Mussels

I promised to tell you more about our caravan holiday, but it's too late to start on Ray's story now, so you'll have to wait till tomorrow again for that.
Meanwhile, here are two words I learnt on a wet evening: Scaup; and Mussitation.

Ou sont les pois-nieges d’antan?

Yesterday I decided to show off by cooking my legendary prawn stir-fry with noodles.  It needs green peppers and, ideally, pak choi; but pak choi was an ask too far for Yagnub Co-op, so we settled for mange-tout, or snow peas as they’re sometimes called, and I lobbed a pack into the trolley.  Come evening, they were nowhere to be found.  A certain amount of historical reconstruction, including inspection of the Co-op till receipt,  proved that they had indeed not been purchased.

I’m making a habit of thieving from supermarkets.  Only last year, as (the) dedicated reader(s) of this blog will recall, I nicked a tube of Polos from Waitrose.  So I felt suitably guilty as well as perplexed, and tried to work out what had happened, or not happened.

The best conclusion is that the pack of snow peas had accidentally spilled over the barricade into the next customer’s shopping.  I do hope they were as perplexed as I’d been, and I rather hope they decided to keep them and incorporate them into a delicious prawn stir-fry with noodles, unlikely though that is.  One can always dream.

The main rationale for this post is, of course, its title.

The Blog of Proverbs

I dug out my Bible and had a look, and some of them are almost comprehensible, and may even be wise.  I rather liked 26: 16, ‘The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason’, though please don’t ask me to explain why.  (Something to do with Z’s policy of short bursts of efficiency enabling long stretches of laziness, maybe?)

But few if any biblical proverbs, at least from the Book of them, have made it through to everyday usage, so I’m going to deconstruct a couple of non-biblical ones that have.  They have two things in common: in deference to the season, they’re both culinary; and, as metaphors, they’re both crap.

Firstly: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”  This is used to justify harming, or sometimes killing, other humans in the interests of a greater objective.  In other words, the end justifies the means.  But whereas most of us will agree on what an omelette is, and that it’s a good thing, the argument from the particular to the general never works.  If I said, for example, “You can’t construct smartphones without starving people in China”, I doubt I’d get much support.  (Except from smartphone makers who starve people in China, of course.)  And eggs aren’t human beings.

Secondly: “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”  In other words, “trust me and don’t interfere.” Now broth, or stock as I tend to call it (in Italian, it’s ‘brodo’) is very easy to make, as any cook kno.  You bung your ingredients (e.g. chicken carcass, vegetables, etc.) into a pan, add water, bring to the boil and immediately reduce to a near-simmer, and then leave it alone for hours.  The key to not spoiling it is not to touch it.  It doesn’t matter how many cooks don’t touch the broth.  If they do, then by definition they’re not cooks.

“Too many cooks spoil the omelette”, now that I could go along with.  But it doesn’t work very well as a proverb, does it?  Or as a metaphor.

Words on Words on Words

We were talking, as we seem to, about language.  Zee wondered why hair is singular, though there are lots of them.  This isn’t the case in other languages, like French, where they quite cheerfully say ‘I washed my cheveux’.  If you say that in English, it sounds a bit risqué.  I pointed out that there is a number of these sorts of confusion.

On my way back here through the drizzle and tyre spray, I reflected that I used to wonder whether I was the only one who did that.  Now I know I’m not.  There are at least two of us.  And there is a pair.

Silence

Frances, in her heartfelt post here, alludes to an essay she was made to write on this topic.  I doubt it was preserved, so I’m taking the liberty of writing my own version.

For a start, whoever said it was ‘golden’ (The Tremoloes, was it?) needs to be sent back to school for an English lesson.  Or what was called, when I did O levels, ‘Use of English’.  (Now there’s a subject ripe for revival, Ms Morgan, are you listening?)  If you had to come up with an adjective to qualify silence, is that really the best available? 

Of course, it wasn’t ever meant to be descriptive, was it?  It was designed as a control mechanism.  Children would have been processed into believing that gold equates to reward, therefore be silent and you might be rewarded – probably by not being punished. 

