Thursday November 12th 2020

07:00 I get out of bed and bring 2 cups of tea up for Lois and me. We've had an email from Sarah, our younger daughter, who, since December 2015 has lived in Perth, Australia, together with Francis and their 7-year-old twins. Sarah says the family are still planning to return to the UK as soon as the coronavirus epidemic subsides, and they want to buy the house Lois and I live in, which will be nice. It's quite a large family house and garden and it's far too big for two old codgers like us, to put it mildly!

We stay in bed a while, and |I look at the Danish news media on my smartphone (ekstrabladet.com). The US Ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, a Trump-appointee, has been telling some untruths on social media apparently - oh dear! 

On Twitter, the ambassador has written, 'Every legitimate vote should count. The legitimacy of the election is at stake and yesterday I checked the vote count in Pennsylvania and they did not count my vote.'

The New York Times has now disproved that, however. 'A search on Pennsylvania's website for the election shows that Ms. Sand's vote has been counted in the county of Cumberland, where she lived for part of her childhood, ' reads the Times article. On Twitter, Sands, who in her personal profile describes himself as 'Mom, risotto lover, and champagne drinker,' has repeatedly criticized the legitimacy of the U.S. election that came out in favour of Democrat Joe Biden.

Carla Sands has been an ambassador to Denmark since 2017 and she is a Republican. She took over the post from Democrat Rufus Gifford. American ambassadors are appointed by the president, so it is Donald Trump's choice that it is Carla Banks who has ended up being ambassador to Denmark.

Rufus Gifford, the former ambassador, has commented on the case on Twitter. 'I'm sorry, Denmark. Truth and Righteousness will return in 70 days,' he writes, referring to the fact that the future president Joe Biden will be installed by that date.

Yes - it'll certainly be nice when "truth and righteousness" becomes the norm again - that's for sure!

10:00 We go for a walk round the village, past the Royal Oak pub, sadly now shut for the duration of the lockdown, and on to the fields leading to the Racecourse.

we stop outside the Royal Oak pub, closed for lockdown, to take an awkward selfie

We walk on down Lake Street, where some tree-felling guys are felling a tree in somebody's garden. Lois is much cheekier than me, and she asks the guys if there's anything wrong with the tree. They say, no, it's just that the owner wants it out of the way so he can have a couple of new houses built there. 

Houses, houses, and more houses - who's going to buy them all, that's what I wonder !! What a crazy world we live in! 

on Lake Street, we see some tree-fellers felling a tree: all is well with the world - not !!!!!

Sheer madness!!!

16:00 We relax on the sofa with a cup of Earl Grey tea and a biscuit. I tell Lois my idea for renaming Donald Trump as one of the Bond villains: Trumpfinger, Trumpfeld of Blo-trump perhaps. She counter-suggests "No, Doctor!" to reference his treatment of Dr Fauci and others. But we can't decide - the jury's still out on that one.

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, a bit of the first part of an interesting new documentary series called "How Britain Won WW2", although both Lois and I agree that a more accurate title would have been, "How Britain Avoided Losing WW2" - if Britain's efforts had gone awry in the first two years, it would have been curtains for this country, and for Europe too - no doubt about that!!!

There have been a number of documentaries about WW2 recently that have focussed on individuals who made an (often) unsung contribution to the war effort, and tonight's programme is very much in that mould. 

The first story tonight was about a 19-year-old volunteer soldier (a "weekend" soldier), Alec Jay, who at the outbreak of the war found himself suddenly a full-time member of the "real" army, and being shipped out to Calais. This was at time when the German blitzkrieg was advancing towards the Dunkirk beaches, where preparations were being made to evacuate a third of a million troops back to Britain. 

Alec Jay (19), a part-time (weekend) soldier, suddenly caught up in real warfare
 

The soldiers in Calais had orders to hold up the German advance at all costs - they were clearly being regarded as expendable for the good of the Dunkirk evacuation, and they were all eventually either killed or taken prisoner. We were impressed that Alec, who was Jewish, had the foresight to take off his military "dog-tag", which listed his religion - and to bury it in the sand on one of the Calais beaches. As a result, when he was taken prisoner, the Germans never found out that he was a Jew. As a POW, he escaped 5 times (but was presumably recaptured each time!). But he survived the war.

