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Former scientist, now graduated to a life of leisure;
Family man (which may surprise the family - it certainly surprises him);
Likes cycling and old-fashioned B&W film photography;
Dislikes greasy-pole-climbing 'yes men';
Thinks Afterlife (previously known as Thea Gilmore) should be much better known than she is;
Values decency over achievement.
They say that languages are alive and constantly evolve, so here is my addition to the UK lexicon preceded by its root in standard UK English:
listen
 /ËlÉŞs(É)n/
verb
give one’s attention to a sound.
“evidently he was not listening“
lusten
/ËlĘst(É)n/
verb
Give too much of one’s attention to a mellifluous radio presenter.
“Evidently he lustened excessively to Kirsty Young”
Well, I did lusten excessively to Kirsty Young this morning, but that was solely to hear Bruce Springsteen on Desert Island Discs. And talking of ‘The Boss’, ’tis a little known fact that I once re-worked some of his lyrics in the days when I organised a series of get-togethers over coffee between colleagues at work – the SciOps Coffee Club – and advertised them with a series of posters.
One such poster was my take on the artwork for Springsteen’s pivotal ‘Born in the USA’ album that was transmogrified into ‘Baked in the MLA’. Literary licence allowed me to pretend that his song ‘Born to Run’ had actually debuted in that album as ‘Born to Bake’.
Here’s the original (modelled by Springsteen):
Apparently this photo was used on the album cover because, according to the man himself, his “ass looked better than his face”.
… and this was my take on it (modelled by ‘Britney’ Springsteen , aka Firstborn):
Firstborn putting the ‘bum’ into ‘Album’
Postscript: this post was prepared on a smartphone. Bad choice. Its keyboard is not conducive to writing a lot of text and its capacity to include even mis-typed text into its dictionary of personalised ‘predictive’ text means that I shall now and forever think of Bruce Springsteen as Beery Sorungsteeb! Very Hitchkiker’s Guide …
But awful year or not, at least we can be amused by her source of inspiration (or, wearing my current Grinch persona, we can once Christmas is over!) …
Postscript#1:Â Unsurprisingly, I don’t really have much in common with Coren Mitchell. After all, she’s an elite poker player, successful writer, highly amusing TV personality and, ahem, muse to men-of-a-certain-age, and all that I can do well is to count fish (commercial fishermen would disagree) and I haven’t actually done that since about 2005!
Postscript#2: In the Observer article on which she tweets, she cites Victoria Wood’s death as the saddest of the year: “… take your pick whose fall upset you most … for me the deepest cut was Victoria Wood, that sparkling creature of joy and laughter“. I agree, recalling from posts passim: “There has been a heavy toll taken of performers recently, but, for me, hers is the most egregious loss. Too soon and too young. A genuine laugh-out-loud writer and a comedian …“. (Of course thousands will have read Coren Mitchell’s comment on Wood; 11 people read mine – and that includes the author – so not much in common there either).
… to a mathematically ‘challenged’ social science class.Â
I’ve previously mentioned the hilarity evoked by Firstborn’s decision to take a course in statistics during her Masters year. Well, that is over now and she didnae enjoy it, concluding that statistics is “evil”.
Tutors take note! That’s what happens when a subject is badly taught. From a pedagogical perspective the teachers could learn much from the following extract from Jordon Ellenberg’s book ‘How not to be wrong; the hidden maths of everyday life“:
“Working an integral or performing linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense … requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel. And let’s be frank: that really is what many of our math courses are doing.”
Short and sweet this week. Firstborn (aka ‘H’) told a friend that “my dad writes a limerick a week”. Her friend apparently thought that was the opening line of a limerick itself, so, at Firstborn’s request, here is one that does start that way:
My dad writes a limerick a week They’re poems of a sort, so to speak. It keeps him amused Whilst the best are infused With a bawdy, irreverent streak.
(Except they’re not really bawdy or irreverent more’s the pity).
