Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
3 October 2018 at 19:27 #64173
Yes, allowing for some dramatic license, the BBC production Elizabeth R was fairly accurate as far as I remember. At one point they even included part of one of her poems as a voice-over soliloquy, and in the correct context!
Early in my career, when I was working in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, I attended a conference where one of the speakers discussed the costuming of historical drama, and she contrasted the different approaches in The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R. In the former production the effect of jewellery, fabrics and the embroidery on the rich clothes was achieved by illusory means, using cheap materials including brass chain from the iron mongers, or glue with silver or gold paint. In Elizabeth R the expensive fabrics and the embroidery were real, even if the embroidery was done partly by machine, and even the jewellery was custom made costume jewellery.
Swerving back in the general direction of the forum topic, it has been stated that there will indeed be episodes in historical settings, and I’ll be interested to see how they approach them. When the show was originally conceived and its educational potential was emphasised, the stories alternated more or less regularly between historical and futuristic until the third Doctor found himself marooned on earth with the Tardis out of action and time travel was ruled out. If my memory is accurate, these early historical episodes did not tend to include fantastical elements other than the time travellers themselves, and I confess that I was often a bit impatient with them, nit-picking the inaccuracies. On the whole I preferred the stories set in an imagined future, even if the science was far-fetched.
Since then, though, the episodes with a historical setting have centred on stories of aliens and the like, even when a good deal of effort has been made to get the incidental details right. And sometimes, as in Robot of Sherwood, the historical setting is itself a fantasy. I suspect that this will still be the case, and the stories set in the past will continue to feature other-worldly and fantastical events, with attention to historical accuracy secondary. And no doubt I will continue to annoy people by nit-picking 😈
P.S. Of course South Australia has a rich history. I’m reminded of friends in the US who, when showed me round Long Island and New England, kept apologising for the lack of ‘real’ history, when in fact there was a wealth of fascinating history clearly in evidence. Since much of the region had been settled by immigrants from East Anglia where I live, I was particularly struck by the evidence for that link*. But I’m rambling way off topic again.
*There are places named Norwich scattered all across the globe, and some years back some enterprising soul managed to assemble representatives from many of them to parade in the annual procession which takes place in Norwich in July to mark the installation of the Lord Mayor.
2 October 2018 at 21:18 #64171Your father’s situation was indeed grim, both for him and all of you who had to witness it and I sympathise.
it is an anti-coagulant so for those at risk it is, if not a wonder-drug, at least a pretty damned cost-effective supplement.
Exactly so; and in my case the aspirin is supplementary to hydroxycarbamide, which acts directly on the megakaryocytes in my bone marrow which had gone haywire and were producing far too many platelets. So far the treatment is working well, though it is something of a balancing act.
As for the statins, I knew about the possible side effects and I suppose that I was in denial about the symptoms at first and persevered too long before reporting back to my GP, but to give him due credit, he did respond promptly. Insofar as I have any criticism, it is that he insisted on trying a different statin, thus prolonging my misery, before conceding and prescribing a less effective substitute.
Who wants to live forever anyway? I’d rather enjoy life while I am able and then conk out suddenly and while I still have all or most of my faculties 🙂
2 October 2018 at 20:46 #64170Of course there is no knowing exactly how Elizabeth did act because every account of her was coloured by the bias of the writer
To some extent that is true of almost any historical figure of the period, but we do have plenty of her own writings to assess her by, included a great many letters and her poems. Despite the fact that she wasn’t a particularly good poet and they are formal literary productions, the latter do, I think, give some insight into the person she was and the tensions between her private feelings and the persona she had to adopt as a sovereign, and moreover a female sovereign in a world where male superiority was assumed almost without question and where even she felt at times that she needed to pay lip service to that assumption, e.g. ‘I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman … ‘.
