Recte Age Usque Ad Finem Viae.
-and still we move on inexorably! We have Walked, Strolled and sometimes Cavorted, but after a year when exercise was at a premium, we may just Saunter into the future!
We are well into a year after when the EU and UK Governments started to realise that Covid 19 was real. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow knew all about it. He takes over from Tennyson for our starter: he wrote, in a Poem from 1841 entitled 'Rainy Days'.
This is both a statement of fact, and an acknowledgement that the human condition has its ups and downs. Living here, we don't get nearly enough of the former, but by analogy, for the past year plus we have had at least a constant dribble of the metaphoric pain. Ella Fitzgerald expanded on the theme with her rendition of her song.
As an aside, I first really became aware of the song, long after the poem had been filed as 'no longer needed' in my post O-Level schoolboy brain, as it was used as music in the TV series 'The Singing Detective' by Dennis Potter starring Michael Gambon as Philip Marlow This really was an excellent series, and I was completely besotted by Joanne Whalley (later Whalley-Kilmer ) after witnessing the Grease Application scene!
The role of Nurse Mills was reprised by Katie Holmes (later Mrs Cruise) in the later Hollywood film version.
Now I will add the videos of both scenes - not for gratuitous voyeurism of course, but there is the option to leave the clips unopened, if you think you may be offended or your mental health may suffer! It is just an example of the rain in Dan Dark's miserable life lifting for a while. In the film version Philip Marlow is called Dan Dark and played by Robert Downey Jr. The TV series in my opinion is far superior, but it is a toss up between the two greasing scenes!
First the TV Series with Michael Gambon and Joanne Whalley:
This is an excerpt from Episode 1/6, 'Skin'. Taken out of context it is rather hard to understand, but the whole series can be found on the net. If you do manage to watch the whole episode, you may notice a lot of similarities in voice and language between Gambon's character and a recently deceased member of the AWW and WAGS.
The same scene from the film with Robert Downey Junior and Katie Holmes
A bit Americanised, and without the subtlety and direction of the UK series
Now how on earth did I stray off track, ( like certain WAGS Leaders - there's the link!!) so far and so easily.
Anyway, when thinking of a theme for the blog, as we are still a bit light on walking tales, I began to dissect what I have been doing with my time. Apart from once a week when I settle down to write the Blog, and the daily round of sorting and replying to emails and WhatsApp chats, it is a GroundHog day of shopping, cooking, eating, watching TV., a short walk for exercise, and sleeping. Many days there is not enough time for this vigorous activity. Highlights may be a visit to the dentist, or Doctor, a journey to the pharmacy, or a video call with relatives or friends. It does not sound much, but it fills the 18 hours until bedtime. In a way, there are few decisions to make so it is fairly stress free apart from any nagging doubts caused usually by health. I considered making a daily timeline, but I probably haven't got enough time. Then it hit me - one of the greatest songs ever written, in my opinion is 'A Day in the Life'
I will play it first in case you just want to treat it as a nice melody and you can read about the various interpretations and the analysis and background of the story, which I found quite interesting. Some links are; Here and Here
A Day in the Life
During my research, I came across a weird connection with this song and Myriam!
One of the most striking lines in the song is 'He blew his mind out in a car'.
Apparently John Lennon had been reading the newspapers when this part of the song came to him. The story was about Tara Browne, heir to the Guiness fortune who had either shot a redlight at high speed or driven in to a parked car, allegedly under the influence of drugs or booze. He died the next day in hospital. His girl friend Suki Potier who was with him in the car, a fibreglass Lotus Elan, was uninjured. She was an It girl and model on the crazy Sixties scene in London, and had also been involved with Brian Jones the Rolling Stones guitarist.
In the '70's, she married Robert Ho, eldest son of Stanley HO, one of the wealthiest men in Macau and Hong Kong.
Extremely rare photo of Robert Ho, and wife Melanie Suki Potier, model, muse, and longest lasting companion to Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. The pair would tragically both die in a car crash in 1981, leaving behind two toddler daughters.
Taken in 1978.