The first spreadsheet program that I learned was SuperCalc for DOS in the pre-Windows days. Then came SuperCalc for Windows with a whole new interface to learn. The same path was followed for word processing: WordPerfect for DOS and then WordPerfect for Windows. All were purchases for the personal computers that my group possessed. The rest of my workplace was on a mainframe computer (actually a ‘mini-computer’, the DEC PDP 11) so my lot was really ahead of the game and we could go our own way. Unfortunately the rest of the place eventually caught up with us and then it all became ‘corporate’.
One of the first corporate decisions was to adopt WordPerfect Office as the ‘productivity’ software of choice. From my perspective that was fine for the word processing part of the package, but not so good for the spreadsheet as I now had to learn Borland’s offering for Windows: Quattro Pro. It also introduced Paradox as its database offering and Presentations as its slideshow application. Not to worry, though, we picked up on these until not that many years later it all changed again. Microsoft ruled the corporate world, so it was “Goodbye” to WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Paradox and Presentations and “Hello” to Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint.
Learning the new programs was tedious when you could do things so much quicker with the software that you had left behind and, often, the WordPerfect offerings were better than Microsoft’s. Add to that the translation of numerous macros from one language to another and things really got tedious – so much for increasing productivity.
Nevertheless, for the next decade or so things were reasonably stable and we had the internet to ourselves; no mass access to the World Wide Web in those days. And then the Web came to everyone, or so it seemed, with the burgeoning of social media. Friends Reunited looked interesting, but then it was MySpace and finally Facebook. (I got on to Facebook in 2015 and left it in 2016 thinking: “What’s wrong with the pub?“). But now we have, among others: Messenger, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Viber, WordPress, Yammer and Snapchat. All of which can be used fairly superficially (easy!) or can be delved into to exploit their real power (a bit harder).
What impresses me is how younger folk take to the ‘harder’ inner workings of these newer applications so readily, and how it seems to get a bit more difficult as you get older even if you have lived with Microsoft since DOS version 3, can program Windows applications using an object-oriented programming paradigm and even wrote reasonably complex code on the old Hewlett Packard programmable calculators in reverse Polish notation. Personally, I take comfort from Michael Graham’s war-time confession
What Michael said:
“Many of us strive to keep our bodies supple, but we do not have much success with our minds. I remember that I only just managed to learn the elements of wireless telegraphy during the last of my âteens; but the boys who followed me knew it all.”
Plus ça change! Time to take up brain-training methinks (or maybe just Sudoku).
Postscript#1: Graham was writing during the 1940s when it generally was ‘the boys who followed’ and not the girls. Sad to say that in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) it is still mainly ‘the boys’ that follow even 80 years after Graham’s quote.
(My workplace is trying to work towards greater inclusion and gender equality in STEM subjects. One of our tools is Yammer where my skills encompass the easy-to-access shallow end of its capability; I won’t be stressing my grey matter to delve into its depths).
Postscript#2: As a Brit of a certain age, my preference would be to refer to the object-oriented programming paradigm as the object-orientated paradigm. I once googled why the former prevails. Mostly, it seems, it is because ‘to orient’ is the common American usage of the same verb that UK English would reference as ‘to orientate’.
Interestingly, North Americans that comment on the issue find the verb ‘to orientate’ to be irritating (or should that be irriting?) whereas ‘to orient’ seems irritating to the Brits (apparently orient is more common than orientate in British use today, but I suspect that may be due to its use in computer programming paradigms – you don’t see it used much elsewhere).
My understanding is that evidence indicates that orientate evolved in UK English from orient, so it seems be an example of an English word that evolved further in the UK after North America was colonised whereas its original form was maintained across the pond. I recall the author Bill Bryson making the same point about other words that we Brits now refer to dismissively as ‘Americanisms‘ when, in fact, they are the original British forms of the words that we now use.
The Mytheltoe Bough aka A Game of Bride and Seek
Itâs a good few years since I first heard of the legend of Lovellâs bride, the sad tale of a young Christmas bride who hid herself rather too well in a game of hide and seek at her wedding party. By the time her body was found many years later (trapped in an old chest that had locked when she closed its lid on herself) her smouldering, youthful good looks had been transformed to a countenance of mouldering decay. Poor Lovell; poor bride!
