Danskcolin: Friday December 8th 2023

It takes Lois and me pretty much all day today to clean up and tidy up our house - what a madness it all is! We've got quite a high tolerance for mess - not for dirt, but mess, yes. We don't mind living like pigs in the jungle, as long as we're having fun - who cares!

just give us a crossword or the Radio Times puzzles

and we find we don't care any more about the clutter,

which is nice!

However, the semi-regular weekend visits of our daughter Sarah and her 10-year-old twins Lily and Jessica at least make us periodically try and force the house to meet certain minimum requirements of tidiness and civilisation. Sarah and the twins stay with us most weekends, but the last two weekends they didn't come for various reasons, and Lois and I have really "let the house go" in these past two weeks, to put it mildly.

This week it's got pretty bad, and visitors have started to look sulky when we ask them to take their shoes off before they come in the house.

And all this "fussiness" started with a local newsflash that was kind of a "wake-up call" to Lois and me. The worst things was the picture accompanying the story, a picture which could easily have been taken at our front-door, no question!

UPPER WICK, WORCESTERSHIRE—Noting the various clothes and belongings strewn across the scratched, dust-covered floor, friends of local man Kyle Gruvard reported Thursday that his apartment was nowhere near nice enough for him to be asking people to take their shoes off.

“I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling with this ‘no shoes’ charade, because he clearly doesn’t take his off when it’s just him in here,” said Geoff McDonough, who added that any dirt guests might be tracking in paled in comparison to the bits of food and grime gathered below his kitchen counters.

“I’m not opposed to it in principle, but maybe own a vacuum before you start requesting that people remove their footwear at the door. Also, it’s f***ing freezing in here.

Gruvard's long-term girl friend, local writer Eve Schaub paid what she called a "conjugal visit" to the apartment last week, only to go away again, after failing to find Gruvard and assuming he must have gone out.

At press time, Gruvard was hastily searching through piles of rubbish looking for a first aid kit, after puncturing his toe on a thumbtack.

That's one awful warning, though, isn't it, and coming from a source only a few miles away from here. And a bit of a wake-up call for us, let's be honest!

And apart from general tidying-up, also today Lois and I want to find our new downsized "mini-Christmas tree" and put the little rascal up in the living-room, so that the twins can decorate it this weekend - there's nothing they like better than using their artistic talents on something like a Christmas tree, bless them.

Eventually Lois finds it at the bottom of our so-called "airing cupboard" and puts it up in the window, together with our bags of Christmas-tree-ornaments, some of which were hand-made by the twins' mother, our daughter Sarah, back in the 1980's - what madness !!!!

later I showcase our "compact" mini-Christmas tree, which replaced our old

5ft "monster" tree, when we downsized to Malvern last year

flashback to Christmas 2012: our "monster" 5 ft tree stands in the background,

as our then 2-year-old grandson Isaac showcases one of his presents

Nothing says "It's Christmas!" quite like a Christmas tree, does it, and you could say the same for one of Lois's Christmas cakes, which she's also been busy at getting together this week.

flashback to yesterday: Lois assembling the ingredients

for her 2023 Christmas cake

It's a time for remembering too, isn't it, all those Christmases gone past. They were all basically the same, weren't they, which is a nice thing to think about.

These are the Christmases of our lives, aren't they - and there's only a limited number of them when you look at it: most people have less than a hundred of them, let's be honest!

You do the maths, haha!!!

flashback to 1996: one of those wonderful Christmases of yore, with my dear

late parents, our daughters Sarah (19) and Alison (21), with Lois (right)

11:00 My other big job today, apart from decluttering our 2 guest bedrooms and vacuuming the house, is to see if I can save our local U3A "Making of English" group from extinction without actually taking on the leadership - a tricky exercise and a bit of a 'balancing act', to put it mildly.

Our original leader, Lynda, stepped down last year, and the other members are trying to manoeuvre me into agreeing to be the new leader, but I'm resisting: I'm already leader of the local "Intermediate Danish" group, which is a ton of work in itself - you would not BELIEVE!

Lynda, our former "Making of English" group leader (centre), seen here in happier times,

sporting her "mock-Hawaiian" tee-shirt, and taking part in an "old-codgers" ukulele concert

At yesterday's meeting of the "Making of English" group on zoom, we were discussing some pieces of early 17th century English tabloid journalism, and I noticed that the members kept praising my insights - a little over-zealously, I thought. Lois and I wondered if this was just another ploy, trying to flatter me into taking on the group leadership.

Eventually I decided that it wasn't a ploy - it was just that my observations were truly brilliant, and the other members were just acknowledging the plain fact of that. Why would I ever have thought otherwise haha!

[You might want to 'revisit' that (IMHO) over-hasty conclusion in slower time, if you ask me! - Ed]

This - the fact of my own brilliance - also had the virtue of being the simplest explanation, and, according to Steve, my knowledgeable American brother-in-law, an example of the 13th century 'Occam's razor', whereby the simplest explanation is always the most likely one.

This important principle, established 700 years ago by the 14th century philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, Ockham being a little village in Surrey, has, to Steve's knowledge, never been disproved, so I can think that it's not too high a risk to apply it universally as we go about our daily tasks.

Steve is the person to go to if you're curious about the laws that govern our lives. His favourite law, which I think supersedes all other laws, was first formulated by science fiction author Arthur C Clarke, as Steve reports:

[That's enough laws! - Ed]

[That's what Clarke said! - Colin]

With Occam's razor and Clarke's 3rd law in our armoury, I think we're pretty much equipped to face all of life's challenges - am I right? Or am I right!

21:00 Lois and I wind down for bed with this week's rerun of the old 1980's comedy "Yes Minister".

In this episode Hacker, Minister for Administrative Affairs, accompanied by his Private Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby, takes his seat on a plane bound for Qumran in the Middle East, with the mission of ratifying a contract won by a British electronics firm.

And as always, Hacker seeks assurance from Sir Humphrey that there's going to be no waste of public money, and that the UK delegation will be just a small one, of a size of the absolute minimum necessary to accomplish the aims of what is a modest, routine mission - it is after all merely to 'rubber-stamp' a 'done deal'.

However, Hacker gets a bit of a shock when he looks out of his window.

Oh, the accompanying civil service delegation has been pared to the bone, insists Sir Humphrey - a group from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a group from the Department of Trade, one from the Department of Industry, another from the Department of Energy, and there's a Deputy Secretary leading a team from the Cabinet Office, and a group from the Central Office of Information, as well as Sir Humphrey's own team from the Department of Administrative Affairs, private secretaries, liaison department secretaries, officials from the legal department that drew up the contract, the officials who supervised the contract.

What madness!!!!