Churchill's message to the officer commanding the men stationed in Calais

The second story was about Air Marshall Hugh Dowding, who had the foresight to develop the world's first radar system and to start building up Britain's air defences as far back as 1935, at a time when the conventional wisdom was to assemble a huge force of heavy bombers. It was Dowding, a man Churchill never liked, according to Lois, who commissioned the world-beating fighter aircraft the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and who was the person mainly responsible for the RAF being able to resist the massive German bombing campaign in the summer of 1940.

The third hero was a female "petrol-head", Beatrice "Tilly" Shilling (Ph.D) who found a "beautifully simple" solution to the Spitfires' and the Hurricanes' main design fault - that their engines sometimes stalled when they went into a dive. 

Beatrice "Tilly" Shilling

One of the biggest German air-raids of the whole war, that took place on September 15th 1940, proved to be the turning point. The RAF lost 29 aircraft but the Germans lost 56, and 2 days later Hitler decided to shelve his planned invasion.

Lois and I have quite taken to Channel 5 documentaries - they seem to use intelligent presenters, who get hold of fascinating information, partly by solid research but also partly by talking to e.g. the grandchildren of these (sometimes) forgotten heroes. They don't waste time and money sending the presenters all over the world, just to film their "pieces-to-camera" in front of some impressive international backdrop, like some of the more prestigious channels do. 

Welcome back, Channel 5 - all is forgiven haha!

Wednesday November 11th 2020

11:00 This morning was supposed to be the start of my new exercise regime, where Lois bullies me into taking a daily walk, but an hour-long phone call from Rose, one of Lois's former work colleagues at the local Church of England Retirement Home, puts paid to that. 

the retirement home, where Lois worked 1993-2006

Rose rings Lois to give vent to her feelings. She is annoyed because her grandson and his fiancée in Gloucester are getting two dogs. 

Getting a dog has become a big craze ever since the start of the first lockwon, so much so, that dog rescue charities have pretty much run out of them - what madness! Rose's grandson and his partner live in a top-floor flat and both of them have two jobs at the moment. Why would anybody think it was a good idea to get a dog in those circumstances? 

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

12:30 Lois and I have lunch and then, despite the perilous imminence of nap-time, we venture out and go for a walk on the local football field. There is hardly anyone about - no surprise there, given that it's lunchtime, and it's always refreshing to the soul to see the 1000 ft high Cleeve Hill in the distance.

we go for a walk on the local football field

17:00 We have a look at the news. Trump is behaving more and more like a Bond villain. But which one? Is it Trumpfeld? Or Trumpfinger perhaps? I think we should be told haha! 

17:30 I spend some time working on my new companion blog OldnorseColin, that celebrates mine and Lois's Viking personas, but I haven't got the formatting quite right yet, there's no doubt about that! It's not even close! I'll just have to put in some additional time this coming week - damn!!

mine and...

....Lois's Viking personas

The critics are already on to me, unfortunately. They say the blog's so-called "saga" lacks action, and that's true - the main "event" in "Kenneth's Saga" (my father's), is that his brother Eric gives him some books on golf and Kenneth sells them to buy some land in Iceland on the peninsular just beyond Rejkjavik near the international airport and rock'n'roll museum. I'll have to try and beef the plot up somehow, that's for sure!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the sofa and watch part 6 of the new Danish crime drama, "DNA".

Currently I'm still hanging onto the plot by the skin of my teeth. I know that some Polish nuns, who run a maternity unit for teenage mothers, seem to be also involved in an international kidnapping and child-trafficking ring, but apart from that, I'm getting quite confused. 

The nuns claim falsely that a lot of the babies being born in the maternity unit are stillborn, and the mothers never see their babies again. But it's all a racket. It appears that a proportion of the new-borns are transported to a convent in the country. And the convent is actually an adoption centre, where the babies are kept in anticipation of international customers eager to buy them.

One of the teenage mothers, Julita, who was told her baby was stillborn, is nevertheless suspicious. She drives out to the convent in the country, and, in order to investigate further, pretends she is a novice nurse who wants to work there. She steals some nun's clothes from a washing line in the grounds, and puts them on - it's an old trick but it might just work haha!

