My 5th birthday. I had mumps, but my mother had already organised a birthday party for me, so I lay upstairs, confined to bed, listening to a roomful of other kids having fun downstairs.

This was a very long time ago, before children were routinely given the mumps vaccine.

Well, the vikings reached the east coast of what is now Canada in around the year 1,000, but they were Norwegians, not Danes. They never got any further than New Brunswick, but who knows, if they visited Florida perhaps they would have stayed…

In these dark times it’s great to see the Danes responding to unpleasant orange chauvinism and bigotry with dry humour. It kind of deflates the mafia boss’s self importance.

I’m watching series 7 of a Danish TV programme called Badehotellet at the moment and it struck me that the Danish sense of humour it portrays is very much like the British, full of irony and self-deprecation. If they could buy the UK as well I’d be extremely happy.

Yes, I’m new to Lemmy, ex-Reddit, and now I’m looking at what else I can do. I ran Linux Mint on an old laptop for many years, but that was when I was still working and I also had a company laptop on Windows if I needed it. So now I’m retired and currently I only have a refurbished Lenovo with Win 10, which goes out of support soon. I suppose I could do dual boot on that machine, but I’d rather have Windows in a VM for the rare occasions when I can’t get something to run in Wine. I have no idea where I’d buy a copy of Win 11, but presumably Microsoft have a store.