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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Being History I'm a child of the 20th Century - most of my life was lived in it. It seems quite reasonable to call it that too since that was how we thought of it. But today I heard a young person referring to it as "the nineteen hundreds." Talk about being suddenly relegated to history, consigned to a long ago and almost mythical time. I am devastated. |
| On Veggies The enigma of the swede has vexed me for many a long year. Eventually resorting to Google, I discovered that they are a type of turnip, just as I had suspected. But, much more interestingly, they are the result of the crossing of a turnip with a cabbage. I kid you not. It turns out that most of our vegetables are related and the result of cross breeding between each other. This particular family includes turnips, swedes, cabbages, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, rutabaga (rocket to us Brits) and many others, some of which I've never heard of. And they have been happily interbreeding with each other from Roman times at least, producing the amazing variety of veggies we know so well. The swede is apparently a misnomer for it does not originate in Sweden. Nor does the sprout come from Belgium. They are just examples of the wonderful way we Brits manage to get the wrong end of the stick whenever forced to confront something foreign. Oddly, the parsnip has nothing to do with the turnip, in spite of the similarity of their names (-nip derives from the Old English "neep", a word meaning root and still used in Scotland). Parsnips and carrots are the snobs of the vegetable world having remained aloof from the rest and creating their own more limited collection of variants. Word count: 225 |
| Acronyms I have always thought that the reason for creating acronyms was to shorten long names and so speed up the process of talking about them. Obviously, this only made sense for those things that were spoken about often. Less chatworthy subjects hardly needed an acronym, being so rarely mentioned. Lately, however, my faith in the theory has been shaken. Every day I seem to be confronted with an acronym I’ve never heard before and have no idea of its meaning. America seems obsessed with the assigning of acronyms to new diseases, committees, departments, etc. faster than I can learn them. It’s no longer a way to make life easier; it’s become yet another tool for muddying the waters of understanding. It used to be the convention that, when introducing an acronym into a treatise, speech or discussion, one would first express the full name of the thing, then put the acronym in brackets (parentheses) immediately after it. Once that had been done, the acronym could be used in the rest of the document without explanation. The game is very different now. The kudos goes to those who can squeeze the most acronyms into a single paragraph, especially if they are so rarely used that it is almost guaranteed that no one will understand what they mean. Since there are too many to be remembered and enquired about, they are meekly accepted and the speaker or writer can be assured that whatever is being pushed will succeed. The whole thing becomes ridiculous and we, the acronym-challenged, should fight back by inventing our own stupidly long and pointless acronyms. Join the revolution now and become unintelligible tomorrow! CLOTHEARS (Council for Long Overstatements of Tedious Homilies on Exhausting and Awkward Revolutionary Schemes) Word count: 288 |
| Shrinkage If we're supposed to start shrinking when we get old, how come it gets harder and harder to reach the ground? |
| To Infinity and Beyond! The television told me to go to the Infiniti site, so I did. Boy, that site is endless. I began to think I was trapped in there forever. In the end, I had to steal my own identity to get out. |
| A Lament for the Past It is a great pity that the bus conductor has disappeared into the fog of history. This was, perhaps, the last profession in which, each and every day, you could tell people where to get off. |
| Harsh Reality It seems the Germans may have a sense of humour after all. Andrea has just translated this message on the back of a German biker's jacket: "If you can read this, my wife has fallen off." |
| It's All About Attitude Some time ago I was told, "Your attitude is la-di-da, I don't care, my underwear." Don't ask me - this came out of the blue. Actually, the whole thing can be explained by the fact that we had bought a coffee percolator. Andrea had become fed up with the filter coffee makers, thanks to their tendency to get dirty very quickly and to spill liquid over the counter at every opportunity. So we took a step back in technology and bought a shiny, stainless steel percolator of elegant proportions. One morning I tried to get the last of the previous day's coffee from it (yes, I don't mind drinking it old and cold), only to find I was pouring clear water. Obviously, Andrea had prepared it the night before so that all that needed doing was to plug it in. I did so and, in due course, I had my first coffee of the day (steaming hot for a change). Half an hour later Andrea gets up and expresses some surprise that the coffee is ready and waiting for her. I expounded my theory that she had done the necessary the previous day but she denied it. At which point, I resorted to plan B, claiming that the coffee fairy must have visited. This would never be sufficient for Andrea and, after a little research, she established that the Boy had made it during the night. Now, he doesn't drink coffee and never makes it. This seemed to me so unlikely an explanation that the coffee fairy returned as the main candidate. Why, after all, would the Boy make coffee? Andrea guessed that he was awake all night on the computer game and needed to remain so. But she worried away at the thing until finally I said, "Your attitude to everything is to worry about it." It was at this moment that the response regarding my own attitude was produced. Bear in mind that it was early in the morning and she had just begun her day. All perfectly logical. Except the part about the underwear. That is what made us laugh. In fact, we're still giggling about it. In such ways are family sayings originated. Word count: 366 |
| Not to Worry Here's one for the old fogies. As we get older, it becomes apparent that we learned some pretty useless facts at our parents' knees. My father, for instance, would meet every sign of anxiety in others by expressing the mantra, "Not to worry - use Pear's soap." Clearly, this was an old advertising slogan that had lodged itself in his brain. Now I find myself repeating the words in exactly the same circumstances and usually I have to explain to mystified looks the reason for my strange outburst. There is a happy result of my outdated affliction, however. Having been regaled with the advice several times, Andrea recently purchased a bar of the relevant soap. I was surprised that it is still in production, not having heard of it in years, but it proved to be the real thing. It was, just as I had described, translucent and amber in color, oval in shape. Perhaps more to the point, I washed my hands with it today and experienced a huge feeling of relief. At last I do not have to worry... Word count: 180 |
| Insurance Geico tells me that I could save 15% or moron car insurance. What they don't explain is why I should have moron car insurance in the first place - are they insulting my intelligence? Or maybe they don't approve of my choice of transport... |
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I've always remembered that episode and thought that was a fun idea.