphs and statistics on Hungarian health and healthcare.

I've only started to digest the article, but here's a taster, that catches my eye immediately: life expectancy at birth. Here I've extracted stats for 3 European countries in the list that are of particular interest to me, but the full list of countries is given below.

What a huge differential there is for Hungarians of both sexes from their peers in other countries, but particularly the men. Two of the factors are certainly lack of money and shortage of doctors.

I'll be looking at the other figures in the report over the next few days - if I'm still around, that is - I'm almost exactly at the OECD age for "kicking the bucket", I notice, so watch this space! [You mustn't take these figures too literally, Colin! - Ed]

21:00 Lois and I wind down for bed with the second episode in the new BBC2 series on the life and works of William Shakespeare, "Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius".

This second episode is quite different in tone from Episode 1, in which Shakespeare was an unknown writer from the provinces, newly arrived in London and struggling to make a name for himself.

By Episode 2, he has established his reputation as the greatest playwright, and he has London and the country at his feet. He has even applied to have his own coat of arms so he can call himself officially a "gentleman".

The downside of this new status, however, is that now various people, particularly the upper classes and the well-to-do, are "out to get him", and bring him down a peg or two.

Shakespeare's 'Blackfriars project' to establish a wholly-indoor theatre in an upscale district of London was scuppered, in 1596, by legal action and pressures from the Establishment.

I didn't realise - although Lois did - that two of Shakespeare's most famous characters who first appeared in Henry IV, (1) the dishonest, cowardly, boastful and narcissistic whoremonger Sir John Falstaff, and (2) Falstaff's thieving low-life follower Bardolph, originally carried the actual names of the real-life aristocrats that they were modelled on: Sir John Oldcastle and Sir John Russell respectively.

Russell's wife, Lady Russell, wasn't happy about this - you can see why she might not be! She organised a public petition, which even got signed by the Lord Chamberlain, leader of Shakespeare's acting company. The Privy Council then proceeded to shut down the Blackfriars Theatre before it could stage a single performance.

And Shakespeare had reluctantly to change these characters' names and make a public apology of a sort on stage, but he tried to do this with only a minimum element of grovelling, which is nice to see!

And with his upscale Blackfriars project in ruins, and having lost a huge amount of his personal savings, Shakespeare had instead to establish what he was to call his "Globe Theatre" in a much less salubrious part of town, on the south bank of the Thames, amid all the bear-pits and brothels.

London's most notorious brothel, the Holland's Leaguer, which featured Dutch prostitutes, was nearby in the Paris Gardens, and King James himself and the Duke of Buckingham were said to be among its regular customers. But not the nicest area to have your theatre in - no doubt about that. Oh dear!