They had two daughters, Sarah and Faye. However in June 1981, they were holidaying in Portugal. The Casino at Estoril was owned by Stanley Ho's company STDM which funded Fundacao Oriente, similarly to the Caldas de Monchique Thermal Spa resort. While there they had a car accident, and both died, leaving the two daughters behind. The eldest daughter Sarah is now a famous jeweller in London.
Myriam knew the Ho family, and one of her sisters taught English to the two girls in Macau. At the time that the news of Robert's death was relayed to Stanley HO, Myriam's late husband was in a meeting with him in Macao.
How is that for Six Degrees of Separation?
Enough rambling, I was sent a short piece with pix by Antje - in her own words -
Just a few words to show we are still moving and not just eating and drinking. Antje x
The Tree of Life!
This leads to the Tree of Life Web project;_
"The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree... As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications."
Charles Darwin, 1859
Myriam sent this:
Inaugurated a month ago, during the peak of confinement. It is allowed to open daily because it sells essential foodstuffs for survival!! 🤣
Otherwise our activities have been covered by posts from the 3 WAGS Whatsapp
Groups. Excited comment on the finale of this Year's 3 Nations Series - someone had to be disappointed apart from the English, but a very watchable game;
The Gourmet group concentrated on Japanese Omelettes:
Myriam's latest offering
Correctly Sauced
Hazel responded with a hand beaten creation, Myriam was not the only one impressed by her strong biceps and flexible wrist. But we must establish the definition of 'hand beaten'! Does that include a rotary whisk wound by hand' or just a fork and elbow grease!
Meanwhile we made a trip to the Saturday Market, where we met Chris and Antje clandestinely! We were looking for duck's eggs for Myriam to salt for 1000 years! We found some at €1,75 for half a dozen. Duck eggs on the right below!
We also found the elusive turkey egg! (on the left) These were only €2,00 per half dozen.
Turkey eggs are more pointed on one end and smaller than we thought, but still larger than our XL chicken eggs. One of the reasons we don't eat them, I decided, is that the shell is so thick and the membrane underneath it like the plastic they secure tooth brushes in, that it is hard to get one into the pan without smashing the way in and scrambling it!
Well enough for this week. What are the rest of you doing or does reading this fascinating account use up a lot of your week!
Maybe John has an answer!
Well,
I don´t know if this answers the query or not but during the past
week, I have been researching matters gastronomic. For various
reasons, the precise details of which I now forget, I found myself
engaged in an email discussion, nay argument even, with a friend who
shall remain nameless, about the respective merits of two Yorkshire
fish and chip outlets, one in Whitby and the other in Guiseley, near
Leeds.
Ah,
now I remember. The subject of Dracula had come up, in particular the
book written by Bram Stoker, part of which takes place in Whitby
although most of it is set in Transylvania. I have never been to
Whitby (although I have been to Guiseley) so I decided to look the
town up on the internet before continuing the email correspondence.
And apart from the Dracula connection, I found that
“The
town also claims to be famous for fish and chips, numbering among its
several well-known chippies The Fisherman´s Wife, The Quayside,
Silver Street Fisheries, and Mister Chips.
No
doubt they are good enough, but I doubt if they can beat the
original Harry Ramsden´s chippy in Guiseley, near Leeds.”
This
modest expression of praise for Harry Ramsden´s drew the following
response:-
Harry
Ramsden is a ‘pile’em high’ factory when compared to that gem
of a plaice! I cod go on and on carping about it but you’d soon
become crabby…”
(Am
I the only one to detect something a bit fishy about that sentence? )
I
could only put this down to some ancient rivalry between the Ridings
of Yorkshire, which were North Riding, West Riding and East Riding.
(There was never any South Riding because you couldn´t have four
Ridings, Riding being an old Viking term for a third part,) Whitby is
in North Riding and Harry Ramsden´s Guiseley is in West Riding.
I
did further research. The original (and I was always referring
to the original) HarryRamsden´s was opened in 1928.
For many years it had only the one outlet and laid claim to be the
best fish and chip shop in the world. That claim is disputed but
certainly at one time it held a Guinness World Record for having
served 10,000 portions of fish and chips on a single day in 1952.It
could seat 250 people, never mind those queuing outside
for the take-away stuff.
