Danskcolin: Monday October 6th 2025 "Got YOUR autumn make-up on yet? If not, get help NOW

Yes, autumn draws on, as the old joke says! And, if you normally wear make-up, it's time to get out your autumn "pallet", and if you're seeking help, just pop into your local Greggs and visit their shiny new cosmetics counter: once you put that Greggs door open, help is literally only a few feet away!

Things can go horribly wrong, however, even at Greggs - witness this horror story this morning on the local Onion News - read it and weep !!!!

Poor Milner !!!!

Let me put my cards on the table at this point! [I wish you wouldn't keep doing that, Colin! - Ed]

A lot of people, I know, mark the passing of the seasons by a change in their make-up pallets, but neither myself nor my light-to-moderate wife Lois wear make-up. I myself have zero experience in this field - I think my natural beauty speaks for itself haha! Lois used to do some light work on her face when I first knew her, but we're past caring about that malarkey now, at the grand old age of 79, would you believe!

my medium-to-light wife Lois and me - a recent picture

No! At our advanced age we celebrate the passing of summer into winter in subtler, and some would say less poetic, ways - by putting the central heating on and wearing thicker coats, turning the electric blanket up to "medium", when we get into bed - call us "old school" if you like haha!

This morning we do actually put our central heating on for a couple of hours, and, in a time-honoured autumnal ceremony, I have to figure out how to work the little "gizmo" in our hallway again. Well the temperature this morning has dropped into the 40's F (46F / 8C to be precise) for the first time for months, so desperate measures are called for, that's for sure!

Brrr!!!! And Lois sensibly wears her "autumn coat when we go out this morning for our daily walk - today it's over Old Man Lowsely's Farm, here in rural, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire.

flashback to this morning: my light-to-moderate wife Lois and me huddling together

for warmth on our morning walk, which today takes us over Old Man's Lowsley's Farm

Also every autumn we feel strange desires stirring inside us, which we give expression to by demonstrating a hearty "stir" (no pun intended!!!) to a nice traditional pudding - like Lois when she's making our annual Christmas pudding, still keeping to the boozy Oxfordshire country recipe first outlined by her old late grandmother, Granny Milcah Cox (born 1870!!!).

flashback to 2017: Lois making her boozy Christmas pudding,

following the traditional recipe formulated by her old granny, Granny [Milcah] Cox

deep in the Oxfordshire countryside: (right) stirring in the booze (!)

Foreigners used to say, about us British, that our cuisine was rubbish, but that we made the best puddings, a "trade-off" that Yours Truly has always been more than willing to accept, to put it mildly!

Are British puddings slowly slipping into the rubbish-bin of history, however (talking point!). The writing may be on the wall for our puddings, according to this week's copy of Lois's favourite magazine "The Week".

Speaking for both of us, we're always ready for a bit of roly-poly or a spotted dick, but as for "Sussex pond pudding", the name itself doesn't exactly get our juices flowing!

It rarely gets really cold in the UK, but it would be nice to know a bit more about what sort of puddings they make where it's really cold, say, out on the Russian steppes, say, or in Outer Mongolia - brrrr!!!!

Tonight Lois and I settle down on the couch to see a TV programme about Genghis Khan, trying to work out why he died, aged 65 or thereabouts. Lots of theories are advanced for his cause of death, but puddings (or the lack of them) isn't mentioned, so I suppose we can rule out that one, which is a pity (!).

There are no contemporary sources of evidence for the death of Genghis Khan. and lots of theories have been advanced as to why he died, and presenter Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb sifts through them all tonight, with the help of a team of experts.

It's been said that he died falling off his horse - well, the Mongol hordes were on horseback most of the day, so it sounds a good hypothesis but they had special "deep" saddles with high sides that helped to keep you in place. Was it a war wound? The Mongols were always fighting somebody or other, after all.

Did Genghis die in bed, having sex? The Mongols did a lot of that as well, when they came home in the evenings - Genghis himself is rumoured to have fathered thousands of children, although only 15 of these were registered with the authorities.

A book written decades later by one of Genghis' descendants claimed that he had died of injuries inflicted on him by the wife of one of his victims, whom he had taken as a concubine (as you do!).

The story has traditionally been taken to mean that the woman took a knife and castrated Genghis. However, experts say that the cutting off of his genitals is unlikely to have been fatal in itself, although a side-effect could have been damage to the femoral artery, which would almost certainly have caused haemorrhaging and a quick end.

And it's thought that if this story was true, the facts could have been later "hushed up", as being too degrading an end for the world's greatest conqueror.

Poor Genghis!!!!!

It's certainly true that story-tellers were looking for a glorious end for Genghis, if at all possible, but the programme concludes that the most likely cause of death was simply the Bubonic Plague or Black Death. The timing is right, because this was around the time when the plague was appearing in Mongolia, where it is now believed to have started, before spreading to Europe, carried by rats and fleas.

In the 14th century a third of the population of Europe died from the plague, and recent DNA studies of skeletons of plague victims from that period now indicate that its probable origin was in Mongolia.