Next: there’s no such thing.  (I mean no disrespect to profoundly deaf people in saying this – some of you are musicians, aren’t you?)  Try and find it; I might have done so about twice in my life, and it shocked me, until I realised that there was a lot of noise still going on: my heart, my breath, even my bloodstream.

Third and last: it’s sometimes used as a verb.  To silence.  If I were into control mechanisms, this would be near the top of my toolkit.  As I’m not, it’s near the top of my ‘misuse of English’ kit.

If it has a colour, it’s black.

Tim is all over the place

I’m in the business of filling in time, which is not the same as wasting it.  I never waste the stuff, whatever appearances may suggest: there’s always an outcome of some kind, however inconsequential or trivial it might appear to uninformed outside observers.  For example, writing that last sentence filled in several minutes, which obviously weren’t wasted, otherwise I’d have deleted it, wouldn’t I?

So it was that this evening I found myself browsing through some old notebooks.  This was very interesting.  I discovered, for example, that in 1983 I went through a demented phase of serving up Chinese banquets: to whom, or why, I have no idea.  Here’s the list of ingredients for one such (provide your own punctuation* if you will):

Walnuts sesame seeds star anise mooli yellow bean sauce squid red pepper mangetout oyster sauce dry sherry mushrooms water chestnuts spring onions (lots!) beef chicken breast aubergine watercress pork eggs lapsang tea

I also, some years earlier, apparently became briefly obsessed with reading the Chambers Dictionary, from which I noted several definitions that amused or intrigued me.  Here’s just one:

Musique Concrète: a kind of mid-20 C music, made up of odds and ends of recorded sound variously handled.

Well, that was fun!  And the plumber’s coming in the morning to fit my new taps.  Isn’t life joyous?

*My fingers typed ‘punchuation, which I rather like.

I dreamt this

"Don't forget or remember too much."


I think I was channelling Samuel Beckett, or vice versa.

Sufficiency of Suffices

Think what you like about Mr Corbyn (and you should, that’s the whole point), his magnetism in attracting the suffix has to be respected.  In a few short weeks he’s acquired a -mania, an -ism, -ites and -istas, and even some -omics.  Not even Mrs Thatcher managed that.

Old Books

What do you do with old books?  I don’t mean the fly-by-night paperbacks I haul in periodically from Waterstone’s, read once and then recycle via the bookbank up at the tip.  (Or not, sometimes they get kept, reread and, rarely, find their way into the permanent library.)  No, I’m talking about really old books.

About sixty of them have been furnishing my dining room for twenty years or more, in a bookcase next to the fireplace.  They range from assorted Prayer books and semi-religious tracts (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, anyone?), through an almost-complete set of Dickens reissues (Unwin editions, 1930s I’d guess), to worthy tomes like The Origin of Species, Macaulay’s Essays on English History, and The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle.  Plus a fair smattering of Victorian verse anthologies, several Works of Shakespeare, and a possibly earlyish edition of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.  They’re all fairly tatty, almost certainly financially worthless and, most importantly, with one or two exceptions have never been read by anyone still alive.

I’m getting rid of them because I don’t think books ought to furnish a room.  I’m going to go slightly metaphysical on you now.  Books have no intrinsic value.  Their only worth is in the thoughts they express.  In turn, this value is circumscribed by the quality of both the thoughts themselves and their expression in a particular book.  But above all, if I’m right here, that worth dissolves into nothingness unless the book gets read.  I’m not going to read any of these sixty or so books, and I can’t find a way of enabling or persuading anyone else to do so.  So in every sense, they’re worthless.  So they’re landfill.  Right?

And yet.  And yet, perhaps they do contain, at least some of them, an ineluctable value beyond the paper, the cardboard and the words within them, read or not.  I skim through the flyleafs (flyleaves?) and find inscriptions which seem to carry their own stories, ones that will never be told but just might still exist in a memory or an imagination.  Certainly in an imagination, in fact: I find myself creating their lives and relationships even as I transcribe them.

Poetical Works by Moore: “Caroline Matthias on her 13^th birthday from her affectionate cousin J M Laws.  Jan 1861”

The May-Flower by Harriet Beecher Stowe:  “R. A. Scammell.  A birthday gift from A.G.  Feb 10^th 1882”

The Poetical Works of William Collins  “Edward Geo. Browne  Presented to him on the 26^th May 1834 by his friend and tutor J. Blern(?) Anstis(?) with the sincerest wishes for his welfare.  St Helier Jersey”

And in one of the Shakespeares: “E L Rea ‘02”  That’s my grandfather.