When
I ate there in the late ´50s or early ´60s, it was still a
straight-forward fish and chip restaurant with simple wooden tables
covered, if I remember aright, with red and white checked table
cloths. Nothing fancy, mind you. I doubt if they had any extras on
their menu. Alas, in 1965 it was sold to big business and then became
an international fast-food franchise operation with Middle Eastern
and hedge fund investors. Now-a-days, a pile´em high factory
operation indeed.
At
least The Magpie doesn´t stoop so low as to have a would-be humorous
name such as
“A Salt N Battery,” “The Frying Scotsman,” “The Cod
Father,” “Salty Towers,” and “The Star Chip Enterprise.”
I
was however intrigued by that fish on The Magpie´s menu called
“woof.” A dog fish, I would thought, from the sound of it,
but no. Woof is a variety of catfish also called wolf fish or
sea-cat. It lives in deep, near-freezing Atlantic waters and has a
natural anti-freeze in its blood. How that affects the taste I don´t
know, although I do remember that some years ago Austrian producers
of cheap white wines used to doctor their product with anti-freeze to
improve the flavour. I´ll probably give the woof a miss.
All
in all, rather a pointless debate because, as everyone knows, the
best fush and chips come, not from Yorkshire, but from Scotland,
where they are eaten with brown sauce as opposed to plain vinegar, with the best chippies being
run by Scottish Italian families such as the Demarcos and the
Crollas.
While
on the subject of fish and chips, although it has become a
traditional British dish, some people hold that the dish originated
in Portugal and may have been brought to Britain via Holland by
Western Sephardic Jews as early as the 16th Century after they were
expelled form Portugal. They would have brought with them the
practice of preparing fried fish in a manner similar to pescado
frito
where the fish is coated in flour and then fried in oil.
There
is a famous pub in Wapping, in London´docklands called The Prospect
of Whitby. I don´t know if they do fish and chips there.
Last Wednesday was St. Patrick's Day, but given the events of Saturday 20th, I will mention nothing about it.
Instead, this morning (Sunday 21st) I heard it was World Poetry Day. This was uncanny, because I had woken up at about 6 am with the words of a line of verse going through my mind like an earworm. I had half expected nightmares with a huge Blue-shirted Le Cruncheur bearing down on me with no-one to offload the ball to, but no, my poetic nature was activated.
Also Saturday was the Spring Equinox, and clearly that had affected me more!
The line was from Locksley Hall, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but I had absolutely no idea at the time, which poem the line was from.
This is the line:-
'In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.'
Why this woke me, as believe it or not, I am no longer young, and I am forbidden to have a 'fancy'!! And I had no idea what I had been dreaming about just before. However having had this thought, I decided to carry out my daily meditation, guided by The Calm App's Chief Instructor, Tamara Levitt, a classy Canadian lady with a seductive voice, that I could easily fancy - were I permitted. The idea is you assume whatever position you are comfortable to meditate in (mine is Missionary covered with a light blanket) and Tamara talks you through meditation exercises, principally breathing and clearing your mind to stay in the 'moment'. She normally discusses a topic of the day after the meditation that is uplifting, inspiring and appropriate. Today it happened to be poetry, and the picture above is from today's app.
I would like you to be able to listen to the words of Tamara on the subject, but unfortunately, I have been unable to embed an audio file in the blog. If you do want to use this App and calm yourself and learn to meditate, then you can get an invitation HERE
Meanwhile here is a short transcript of today's discussion:
Today, I'd like to talk
about poetry . In 1966 The Academy of American Poets designated April as National Poetry Month. Research has found that writing about
emotional themes improves our immune system. It can also reduce
stress, anxiety, and depression. Both writing and reading poetry can
have a powerful healing effect. Poetry inspires us to dive deep into
our emotional depths allowing us to more easily put words to what's
happening within. When dialoguing with others, words can be hard to
find - let alone speak. But when we sit in a quiet place and pick up a
pen we create space for our feelings to flow through us, connecting
with our heartache or grief, gratitude or joy.