No, she wasn’t particularly ‘nice. In her position and the circumstances she couldn’t afford to be, and considering her parentage and the traumas of her early life and adolescence she probably wouldn’t have survived as she did without developing considerable toughness and a strong manipulative streak on the foundation of her formidable education. If I had met her, even on equal terms, I don’t think I would have liked her at all, but I have a great deal of admiration for her, nonetheless.
1 October 2018 at 20:21 #64165@thane @pedant
It is certainly beyond argument that Tennant was very popular in the role and seems to have drawn in a lot of new viewers, and I certainly didn’t dislike his incarnation of the Doctor, especially not in the beginning. Towards the end, though, and perhaps earlier than you, Puro, I did begin to find his mannerisms and the recurrent emphasis on his romantic appeal and multiple attachments more than a little irritating; it began to look as if he was reprising his role as Casanova.
As regards his amorous adventures, the depiction of the relationship between him and Madame de Pompadour certainly worked in The Girl in the Fireplace, even if it played a little fast and loose with history. But Elizabeth I? No, that is going too far! She was undoubtedly susceptible to male flattery – up to a very calculated point; but before anything else she was a highly intelligent and extremely canny political operator who put her own interests first in what was very much a man’s world, otherwise she would never have survived her adolescence and early adulthood during the reigns of her brother Edward and her sister Mary. She resisted the Earl of Leicester, who was probably the love of her life, and would certainly never have been diverted enough to succumb to the charms of a passing Gallifreyan time traveller to the extent of agreeing to marry him. The 10th Doctor in Day of the Doctor was right in his first assessment. But for those in the know, I suppose that was the point of the joke 😉
1 October 2018 at 19:38 #64164In my case it wasn’t stomach aches that were the problem. For as long as I was on statins – and my GP tried me on two different ones – I had persistent pains in my left side and muscular pains and weakness in my legs, which sometimes felt about as supportive as boiled spaghetti, and I know others who experienced similar side effects. So I would rather face the possibility of elevated cholesterol levels, whatever the well-meaning medics say 😈
30 September 2018 at 18:15 #64155@Bambi70006
Hello and welcome. In some ways I envy you having so much to look forward to as you catch up in your viewing.
It is difficult if not impossible to imagine that anyone who watches and enjoys Doctor Who and who understands what the Doctor stands for could ever have voted for Trump, so I think we would have taken that for granted even if you hadn’t mentioned it 😉
30 September 2018 at 18:05 #64154Yes, it’s always a good idea to read the information sheet, or at least the instructions and list of ingredients on the label 🙂
Given the pharmaceutical cocktail I’m expected to ingest on a daily basis, it is fortunate that I seem to tolerate almost all medication pretty well, the only exception so far being statins which had some very unpleasant and debilitating side-effects. Aspirin, though, is apparently essential, or so the haematologists insist at my regular check-ups; but the dosage is only a little over a fifth of that when used as an analgesic, and an even smaller fraction of that when it is/was prescribed as an anti-inflammatory.
30 September 2018 at 17:42 #64153@thane16 puro
I don’t see, necessarily, how it is like anyone, myself? To me, it’s just ‘very’ doctor.
That was my impression, too. The teasers, the trailer and the clip from the first episode give us very little from which to draw conclusions, and the chief impressions which I gained were that a) that the production values look to be as good as promised , b) The dynamics of the Doctor with the three companions will probably work and c) Whittaker has what it takes to be The Doctor.
In one of the interviews I think she said something to the effect that she had largely avoided watching her predecessors after she was cast in the part in case she ended up imitating them.
26 September 2018 at 23:16 #64136As @whisht and @pedant have already noted, you appear to derive most of your opinions on scientific matters and your distrust of scientists from the inconsistencies in newspaper headlines and articles compiled by sub editors and non-specialist reporters who have at best a limited grasp of the scientific matters on which they are reporting.