But unfortunately it doesn't quite work out for Julita. She locates her own baby but too late to stop it being taken away for adoption early next morning. And there's another exciting wrestling match where a bunch of nuns try to overpower Julita in the corridor.

a bunch of nuns try to wrestle Julita into a room where she can be locked up

Flashback to episode 5: a similar, earlier, confrontation in the actual maternity centre where Julita has just given birth.

Tremendous fun!!!!

Tonight, Rolf, the Danish detective on the case, who also just happens to be a victim of a similar kidnapping ring - could it be the same one?, he wonders. Rolf's baby was snatched away from him on a ferry a few years ago. 

But in this episode Rolf has a piece of luck. He seems to find a little girl he thinks is his daughter: a girl, who has red hair and blue eyes like Rolf's partner, has been adopted by a couple who own a fertility clinic in Paris,  a clinic which also seem to be involved with the Polish nuns. 

While nobody much is around in the clinic's foyer, Rolf sneaks a DNA test on the little girl, but the incident is captured on security cameras. Rolf is now in big trouble over the incident, for mixing his private suspicions with the case he is supposed to be working on.

Rolf surreptitiously gives a little girl a DNA test, but it's caught on security cameras - oh dear!

Poor Rolf !!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Class and we relax with a retrospective on the so-called "British invasion" of British rock groups who flooded America in the 1960's. It's nostalgic to see all those guys again. 

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

Tuesday November 10th 2020

10:15 My first so-called "physiotherapy session" begins by telephone. Connor gets me to describe my problem, which is mainly that I've been taking less and less exercise as the lockdown has progressed, leading to general unfitness: which is clearly my fault. 

But Connor isn't judgmental, which is nice. And he's going to mail me some exercises and some general advice suitable for old codgers. He and I will have another telephone "session" in 3 weeks' time to see how I've been getting on. I've been trying to do a bit more exercise recently: a 4-5 mile "ride" on my exercise bike about 3 times a week, some not-very-challenging weight training, and a bit of work on my so-called "grip" machine - oh dear, it doesn't sound like much does it, come to think of it!

the local general hospital where the physiotherapy department is located

11:30 I haven't been doing much going for walks, so Lois says she is going to bully me into doing that on a daily basis, weather permitting. We would have started today, but we are half expecting Mark the Gardener to come round, and he's not answering his phone. Only Mark, and Mark alone understands his own schedule, which seems totally arcane and indecipherable to his customers, I sense - oh dear (again)!

Having a gardener is a very satisfying hobby, however, even if the gardeners, as they normally do, quickly "take over", and start regarding your garden as their own, and soon start making all the decisions. We were first introduced to this so-called "gardnering" hobby by local woman Susan Tager, who wrote a fascinating piece about it for the local news website, Onion News Local.

Local housewife Susan writes, "If you had asked me three years ago if I was ever going to have a gardener, I probably would have thought you were out of your tree. Sure, I loved the idea of lush greenery and fresh vegetables, but in my mind, it was simply not worth the finding the time and expending all the effort to deal with a gardener every day from spring till fall: way too much hassle. 

Nothing seemed more tiring than having to figure out what my gardener was going to have to plant and where to order him to plant it—all the countless headaches of getting someone to take care of the garden just seemed overwhelming. To say nothing of the hours and hours I'd have to put in under the deck umbrella watching his every move, making sure every last detail was exactly as I wanted it. Everything about it just screamed "No, thanks!"

But my mother and sister and the servants kept insisting that I needed to get out and be more active. "Why Susan," they'd say. "Look at you! You barely have the energy to get out of bed after breakfast each morning!" They kept telling me how rewarding it was to have a gardener, what wonders an outdoor hobby would do to invigorate my delicate constitution. So I finally gave in and decided to give 'gardenering' a try.

And you know what? They were right! And now I can't imagine life without a gardener any more than I could without stables, the wine buyer, or my kitchen staff!"

Well, Susan talked us into it all right, and since then we've never looked back!

I know I can become fit again, if I'm just determined enough about it. If at all possible I want to emulate the inspirational success of another local hero, Matthew Sabourne, who doesn't let anything get in his way. His story was reported on the same local news website recently. 

Saying that he wouldn’t let his problems define him, recently injured man Matthew Sabourne told reporters Thursday he was determined to maintain his normal sedentary lifestyle despite his new physical challenges.