As Audrey Lord said
poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It
forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes
and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language then
into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help
give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
So this week as an
experiment try to connect with your own poetic voice. Explore how
healing the act of writing can be and if this feels intimidating
drop all judgments or the need for perfection. It doesn't have to
rhyme or sound pretty. Simply use writing as an entry point to
explore your emotions. You can start by answering questions such as
what scares you?; what saddens you?; what delights you?; what are your
hopes and dreams? Use these questions as prompts and then allow
whatever words arise to flow through you. As Robert Frost said
"poetry is when an emotion has found it's thought. And the
thought has found words."
Any takers?
How has the prolonged lockdown affected you? My standard response was that I was quite enjoying it, and it hadn't so far made an enormous difference. Given that I haven't contracted the virus, and in fact I know of no-one who has had any problem. - is it a hoax? Obviously not because we see daily stats and Government briefings, and of course Governments never lie! Of course there are people in the media playing the blame game and distorting facts but that is the inevitable outcome of the digital media age.
I enjoy the lack of summer tourists because of my personal situation but I sympathise with those whose living and income has been severely damaged. Is the daily existence causing me distress? I like to think we have been following the rules responsibly since we were first forced to walk in Bubbles in our own neighbourhood. In those long gone days (18th March 2020 - is it only one year?) we used to call it Quarantine.
Have you changed your dress habits? Do you get up and dress for breakfast exactly as before - or do you slummock around in tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt (preferably a WAGS one) until you actually have to go out?
How is your memory? Has the lockdown and lack of stimulus, except for reading , watching TV, eating, and long distance video calls caused any notable difference in your ability to recall things? Or is that part of the natural aging process? The woke generation are obviously suffering from immense mental health issues! Not me!! Here is an article from woke media that sums up what lockdown can do to an introspective writer.
Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain
We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal.
I
first became aware that I was losing my mind in late December. It was
a Friday night, the start of my 40-somethingth pandemic weekend:
Hours and hours with no work to distract me, and outside temperatures
prohibitive of anything other than staying in. I couldn’t for the
life of me figure out how to fill the time. “What did I used to …
do on weekends?” I asked my boyfriend, like a soap-opera amnesiac.
He couldn’t really remember either
Since
then,
I can’t stop noticing all the things I’m forgetting. Sometimes I
grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find
myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point during the
writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses with
nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like someone
is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything
loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past
life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at
all: What
time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like?
Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was
the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread?
How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when
they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You
have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s
more baffling than distressing – most of the time.
Everywhere
I turn, the fog of forgetting has crept in. A friend of mine recently
confessed that the morning routine he’d comfortably maintained for
a decade—wake up before 7, shower, dress, get on the subway—now
feels unimaginable on a literal level: He cannot put himself back
there. Another has forgotten how to tie a tie. A co-worker isn’t
sure her toddler remembers what it’s like to go shopping in a
store. The comedian Kylie Brakeman made a
joke video of
herself attempting to recall pre-pandemic life, the mania flashing
across her face: “You know what I miss, is, like, those night
restaurants that served alcohol. What were those called?” she asks.
“And there were those, like, big men outside who would check your
credit card to make sure you were 41?”
Jen George, a
community-college teacher from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, told me she is
losing her train of thought in the middle of a sentence more and more
often. Meanwhile, her third grader, who is attending in-person
school, keeps leaving his books, papers, and lunch at home. Inny
Ekeolu, a 19-year-old student from Ireland, says she has found
herself forgetting how to do things she used to do on a regular
basis: swiping her bus pass, paying for groceries. Recently she came
across a photo of a close friend she hadn’t seen since lockdown and
found that she couldn’t recognize her. “It wasn’t like I had
forgotten her existence,” she told me. “But if I had bypassed her
on the street, I wouldn’t have said hi.” Rachel Kowert, a
research psychologist in Ottawa, used to have a standing Friday-night
dinner with her neighbors—and went completely blank when one of
them recently mentioned it. “It was really shocking,” Kowert told
me. “This was something I really loved, and had done for a long
time, and I had totally forgotten.”
This is the
fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. In the spring, we joked about
the Before Times, but they were still within reach, easily accessible
in our shorter-term memories. In the summer and fall, with
restrictions loosening and temperatures rising, we were able to
replicate some of what life used to be like, at least in an
adulterated form: outdoor drinks, a day at the beach. But now, in the
cold, dark, featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither
remember what life was like before nor imagine what it’ll be like
after.