Dw i heb dy weld ti ers talwn!

Off to open up the caravan tomorrow, which will doubtless inspire me to resume blogging – SAD always sets in in March, and I need kickstarting, which a visit to West Wales usually achieves, especially when the weather is as good as promised.  I quite liked the Plaid Cymru lady in the debate, didn’t you?  And of course Nicola is a star.  What a shame they don’t want to be British.  If they were, I’d vote for one or other of them.

Meanwhile, a few Cameronisms which almost make you warm to him:

• In the brilliant documentary about Parliament the other week, he informed us that the place was “half church, half museum, and half public school.”
• At PMQ last week, he said “A straight answer deserves a straight question.”
• And in yesterday’s debate, he informed us that “There are three sides to this coin.”

Iechyd da!

The Only Word Is Exxes

“I loved as much as you will receive carried out right here. 

The sketch is attractive, your authored material stylish.
nonetheless, you command get got an nervousness over that you wish be delivering the following.
“unwell unquestionably come further formerly again as exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this hike.”

What I loved about this particular spam comment (which originated, as always, from Russia) is that it purports to link to a tanning salon in Braintree.

And its ‘found’ poetry.  The bastard child of Ezra Pound and William Burroughs after a good night in?  I particularly like “case you shield this hike.”

I HATE SPAM.  But just occasionally it throws up a gem.  Another recent one praised the insight, erudition, eloquence, etc. that I’d evinced in a photograph of a butterfly.

The real purpose of this post, of course, is to see what spam comments it attracts.  I’ll share the best, if any.

Please prove you are a robot

‘Eugene Goostman’, either a dysfunctional Ukrainian teenage boy or a computer-generated simulacrum, has, it’s claimed, passed the Turing test, by fooling a third of a panel of judges into believing that he (it) is the former.

There’s evidence that Alan Turing wasn’t being entirely serious when he proposed this test. But, having read a few of Eugene’s conversations (google them yourselves), I can only assume either that the judges weren’t being entirely serious either, or that they all exclusively inhabit the twitterverse – where that sort of gubbish is entirely normal.

I propose an updated Turing test: ask Eugene to write a blog.  That’ll sort out the brains from the bots.  

Where does this stuff come from? And why?

I woke up this morning to find that sometime during the night I'd written, on the pad I keep by the bed for that purpose, the following:

That's "ANTS + Sartre = DALI".

Now, I know exactly what that means, which is Absolutely Nothing.  But I'd love to know what it meant at the time I wrote it.

Any clues?

New Words

A ditty which was going the rounds just before the outbreak of World War II, when loads of women were signing up to the ATS:

Rockabye baby, or Daddy will spank.
Mummy’s in Aldershot, driving a tank.
When the Camp’s over, Mum will return 
And oh! what a lot of new words you will learn!

I’ve been learning a lot of new words lately too, but they’re mostly medical and hence off limits.  (You don’t want to know about ‘distal interphalangeal joints', do you?)
But here’s one I hadn’t come across before which has cropped up three times in a week – once in a medical context, twice in journalism – ‘triage’.  I naturally assumed it must be trending, so I looked it up.

I’m sure my uniquely well-informed readers will be familiar with its standard meaning (something to do with applying scarce resources effectively) – but did you know it also means ‘broken coffee beans?’

Just sharing.  I promise to get heavy again by the weekend.

World-class UMT*

I was hesitant about writing this post, because unless I choose my words quite carefully I could risk leaving you with one or both of two impressions: that I take the medical trauma I’ve been through this past week or two less than seriously; or, worse, that have anything less than the highest regard, respect and gratitude towards the many amazing NHS staff who have been so brilliantly supportive and effective.  Neither of those is the case.  It’s not over yet, but it’s getting better.  And a big thank you to the NHS!