Lovell’s bride had an impressive chest …
The fateful events of the legend probably didnât happen, but that hasnât stopped a lot of grand houses in England claiming to be the home of the tragedy. It also became a sort of Victorian urban myth thanks largely to a popular song written in the 1830s – The Mistletoe Bough by Thomas Bayly and Sir Henry Bishop. Its words articulate the grievous events in a way described by some as: “stately, delicate and positively creepy” or as “brilliantly gruesome” (by Jon Boden, the former Bellowhead frontman) and by others, very simply, as “gothic folk”.
The song itself is thought to be based on an earlier poem, Ginevra, by Samuel Rogers, telling a similar tale that befell a young Italian bride:
There then had she found a grave! Within that chest had she concealed herself, Fluttering with joy, the happiest of the happy; When a spring-lock, that lay in ambush there, Fastened her down for ever!
(Although Rogers’ poem places the events in Modena, Italy, his notes attribute the tale to an English legend).
A slightly later poem, The Bride of Modena by John Heneage Jesse, recounts the story in more accessible verse (and varies the spelling of the bride’s name):
‘Twas in Genevra’s bridal hour, When, flying from her lover’s kiss, She sought that lone, deserted tower, To cheat him of a moment’s bliss; And, smiling as her fancy lent A thought of his embarrassment,
She hid herself in that old chest.
In both poems, Francesco, a lovelorn groom from Modena, is broken by grief on the loss of Genivra/Genevra his childhood sweetheart, and, in the latter retelling, he rushes to war to find, in Jesse’s words: “the glorious death he sought”. Meanwhile, in the song that Rogers’ poem spawned, instead of hurrying to war, the groom is allowed to grow old and can be seen in his dotage to “weep for his fairy bride”.
It says a lot about the Victorian sense of humour that it became something of a Christmas tradition to include The Mistletoe Bough in what must have been a less-than-jolly seasonal sing-song; indeed, in some instances the story would be acted out to accompany the song.
And it wasn’t just the Victorians. There is a number of contemporary interpretations of the song to be found on the internet as well as some older theatrical versions (including a restored 1904 film held by the British Film Institute) and, as particularly canny readers will know, a few years ago it was one of Jon Bodenâs A Folk Song A Day entries for December. So, with the anniversary of that in mind, here is this week’s limerick âŚ
‘Twas a game, and you thought that youâd hide
In a chest, so you clambered inside,
But it trapped you in there
‘Til you ran out of air
And became Lovellâs young mummified bride.
Did Lovell’s bride enjoy being trapped in an old oak chest? Of corpse she didn’t!
Postscript: You can see and hear Bellowhead’s version of the song here and you can also catch another Christmas favourite of mine on the same video, Thea Gilmore singing “That’ll be Christmas!“).
… and the words to the song itself:
The mistletoe hung in the castle hall; The holly branch shone on the old oak wall. The Baron’s retainers were blithe and gay Keeping their Christmas holiday.
The Baron beheld with a father’s pride His beautiful child, young Lovell’s bride, And she with her bright eyes seemed to be The star of the goodly company.
Oh, the mistletoe bough! Oh, the mistletoe bough!
“I’m weary of dancing nowâ, she cried, “Here tarry a moment, I’ll hide, I’ll hide, And Lovell be sure thou’rt the first to trace The clue to my secret hiding place”.
And away she ran and her friends began Each tower to search – each nook to scan, And Lovell he cried, “Where dost thou hide? I’m lonely without you, my own dear brideâ.
Oh, the mistletoe bough! Oh, the mistletoe bough!
They searched that night and they searched the next day, They searched all around âtill a week went away. In the highest, the lowest, the loneliest spot, Young Lovell sought wildly but found her not.
And as years went by their grief at last Was told as a sorrowful tale long past. When Lovell appeared all the children cried: âSee the old man weep for his fairy brideâ.
Oh, the mistletoe bough! Oh, the mistletoe bough!
At length an old chest that had long lain hid Was found in an attic, they raised the lid. A skeleton form lay mouldering there, In the bridal wreath of our lady so fair.
Oh sad was her fate for in sport and jest She hid from her love in an old oak chest It closed with a spring, and her bridal bloom Lay withering there, in a living tomb.