To
some degree, this is a natural adaptation. The sunniest optimist
would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the
resilience of our species. Humans forget a great deal of what happens
to us, and we
tend to do it pretty
quickly—after the first 24 hours or so. “Our brains are very good
at learning different things and forgetting the things that are not a
priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Tech, told
me. As the pandemic has taught us new habits and made old ones
obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like taking the bus
and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed social
distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the closet.
When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.
That’s
the good news. The pandemic is still too young to have yielded
rigorous, peer-reviewed studies about its effects on cognitive
function. But the brain scientists I spoke with told me they can
extrapolate based on earlier work about trauma, boredom, stress, and
inactivity, all of which do a host of very bad things to a mammal’s
brain.
“We’re
all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,” said Mike
Yassa, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine. “Based on everything we know
about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are
physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is
chronic and perpetual stress.” Living through a pandemic—even for
those who are doing so in relative comfort—“is exposing people to
microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time,” said Franklin,
whose research has shown that stress changes the brain regions that
control executive function, learning, and memory.
That
stress doesn’t necessarily feel like a panic attack or a bender or
a sleepless night, though of course it can. Sometimes it feels like
nothing at all. “It’s like a heaviness, like you’re waking up
to more of the same, and it’s never going to change,” George told
me, when I asked what her pandemic anxiety felt like. “Like wading
through something thicker than water. Maybe a tar pit.” She misses
the sound of voices.
Prolonged
boredom is, somewhat paradoxically, hugely stressful, Franklin said.
Our brains hate it. “What’s very clear in the literature is that
environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping into
people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively
being deprived of—is very associated with synaptic plasticity,”
the brain’s inherent ability to generate new connections and learn
new things, she said. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Marian Diamond
conducted a series of experiments on rats in an attempt to understand
how environment affects cognitive function. Time after time, the rats
raised in “enriched” cages—ones with toys and
playmates—performed better at mazes.
Ultimately,
said Natasha Rajah, a psychology professor at McGill University, in
Montreal, our winter of forgetting may be attributable to any number
of overlapping factors. “There’s just so much going on: It could
be the stress, it could be the grief, it could be the boredom, it
could be depression,” she said. “It sounds pretty grim, doesn’t
it?”
The
share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder, depressive
disorder, or both roughly quadrupled from June 2019 to December
2020, according
to a
Census Bureau study released late last year. What’s more, we simply
don’t know the long-term effects of collective, sustained grief.
Longitudinal studies of survivors of Chernobyl, 9/11,
and Hurricane
Katrina show
elevated rates of mental-health problems, in some cases lasting for
more than a decade.
I have a job
that allows me to work from home, an immune system and a set of
neurotransmitters that tend to function pretty well, a support
network, a savings account, decent Wi-Fi, plenty of hand sanitizer. I
have experienced the pandemic from a position of obscene privilege,
and on any given day I’d rank my mental health somewhere north of
“fine.” And yet I feel like I have spent the past year being
pushed through a pasta extruder. I wake up groggy and spend every day
moving from the couch to the dining-room table to the bed and back.
At some point night falls, and at some point after that I close
work-related browser windows and open leisure-related ones. I miss my
little rat friends, but I am usually too tired to call them.
Sometimes I
imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my
head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes
come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them. I have a finite suite
of moods, a limited number of possible activities, a set of strings
being pulled from far offscreen. Everything is two-dimensional, fake,
uncanny. My world is as big as my apartment, which is not very big at
all.
“We’re
trapped in our dollhouses,” said Kowert, the psychologist from
Ottawa, who studies video games. “It’s just about surviving, not
thriving. No one is working at their highest capacity.” She has
played The Sims on and off for years, but she always gives up after a
while—it’s too repetitive.
Earlier
versions of The Sims had an autonomous memory function, according to
Marina DelGreco, a staff writer for Game Rant. But in The Sims 3, the
system was buggy; it bloated file sizes and caused players’ saved
progress to delete. So The Sims 4, released in 2014, does not
automatically create memories. PC users can manually enter them, and
Sims can temporarily feel feelings: happy, tense, flirty. But for the
most part, a Sim is a hollow vessel, more like a machine than a
living thing.