As part of my treatment, I’ve been put on a course of Warfarin.  As I’m sure you know, in addition to killing off any rats that might be lurking in my bloodstream, this reduces the rate at which blood clots, and hence the risk of recurrences of the original problem.  Frequent tests determine how well the drug is doing this, by measuring something called the INR.  Briefly, an INR of 1.0 is normal, 2.0 means clotting takes twice as long, and so forth.  My target is 2.5.  

So, you’ll be wondering, what does ‘INR’ stand for?  Here’s where the fun starts.  You won’t guess, so I’ll tell you.  It stands for ‘International Normalized Ratio’.  (Also the Russian Institute for Nuclear Research, McKinley National Park Airport and Indian Rupee, but let’s stick to the point.)  So if you want to know how fast your blood is clotting, just have your international normalized ratio checked, okay?

I’m not totally against jargon – it can be a useful form of shorthand – but I do prefer that it bears at least a smidgeon of connection to the concept it represents.  The roots of this particular item are lost in the mists of the early 1960s, the mystery perhaps being how it’s persisted for so long in the face of its patent meaninglessness.  It’s not even a ratio, for God’s sake!  Couldn’t someone, over the decades, have thought to give it a more helpful label?  ‘BCR’ (Blood Clotting Rate), for instance.  

* Utterly Meaningless TLA**

** Three Letter Acronym

Can I be forgiven...

... for misreading the last word of this local paper headline?

You can’t beat a good cliché!

Len Deighton once put into the mouth of one of his characters the thought that the cliché was a much-maligned means of instant communication.  (‘Billion Dollar Brain’, I think it was.)  But the character was, if I remember correctly, the baddie.

The trouble with clichés is that they almost always get drained of any meaning or relevance once you look behind them.  Let’s take the current favourite, here in British politics:

“We are going to fix the roof while the sun shines!” 

This boils down to “We’re going to save some money, because another crippling economic crisis is going to happen and we need to be ready.”  There are a few things wrong here. 

First, and most obviously, fixing roofs in sunshine calls for a guaranteed spell of fine weather.  (As it happens, the roof of the house opposite me is being fixed, but it’s been raining for a couple of days, so they’ve stopped.  Luckily, they got the felt installed, otherwise water would presumably be dripping into the bedrooms by now.) 

Secondly, you need to make sure the walls can bear the weight of the new roof. 

And thirdly, using this cliché equates to admitting that ‘There Will Be Rain.’  In other words, we can’t control the economic weather, we can’t stop it raining when it chooses to.  This is such an abject confession of political failure that you have to wonder where they keep their brains.  Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!  It’ll come back to haunt them.  And bite them in the bum.  I don’t believe it!!

Okay, one more, which I haven’t heard recently (Ed: you will, Tim, you will):

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

I can’t be bothered to deconstruct this one right now, just to say it boils down to “The end justifies the means.”  Hmm, heard that somewhere before.

Which weekend was that?

If I say “this weekend”, I might be referring to the one just past, or the one just coming.  Usually you’ll be able to tell from the context, especially the tense of the surrounding sentence.  But it’s inherently ambiguous.

Now, if I say “last weekend”, the ambiguity thickens.  If I were to say, for example, “I went to Abergavenny last weekend”, apart from this being a lie, you’d be unsure which weekend I was referring to.  Your interpretation might be swayed by the day on which I made the assertion: if today were Monday the 16^th, you might suppose I was referring to Saturday and Sunday the 7^th and 8^th *; but if I said it on Friday the 20^th, I might easily be talking about the 14^th and 15^th.  (It’d still be a lie, but that’s not the point.)

“Next weekend” is even worse, because it’s about the future, and any inherent uncertainty could result in missed appointments, communication breakdowns, acrimony and tears.  The same ground rules as for “last” probably help; but they don’t cover Wednesday.  “I’ll see you in Abergavenny next weekend”, spoken over the phone even on a Thursday, could have repercussions way beyond the “oh well…”.  Wellington texts Napoleon:  “Wen U sed CU nxt wkend, Waterloo, I thought ment…” **  You get the picture.

So far, I don’t remember this amphibology placing me in any life-changing situations, maybe because if it’s that important, I’ll probably be specific about the actual dates.  I’ll be in Abergavenny on the 20^th.  (That’s a lie too, by the way.)  Mainly, I just wanted to type the words ‘Abergavenny’ and ‘amphibology’, and see those dinky little superscripts popping up on the dates.

