Danskcolin: Friday December 15th 2023

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! And Lois is busy this morning making the icing for her 2023 Christmas cake.

Lois putting the icing on the cake this morning

Our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica are going to have enormous fun this weekend decorating it with some of our "up-to-60-years-old" Christmas cake decorations.

I wonder how Pope Francis is getting on this year about decorating his Christmas cake. I know he still insists on decorating it all himself as well as putting all the other decorations up in the Vatican, despite being now only 2 days away from his 88th birthday. Do you remember that story in Onion News that "went viral" a few years ago?

VATICAN CITY—Hoping to have all his holiday decorations up by the weekend, His Holiness Pope Francis has spent the past two hours rummaging through the basement of the papal apartments in search of the Vatican’s plastic nativity scene figures, sources confirmed Friday

After climbing over dusty cases of sacramental wine and bins filled with mothballed vestments, the pope reportedly found the set’s plywood manger in a corner of the room near the sump pump, though sources noted he has yet to locate all the blow-moulded polyethylene representations of the Holy Family and their Christmas visitors.

Poor Francis !!!!!!

Let's hope he's managing to get some of his Christmas cards up as well. As head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, he must get many more than the 30 that Lois and I have received so far. After all, there are estimated to be over 400,000 Catholic priests in the world, and I would imagine it would be "curtains" for a priest's career not to drop the Pope a card at Christmas, wouldn't you think? Am I right, or am I right?

Be that as it may, today Lois and I put up the 30 cards we've received so far, which makes our living-room instantly more "Christmassy" - can you see the one YOU sent us haha hint hint!!! [Just a gentle reminder, in case you've "forgotten" again haha !!!!]

So, in sum, another busy day in our little downsized "house-for-two" here in Malvern. We've also to get the house ready for the semi-regular weekend visit from our daughter Sarah and our twin granddaughters Lily and Jessica. A possible visit to the local ice-skating rink is planned for tomorrow, as well as the chance to decorate our Christmas cake, a job which is "just up the twins' street" to put it mildly.

flashback to last Saturday: our twin granddaughters

Jessica and Lily start work on decorating

our downsized 2'6" Christmas tree

19:00 By now exhausted, Lois and I wind down for bed by watching a bit of "telly". First, an interesting documentary in the "Villages By The Sea" series by archaeologist Ben Robinson. Tonight's programme is all about a weird place in Suffolk, where an architect, Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, bought up a whole piece of land just over a hundred years ago, and built his own vision of an English village on it.

Do you ever feel sorry for the Anglo-Saxons when they first started coming over to England from Denmark and Germany over 1800 years ago? You know, because... they not only had to start hundreds of villages up here in the east of England, but they also had to think up names for them. Not an easy job, when you start to think about it, is it! Be fair !!!!

I must have been blind not to notice this, but it's obvious to me now, that the strain of thinking up names for all their new villages must have been exhausting for these new Anglo-Saxon arrivals. You can tell that, because, as presenter Ben Robinson tells us in tonight's "Villages by the Sea", there are 16 villages called "Thorpe", all just in one county - Suffolk.

And as everybody knows, "Thorpe" was just the Anglo-Saxon word for "village". I rest my case!

Just as a "by-the-way", if you're thinking of sending a Christmas card to somebody in one of these 16 Thorpes in Suffolk, be sure to put the postcode on it won't you. It's the poor Royal Mail postman I feel most sorry for!

Luckily, architect and playwright Glencairn Ogilvie who bought this whole area up over 100 years ago, changed the village's name to "Thorpeness", so that was one less "Thorpe" for the postman to worry about, which was a nice thought.

And what we have today from Ogilvie's efforts is an actual "planned village" - something of a rarity in England, to put it mildly, and the UK's first ever planned seaside resort.

It's sort of on the coast of the North Sea, but it actually faces inland, with its focal point being a boating lake which Ogilvie created from the local bogs, with names for islets etc taken from his pal JM Barrie's Peter Pan stories.

Interestingly, although Ogilvie planned Thorpeness as a seaside resort, he wanted to make it a "refined" seaside resort, when it started opening up for tourists in the 1910's and 1920's.

And rather than putting "no riff-raff" signs up, like Basil Fawlty did for functions at his Torquay hotel Fawlty Towers, Ogilvie used more subtle methods of keeping out the "riff-raff".

He managed to keep the village off the local train lines and bus routes, for starters, so that you could only come here really if you had a car, relatively rare in the 1920's. He eschewed "popular seaside entertainments" - no pier, no promenade, no amusement halls, no ice-cream sellers, no Punch-and-Judy shows, no "kiss-me-quick" hats etc. It was just wholesome family fun for the well-to-do.

Half-timbered houses were built that looked old, but weren't. Water towers, which are usually quite ugly buildings, were disguised as tall houses. And some of the latest technology was used - modern for the 1910's: buildings made of concrete blocks containing shingle from the local beaches, and a wind-powered mill to pump water to the village's residents.

Ogilvie built houses that looked old, but weren't...

... and water-towers disguised as tall houses

Fascinating stuff !!!!

21:30 We go to bed on the latest episode of the sitcom "Two Doors Down", a series which focuses on the lives of suburbanites in Glasgow, Scotland.

It's Fathers Day, and several of the street's residents are gathered at the local carvery for a meal. The atmosphere is good to start with, until talk turns to family-tree research. Uh-oh, always a risky subject, if you ask me!

And unfortunately, but predictably perhaps, the atmosphere is quickly soured after young Gordon finds out for the first time that his father was adopted, and that starts him wondering about what else his parents haven't told him.

A paternity test? Why would Gordon's dad have taken a paternity test?

Well, it seems that, around the time Gordon's mum met his dad they were living quite different lives, his dad working in an office nine-to-five, while his mum was heavily involved in the nightclub scene in Manchester, drinking, taking drugs, and staying out all night.

She eventually settled down with Gordon's dad, but because she'd been so "active", his dad wanted to be convinced, when little Gordon was born, that the boy was definitely his.