The
game itself doesn’t have a term for this, but the internet does:
“smooth brain,” or sometimes “head empty,” which I first
started noticing sometime last summer. Today, the TikTok user
@smoothbrainb1tch has nearly 100,000 followers, and stoners on
Twitter are marveling at the fact that their “silky
smooth brain”
was once capable of calculus.
This
is, to be clear, meant to be an aspirational state. It’s the step
after galaxy
brain,
because the only thing better than being a genius in a pandemic is
being intellectually unencumbered by mass grief. People are
celebrating “smooth
brain Saturday”
and chasing the ideal summer vibe: “smooth
skin, smooth brain.”
One frequently
reposted meme shows
a photograph of a glossy, raw chicken breast, with the caption “Cant
think=no sad ❤️.” This is juxtaposed against a biology-textbook
picture of a healthy brain, which is wrinkled, oddly translucent, and
the color of canned tuna. The choice seems obvious.
Some
Saturday not too long from now, I will go to a party or a bar or even
a wedding. Maybe I’ll hold a baby, and maybe it will be heavy.
Inevitably, I will kick my shoes off at some point. I won’t have to
wonder about what I do on weekends, because I’ll be doing it. I’ll
kiss my friends and try their drinks and marvel at how everyone is
still the same, but a little different, after the year we all had. My
brain won’t be smooth anymore, but being wrinkly won’t feel so
bad. My synapses will be made plastic by the complicated, strange,
utterly novel experience of being alive again, human again. I can’t
wait.
Well if you skipped to the bottom of that I sympathise. I might have also if I had not been looking for Blog Material!! However is there any truth that we could be mentally scarred by the past year. What, do the positive thinkers and optimists say? Well we have developed an amazingly quick way of producing vaccines. Before 20th January none of the big pharma companies had any suitable products, but by the end of February two or three companies had designed and produced samples for trial In fact both Moderna and Pfizer had designed their vaccines at least 4 weeks before US announced the first Covid fatality, and Moderna had produced vaccine batches for trial at least a month before the WHO had declared a Pandemic.
Another bonus is that many people, particularly seniors have buckled down and learnt how to use their computer or smart device properly. Even Mike has acquired a smartphone and John has installed WhatsApp! Who Zooms? Myriam does now! She even advises me on using some apps!! We are all familiar with wearing masks and not physically contacting friends and relatives. Sometimes that is a boon!!
The big worry for high risk persons like most of us, is that there are still a lot of idiots breaking the rules, and behaving dangerously apparently not caring and demanding 'human rights'. But that is a whole another story. A more important question is why the current generation did not inherit 'The Stiff Upper Lip'. "If you are distressed by any external thing, it is not this thing which disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now."[ This quote is by Marcus Aurelius from the 2nd Century AD. A more modern reflection is Rudyard Kipling's inspirational poem, 'If'. What has happened to the current 'snowflake' generation? Meanwhile, our Agent in Lagos has been out again and reports back that the signs at each end of the Avenida, covered in the Blog of 03/03/2021 - The Latin Question - forbidding exercise on that pedestrian walkway have now been removed.
A victory for the Power of the Blog! The Lagos Camara clearly have their nose to the ground and heard our lament and scurried out to forestall further criticism. Stay in touch and please pass on the news, if only to prevent me from rambling on the keyboard rather than on foot!
Of late, some complaints have been voiced (sotto voce, of course) that recent blogs on this WAGS site have not had very much, if anything, to do with walking. Variety is to be welcomed but not to the extent that the prime focus is lost entirely. In an endeavour, therefore, to return to our roots, let me quote verbatim from a 9th March article in the Business News section of The Daily Telegraph:-
"Sole Mates: Boot steps in for Foot at Shoe Zone.
Terry Boot will step into the position of finance chief at Shoe Zone after his predecessor Peter Foot walked away from the role."