“I caught a tough break with the accident, but I’ll be damned if I let this injury stop me from getting out of bed every afternoon, plopping down on the couch, and binge-watching Netflix for eight hours just like any other able-bodied person,” said Sabourne, 29, who also vowed to maintain his previous diet of nonstop fast food and carbonated beverages.

“I will not let this injury get in the way of my personal or professional life, at least any more than my recliner did before. As soon as I finish my FIFA season, I’m turning off my PlayStation, hitting the job market, and landing a regular gig where I can sit in front of a computer all day long.”

What an inspiration to all of us! 

Hail to thee, Matthew Sabourne - you kept us out of war!!!!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the first part of Lucy Worsley's new series on 

The amount of information that Lucy Worsley gets across in her hour-long documentaries is really quite small, because she has to "jazz up" every point she makes with some sort of visual display. Do we really need to see endless displays of little cakes while she's illustrating the point that Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake", for example?

Queen Marie-Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake" , but yes, Lucy, we do know what a cake is!

A lot of the material she presents about the French Revolution is familiar territory to Lois and me, as we're both history buffs, but it's nevertheless useful to be reminded of the famous misconceptions about the revolution, especially because, at our age, we're inclined to be more and more forgetful - oh dear!

We both knew that the French state was bankrupt in the run-up to the revolution, but we didn't quite realise the scale of the cost to France of the support she gave to the American fight for independence from Britain - their expenditure in supporting the colonists was equal to two and a half times the country's annual budget - my god!

The moral: don't spend out an excessive amount of money, more than you can afford, just to spite your neighbours, however much you may dislike them haha!

There have been many popular misconceptions about the revolution, and Lucy reiterates tonight some of the true facts, including, for example:

1. The revolution wasn't started by the hungry, downtrodden masses - it actually started as a revolt by middle-class professionals.

2.  When the mob stormed the Bastille, there were actually only 7 prisoners in it, and not a single one of them was a "political prisoner".

3. The slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" was in fact only adopted over 50 years later, in 1848.

4. The guillotine was actually introduced as a humane alternative to existing methods of execution, which were far more brutal.

5. Napoleon's "short stature" was in fact just a British propaganda slur - he was 5 ft 7 in (170cm) tall - and this was close to the average height for men at the time.

...and much much more! Robespierre in particular has been very misunderstood - he was originally against the death penalty, for a start, and of course he himself got guillotined in the end. And Lucy points out that, strangely, there are very few statues of him around today in France. 

Would the "woke" people be attacking such statues, if they were there? Lois and I are not quite sure about this, so the jury's still out on that one. Guidance, please!!!!

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

   

Monday November 9th 2020

It's a pretty wet day, but luckily Lois had a much better night, and she had a normal breakfast and lunch. Yesterday it was me doing the meal-preparation, and I don't think she can face another day of my cordon bleu signature-dishes, so it's just as well she has started to recover, to put it mildly!!!

13:00 The big news today is the progress with the Pfizer BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. It's looking like it may be over 90% effective. Unfortunately we also hear at the same time that the flu jab we both got yesterday is only about 50% effective, which is disappointing - damn! And for the last two days we were feeling so protected! ...until now - damn (again) !!!!

We reckon, nonetheless, that if we continue avoiding people to keep ourselves safe from coronavirus, we'll also be cutting down the chances of getting the ordinary influenzas. That's what we think anyway!

14:00 Lois and I are also waiting to see if and how Trump will end his term as president - it's quite a cliff-hanger. Will he agree to go only after weeks of litigation and annoying rhetoric? 

Or, as Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has predicted, could it be that Trump will just leave the White House for next month's Christmas break and never return? 

Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and "fixer"

Cohen doesn't believe that Trump plans to concede to President-elect Joe Biden.   "I wouldn't be shocked if there's no concession speech at all," Cohen told MSNBC's Alex Witt on Sunday. "My theory is that at Christmastime he heads to Mar-a-Lago and I don't believe he'll come back to Washington. I think he'll stay at Mar-a-Lago all the way through the inauguration."

Cohen, who worked for Trump for years before turning against him in 2018, added that Trump was unlikely to attend the inauguration. "He cannot let the camera look at him and basically pull down the curtain and see the wizard that's standing beside," Cohen said. "That he's a loser, and it's killing him." 

In a recent TV documentary Lois and I discovered that Trump had a strong personal relationship with Norman Vincent Peale, author of "The Power Of Positive Thinking" - Peale was a close friend of the whole Trump family.