* A calendar might be helpful at this point

**Thanks to Bee for that one.

 

 

Crosswords

I haven’t delighted you enough recently on this subject, have I?  Tick the appropriate box:

□ NO!!

 □ Yes

 Oh, all right.  I decided recently (yesterday evening in fact, at about 9.45) that I needed a new hobby.  Or any hobby.  Collecting things is Out Of The Question.  (Yet more stuff?  I think not.)  Researching things requires long-range effort and concentration.  Also OOTQ.  (Checking the gin bottle and the tonic stock is as far as I care to go down that road.)  Then I remembered that, in my twenties, I occasionally used to compile crosswords.

I’d design my own grids (it took me a while to accept that they had to be symmetrical), fill them in somehow (which got easier when I was given a dictionary for my birthday), and then, the really fun bit, make up the clues.  My masterpiece, I vaguely remember, was defined as ‘Workers’ playtime?’, and involved Volkswagens, South African currency and comedy take-offs.  (‘BEER AND SKITTLES’, since you ask.)

Nobody ever actually solved these things, of course – that wasn’t the point.  (I offered one to a fellow-enthusiast at work once; he didn’t get a single answer.)  Nor, I accepted last night, would anyone have a punt at my new ones: apart from anything else, I don’t think I know anybody else who does cryptic crosswords on any regular basis.  (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

So, I spent the next two hours researching crossword compilation applications.  There are a few out there, but they don’t meet my exacting needs.  Actually, all I want is a set of ready-made grids which I can fill in on the computer.  If these happen to be standard Guardian grids, so much the better.  Ziltch.

So I emailed the Guardian’s crossword editor.  (Regular readers may have noticed that I can be a bit obsessive once I’ve snatched at a hook.)  To his eternal credit, Hugh replied by return – but the news wasn’t good.   Digital versions of their grids aren’t available to the general public.  My best plan, he suggested, was to photocopy or download the day’s puzzle from the paper and then use a pencil and a rubber.  Fair enough.  But I reckon I can do better than that.  I feel a highly customised Excel spreadsheet coming on.

Don’t watch this space (or 'light', as we setters call it) though.

 

Oh, all right – here’s another clue for you all: ‘Harry Potter? (7)’  (Need help?  The 5^th letter is K.)

 

Handwriting

I had to look out some of my termly Reports from primary school, to confirm something I’ve always accepted as true: my handwriting is terrible.  The subject was labelled ‘Writing’, as distinct from ‘English Composition’, at which I seem to have done quite well (although ‘marred by untidiness’).  Here are some of the comments:

·         Poor – rather unsteady

·         Untidy – must try to slope all his letters the same way.

·         Uneven

·         Too much ink

·         Too large and irregular

·         Very poor and untidy

·         Probably tries too hard!

And a rare one:

·         Improving

My signature on official documents – cheques, the backs of new credit cards, contracts and suchlike – is similarly, let’s say, unsteady and uneven.  I blame this on a brief period during my banking career when I had to sign hundreds of ‘mail payment orders’ a day, at speed.  There’s a theory that people’s signatures evolve towards either a straight line or a circle; well, mine ended up as the contents of my green bin when the holly has just been pruned.  Complaints were received from banks around the world.

These actions and thoughts have been triggered by the arrival of my Book book, about which I wrote a few posts ago.  As a reminder, the idea is to record stuff about books – any stuff, there isn’t a plan – in this nice black-hard-covered A4 lined notebook, as a kind of archive.  My Book of Books.  Past, present, future; expectations, disappointments, love affairs.  I still like the idea, very much, but there’s one thing I hadn’t taken into account.  The blank first page is staring unblinkingly at me right now.  “If I’m to be what you think I am,” it’s saying, “you’re going to have to write considered words in me.  Preferably with a proper fountain pen, in properly sloped copperplate.”

I’m considering my considered reply.  At the moment it’s along the lines of “flip off, page one, I’ll scribble whatever I choose, with whatever writing utensil comes to hand.”  In fact, I’m just going to make some notes about ‘Lionel Asbo’, in a commensurate fashion.

At the same time, I can’t help thinking that the Book has a point.