Wednesday November 13th 2024 "Who's YOUR 'personal trainer', and who's YOUR 'life coach' then haha!"

Watch out, friends, here it comes! Yes, it's my "question-of-the-day" and today it's a real "doozy", so get ready for it! 

Here's the thing - do YOU have your own, your very own, personal trainer, or life coach maybe? Most of us do, don't we, especially here in rural West Worcestershire, and stories about the achievements (and otherwise!) of the local 'PTs' and 'LCs' here in West Worcestershire are normally at frequent-to-very-frequent level, and sometimes almost "legion", at least in the pages of the local Onion News (print edition) - just turn to page 94, and you'll see about 6 this morning alone, which is total madness!!!!

Isn't it refreshing to hear about McGann's rapid progress under the capable hands of local trainer Logan (!).

It's the kind of progress that my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I are looking forward to now, after recommendations from our local NHS doctor's surgery's about joining Anglo-Danish company Liva Healthcare's critically-acclaimed "outreach" programme, which offers NHS patients the services of a so-called personal "diet coach".

So watch this space! Or rather watch the pounds just dropping off us, as we are assigned our personal "diet coach", and start to follow his or her recommendations. Exciting times!!!! [If you say so! - Ed]

And Lois and I make a good start with losing weight this morning, even before talking online to whichever "personal diet coach" Liva Healthcare assigns, which is encouraging (!). 

Just watch us as we make an early-to-mid-morning visit to local supermarket Warner's at Upton-on-Severn, where we purchase a number of healthy food items: just see our till receipt (included below!), and you'll see that things are really starting to "happen" for us now, to put it mildly !!!!

we make an early-to-mid-morning foray into Warner's 

Supermarket, Upton-on-Severn, to buy a number of healthy, 

low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt, low-everything food items 

for our so-called "Anglo-Danish Diet"

It's confession time, however. While Lois isn't looking, a slip a Belgian bun into our trolley, and enjoy it later on the couch with our 4 o'clock cup of Earl Grey tea. Oh dearie me! But as I explain to her, I haven't scheduled my particular Anglo-Danish diet to start till tomorrow, so that's all right. "The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast", as people say. Oh dearie me (again) !!!!

No, I'm not breaking my own personal "Anglo-Danish Diet",

because it isn't scheduled to start till tomorrow, luckily (!)

I think that Brits today regard our friends, the Danes, as a generally positive influence on British life. But it wasn't always so.

By coincidence Lois is currently reading a book called "The Dark Side of Oxford", which is the town we were both born in. A thousand years or more ago, when Danish settlers had started flooding into eastern England, and establishing their own kingdom there - the so-called Danelaw - Oxford was a town very much in the borderlands between the two jurisdictions of the Danelaw and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex.

In due course the two jurisdictions were merged, sometimes under Anglo-Saxon, and sometimes under Danish kings, but to begin with there was a lot of friction between the 2 communities.

In the year 1002, for example, after repeated demands for "Danegeld" (money to bribe the Danes from encroaching further), and a series of Viking invasions, the Anglo-Saxon king Ælthefred issued an edict stating that it was no longer illegal to kill any Danes living in England. What madness! And also very unfair to the majority of Danish settlers, who had settled here peaceably and begun to raise their families here.

I showcase Lois's current book,

"The Dark Side of Oxford", by Marilyn Yurdan

According to Lois's book, on the 13th November 1002, St Brice's Day, amid rising Anglo-Saxon anger,  members of Oxford's local Danish community were forced to take refuge in the church of St Frideswide (today's Oxford Cathedral). The Anglo-Saxon townspeople then retaliate by setting the church on fire, killing, among others, Gunnhild, the sister of the Danish King. 

Later, however, the King of Denmark himself, Sweyn Forkbeard, descended on Oxford in person, and burned the whole town down in retribution, and so "fair enough!", you might say!

But what a crazy world they lived in, all those years ago !!!!

(left) Gunnhild, the Danish princess killed by the people of Oxford,

and (right) Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard, who burned down

Oxford in revenge - but what a madness it all was !!!!

And "Wessex 0, Denmark 1", as I think you could describe the final score haha!

21:00 It's interesting that 19th century author Thomas Hardy revived the archaic place-name of "Wessex" as his name for the half-real and half-dream world of Dorset and surrounding counties, the region of South West England that he used as the setting of his many novels.

And tonight Lois and I settle down on the couch and get ready for bed by watching two TV documentaries, aired originally in the 1980's about the countryside that Hardy wrote about so adoringly in his books.

The counties of Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall are of great interest to me personally, because my parents, my siblings and I spent pretty much of the 1960's decade in the city of Bristol. 

Bristol and the counties of south-west England:

Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall

flashback to 1960: me at 14, in my 'prestigious' Bristol 

Grammar School uniform, with my sister Jill, then aged 2

1960: (left) my late brother Steve (8) and (right) my late sister

Kathy (13), with Jill, in our back garden in Bristol

I myself attended the prestigious Bristol Grammar School, which included in its catchment area, for example, the whole eastern half of Somerset. So-called "clever boys" from backwoods Somerset villages "out in the sticks" or "out in the boonies", like, for example, from the village of "Backwell" and places like that, made up many of my classmates at the grammar school.

In many cases, these country boys described themselves as "the only Einstein Jr's in the village", but they themselves still used old-fashioned country expressions like "Ee bist" instead of the standard "You are"; or "Shudd'ee head!" instead of the more 'genteel' (!) admonishments to "shut your mouth!" or "shut your cakehole!" etc. 

What a crazy language English is!

In 1870, Thomas Hardy, an architect as well as a writer, was "on a mission", as TV documentary-presenters say, to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, and while there he met, and fell in love with a young woman Emma Gifford, whom he married 4 years later. It was love at first sight for both of them, and they started their married life in a house in Sturminster, Dorset.

flashback to 1874: Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford (both 34)

in the first year of their marriage

Hardy later wrote very nostalgically about his and Emma's first years together:

It's a great story - this young couple rushing up to Bristol to get some furniture, dashing round and choosing what they wanted, spending £100 in a crazy two hours, before travelling back to Dorset.

And there's these lines of Hardy's, talking about himself going back to his cottage in the evenings and seeing Emma waiting on the porch for him, or "descrying her" [using the word that Steve, our American brother-in-law, named as his "word of the month" for October 2024 - just saying !!!!]

Yes, on his way home to the cottage in the evenings, Hardy used to "descry" Emma from a distance, waiting in the porch for his return. 

And what did the young couple do in the evenings during their first two years together? Well, we get some clue from Hardy's declared "interests" maybe, as stated in another of his poems:

Well, we've all been there, haven't we - apart from the dancing, obviously haha (!).

But it's also a bit sad, however, isn't it, that, for this young couple, so very much in love, these first 2 years should have been described as the high point of their marriage, with everything seemingly going downhill after that. The couple, said to have become estranged later on, stayed together nonetheless, until Emma died childless, 38 years later, in 1912.

"What went wrong?", Lois and I wonder, but we're not sure. 

Perhaps we should be told?

[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!