Normal Vincent Peale (left) with Donald Trump many years ago

Lois and I both agree that there's a lot of good sense in the power of positive thinking, but it seems that it can seduce people into thinking you don't have to do anything else, except think positive thoughts. In fact there's of course a limit to it - it doesn't necessarily stop you from contracting coronavirus for example, or from losing an election. 

My late mother had all of Peale's books, and they probably helped her to reach, as she did, the impressive age of 91, But those books, plus the related Christian Science ambivalence towards medical treatment, also led her into setbacks in her health that could have been avoided, we think.

So follow Peale by all means, but keep a sense of proportion, would be our conclusion!

Nobody seems to know what the official label for Kamala Harris's husband will be. In the UK we don't have a tradition of calling a Prime Minister's spouse the "First Lady" or "First Gentleman" or whatever, so it doesn't arise as an issue here. 

When Maggie Thatcher become Prime Minister in 1979, a lot of fun was had with Dennis Thatcher's imagined domestic life with Maggie, as in the Bond film "For Your Eyes Only". The couple are seen in their kitchen doing the washing up and drying up when the official Maggie-phone rings. The Prime Minister thinks she is speaking to Bond, who was on some sort of mission at the time. In fact she had been connected to a parrot, who asked her to give him a kiss. What madness!

Janet Brown, the Margaret Thatcher-impersonator.

Janet played the then British prime minister,

in the ”For Your Eyes Only” James Bond film (1981)

(John Wells played Denis Thatcher): here she thinks she's talking to Bond on her "Maggie-phone"

I don't suppose they'd get away with that type of humour today, or any other type of humour come to that  - oh dear!

16:30 We have a cup of tea and watch last Friday's Goggleboxers' reaction to Borat's hoodwinking of Giuliani, Trump's lawyer. Giuliani seems to have really fallen for the set-up and he appears to have genuinely believed he was being interviewed by Borat's "daughter" in a hotel room.

It is strange how Borat, after all this time, continues to have success in getting away with these con-tricks, without his victims apparently suspecting anything - but I guess if you're a celebrity you think you can get away with anything these days - my god!

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the sofa to watch episode 5 of the new Danish crime series, "DNA".

One thing I definitely can't cope well with in this type of series is when the director decides to switch back and forth between different time-periods, especially if the flashbacks are not announced by a message like "Five years ago....".  

Currently I'm hanging onto the plot by the skin of my teeth. I know that some Polish nuns, who run a maternity clinic for teenage mothers, seem to be also involved in an international kidnapping and child-trafficking ring, but apart from that, I'm getting quite confused.

It's in any case a lot of fun tonight to see a bunch of nuns wrestling a teenage mother at the top of some stairs, trying to stop her finding her baby, which she believes the nuns are still holding somewhere on the premises - yikes!

Tremendous fun !!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her seminar and we watch our two favourite TV quizzes, Only Connect and University Challenge.

In University Challenge, it's a so-so battle tonight between us and the 8 students. We can answer about a third of all the questions, and we get 5 questions right that the students strike out on, which isn't bad.

1. Containing three double-S's, what word means an excessive desire to own or dominate or to show jealous tendencies towards another person?

Students: [pass] [say what??????- Ed]

Colin and Lois: "possessiveness"

2. From Virginia Woolf's "The Common Reader", identify this author: "Born 1857, he alone was able to lead that double life, for he was compound of two men: together with the sea-captain dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow." 

Students: Hemingway [say what??????- Ed]

Colin and Lois: Joseph Conrad.

3. The classification of which species of the genus homo dates to the discovery in the 1850's of a fossil assemblage in the Feldhofer Cave near Dusseldorf?

Students: Homo erectus

Colin and Lois: Neanderthals

4. Founded in 1634 for the settlement of English Catholics, which of Britain's American colonies was the first to be governed by a lord proprietor holding a royal charter?

Students: Pennsylvania [say what??????- Ed]

Colin and Lois: Maryland

5. The standard rate of VAT is 20%. What is the reduced rate, charged on certain products such as domestic heating fuel and children's car-seats?

Students: 17.5%

Colin and Lois: 5%

22:00 Little things please little minds. Feeling perhaps unjustifiably smug, we finally go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!