UK brussels sprout harvest hit by ‘super-pest’ moths
… consumers shopping for sprouts this year could have less choice than usual after some British-grown crops were ravaged by âsuper-pestâ moths during the summer. … The problem has arisen as a result of an explosion in the numbers of diamondback moths arriving in the UK from Europe, which can cause huge damage to crops such as sprouts, cabbages and cauliflowers.
Add broccoli to that list of cruciferous b******s and I’ll happily start a diamondback moth appreciation society đ
Today’s Graun had a long piece in it by Ian Martin, reflecting on his 10 years as a cancer survivor. At one point he went on a bit of a rant. I don’t normally just copy and paste anything other than short quotes in this blog, but what Martin was ranting about is important. Let’s hope we stop being idiots soon:
My antigen numbers had come in, spectacularly high. But an inflexible NHS system had already decided there was no way they could bring forward the biopsy, set for three monthsâ time. A neat solution as by then Iâd be, if not dead, unsaveable. So in July 2006, for the first and only time in my life, and following the clever advice of Barbara on reception at my GPâs surgery, I paid for a private consultation with my NHS oncologist, at the local private hospital where he worked part-time. He was then able to pick up the phone from his private consultantâs office and book me an NHS biopsy, with the public sector version of him, in two daysâ time. Then at that biopsy his NHS persona acknowledged the seriousness of the situation flagged up by his private sector self and thankfully âtheyâ immediately started me on the treatment thatâs kept me alive ever since.
This blurring of who does what in the NHS â this is how the lung-shadow of privatisation has spread in the last 10 years. Lobbyists and politicians push for lucrative contracting-out for companies and their shareholders but call it improved customer service, and savings. Those of us in the #WeLoveTheNHS club are forced to circle the wagons, when it clearly needs not brittle defence but proper reform. And those of us born in the infancy of the NHS, who have paid in their whole lives for the treatment they receive, now discover theyâre part of an âoverspendâ. Before the Tory cuts â ÂŁ20bn so far and another ÂŁ22bn by 2020 â the NHS was âin surplusâ. Why in the name of Beveridgeâs bollocks are we even talking about overspending and not underfunding? Because weâre idiots, thatâs why.
It’s a long read, but worthy; the full article is here.
So, what do you think the actor Andrew Sachs, who died yesterday, had in common with my dad? No? I’ll tell you then. Sachs came to the UK with his parents as a pre-war refugee from the Nazis in 1938, the same year that my dad and his parents arrived also having fled the Nazis. Sachs’ family escaped the persecution of jews in Germany whereas my grandad was in Hitler’s ‘little black book’ for taking part in anti-Nazi activities in Czechoslovakia.
The second thing they had in common was of an altogether lighter note. Sachs’ most famous acting rĂ´le was as Manuel the Spanish waiter in the TV comedy Fawlty Towers. His trademark struggles with the English language were central to his relationship with Basil Fawlty, as played by John Cleese. Dad didn’t struggle with the English language anything like as much as Manuel, in fact his English was extremely good, but he did have one or two idiosyncratic issues. The letters ‘v’ and ‘w’ were often substituted one for another, but his most amusing trait was that he always referred to a friend of my mother’s as ‘Mrs Radford’ and not by her first name ‘Eithwen’. The reason was simple. The first time he tried to pronounce ‘Eithwen’ it came out as ‘Eichmann’ and as severe a north-Walian as she was, she was no Nazi; so ‘Mrs Radford’ it was from then on.
“I can speak English, I learn it from a book“
Anyway, Sachs as Manuel has left a lasting humorous legacy, so to mark his passing, I give you:
You spun comedy gold as a waiter, But have gone now to meet The Creator. We laughed at your anguish As you struggled with ‘Spanglish’ ‘Hasta la vista”, Manuel, none were greater.
Postscript:Eithwen is, of course, the English spelling of the Welsh name Eiddwen and just as in, say, Pontypridd, the ‘dd‘ is pronounced ‘th‘. All of which brings me to a Welsh joke courtesy of @ehdannyboy:
“I used to go out with a Welsh girl who had 36DD’s.