Let´s hope that Boot lasts. Shoe Zone is an on-line purveyor of foot wear, mostly at the cheapo end of the market. One doubts that our Blogger-in-Chief, even in his enthusiasm for a good deal and for the very latest in walking gear, will have bought any boots from them.
Rather less inspiring was a news item about a 21 year-old American girl who claimed a record (Guinness Book style?) for being the youngest person to have visited every country in the world. As there are about 195 sovereign countries in the world, one has to doubt that she can have learned very much about any of the places she visited. My preference has always been to stay for a lengthy period and let the essence of a place seep into one.
Much of the so-called headline news recently has been the garbage coming out of the U S of A. In the context of those so-called revelations, it is educational to remember that, in ancient Greek drama, the word for acting was hypokrisia and that for an actor hypokrites. Plus ça change, plus c´est la même chose.
Having blogged that little
bit a couple of days ago, I then got a call from a very frustrated
Paul who said he could not do a blog this week, (due to a
malfunctioning computer), I was then asked to stand in and produce
the usual inconsequential natter and patter, flying solo as it were.
What to do?
One of Paul´s suggestions
was that I should repeat a recent report by Terry which appeared in
the WhatsApp chats on his stroll in a park complete with pictures of
orchids and, mirabile
dictu, Terry´s Latin titles for said
orchids. This is what Terry wrote:-:-
“Out
for our walk, what a lovely morning, good enough for the orchids to
flower. Take care.”
And
these are his pictures and his captions:-
“Ophrys
tenthredinifera”
"Orchis itálica”
So
Terry does do the Latin after all, in spite of his protests. Subsequently , while musing on the matter of languages, I
recalled that I had recently been sent an email by a friend (who
shall remain nameless) which ended with the words:-
“Hastenna
e chouf!”
I
realised soon enough that the language was Arabic of some type but
didn´t know what it meant and so had to ask. The answer was :- “Let´s
wait and see!”
Then
I recognised that “chouf”
was the same Arabic word as that adopted by British Army in Egypt in the
phrase “Let´s
have a shufti”
i.e
“let´s
have a look”.
In
India, the same process of verbal adoption took place but in that case
from Hindi as in “Let´s
have a dekko.” Both
having a dekko
andhaving
a
shufti have
become everyday Englishslang
for having a quick look-see so as to sort something (usually mechanical) out.
Following that same
vein of thought, I then wondered if the phrase “Let´s
have a gander”
which has the same slang meaning as “shufti”
and
“dekko”
might
also have something to do with India and the Gandhi name but, no;
that particular slang expression comes from the visual image of a
male goose waving its long neck around as it peers here and there,
which reminds one of the old joke about the man who was wandering
around the poultry market when a stall-holder asked him if he would
like to buy some goose, and he replied “No thanks, I´ll just take
a gander.” And as you all know, the Portuguese for a gander (the bird,
I mean) is “ganso”
, which must surely be derived from the Latin word for goose which is “anser.”
As the schoolboy Latin joke used to go “Boy,
translate the word “anser.” “Sir, the answer is a goose."
Looking further into this
orchid business, I found that Ophrys Tenthredinifera is
also known as the sawfly orchid because of its resemblance to the
sawfly, a wasp-like insect.
And,
as for Orchis Italica,
(Those of a Sensitive Nature may want to look away at this point), it
is commonly known as The Naked Man orchid, apparently because the
lobed lip of each flower mimics the general shape of a naked man -
could have fooled me. The Italica
part of the name arises because in Italy, so Wikipedia assures us, it
is believed that consumption of the plant is conducive to virility.
(Oh, come on !Do Italian men really go around chomping on orchids? Or
do their women folk slip them surreptitiously into their salads? And
what happens if a woman eats the salad? The mind boggles.)
ToaSN
can look back now.
Since
we were dealing with both geese and orchids, I began to wonder if
possibly there was such a thing as a Goose Orchid. Goose Barnacles,
yes, but Goose Orchid, no, not yet. The nearest thing is the Flying
Duck Orchid (Caleana Major).
Let us hope that
Paul can get his computer to behave by next week.
And as a postscript and finish to the News You May Have Missed, here is a picture of a goose flying upside down which The Daily Telegraph has kindly published on 19th March, entitled Take a Gander.