If we take your example of dietary advice, everything centres on the advisability of a balanced diet, which should include proteins, carbohydrates, fats and vegetable matter, all in a balanced moderation, and too much of anything can be bad for health. As my father, who knew a thing or two about the chemistry of foods and food additives once said, not entirely in jest, ‘Any foodstuff given to them in large enough quantities may prove to cause cancer in mice’. Nutmeg is harmless when used in very small quantities as a flavouring spice, but would be toxic in large quantities.
So, the evidence suggests that a small glass of red wine several times a week may be beneficial to health, but a whole bottle of wine several times a week is certainly not a good idea in the long term, and whereas an occasional nibble of dark chocolate may have beneficial effects, it is not a good idea to make a habit of pigging out on whole boxes of assorted chocolate confectionary. The evidence to date also suggests that vegetable oils and fish oils may be better for ones health than animal fats, but it is debatable whether the hydrogenated vegetable fats in butter substitutes are better in that respect than butter, and since I dislike the flavour and texture of butter substitutes I prefer to use butter – in small quantities. The important thing is not to ingest too much of either.
As for aspirin; yes, as @pedant says, it is a gastro-irritant as well as a blood thinner, which is why it is no longer recommended as an analgesic, and there is no obvious reason why healthy people should take it; but it does have prophylactic uses, and in my own case it is necessary for several reasons, including the fact that I have a blood disorder that puts me at high risk of blood clotting, thromboses and embolisms; but for this the dosage is much less than when it is used as an NSAID and analgesic, and it is prescribed in dispersible form, dissolved in water and to be taken immediately after food, which reduces the risk of gastric irritation.
When it comes to your views on global warming and climate change, I’m afraid that you are simply indulging in wishful thinking and clutching onto the specious arguments of those who have a vested and very short term interest in denying the consensus. There is documentary evidence that even in the 1980s there were oil producers who understood what was happening, the causes and the implications, but their response was a campaign to downplay or deny it; just as tobacco companies once went all out to obscure the evidence that tobacco smoking causes respiratory problems, lung cancer and heart disease. As @janetteb says, the fact that carbon dioxide in effect traps the heat radiated from the sun in the atmosphere was demonstrated and proved over a century ago, and the scientific evidence for the consequences of our burning of fossil fuels and thus releasing carbon dioxide sequestered tens of millions of years ago is now overwhelming; the only debate is over the details of regional climatic change, the extent of loop back effects which could be triggered by the warming*, and the speed at which the effects will be manifest – and so far this seems to be faster than predicted.
*such as the release of methane, another and even more efficient ‘greenhouse’ gas, resulting from the decay of vegetable matter in thawing permafrost or from clathrates on the ocean bed.
10 September 2018 at 20:22 #64083The teaser didn’t seem particularly off-putting to me, despite the musical accompaniment. For a variety of reasons I’m not keen on rap and its ilk but, as @bluesqueakpip has pointed out – and many thanks for providing them, Blue – the lyrics are entirely apt, which was clearly why this particular track was chosen. There is no reason to suppose that it reflects the type of score we will hear in the actual episodes, and if it lures in or reassures a particular audience, then that is all to the good.
As for the rest, tantalising as it is for those who want to something to analyse, the smashing of the glass ceiling* is far from a subtle allusion, but I’ve no quarrel with that; and I found the ‘oops!’ and the way it was delivered a mildly encouraging portent of what is to come. Which isn’t to say that what little the team have divulged so far doesn’t leave me still a little worried that it may be weighted too much on the side of frothy, fast-paced, light hearted romp, with too little ‘meat’ for those of us who relish something to get our teeth into.
*Although the tenth Doctor set the precedent in The End of Time
8 September 2018 at 21:58 #64076Well, bugger that.
Seconded
Moving the conversation to the pub where it more properly belongs.
I was teasing, really, because the story isn’t all that riveting and others are invited to skip over this post. But since you asked:-
A group of us had tickets en bloc for both productions on successive days, purchased on our behalf by one of our number who happened to have no lectures or tutorials on the day the box office opened and volunteered selflessly to queue for what turned out to be hours.
On the first day, the day of the Othello, everything went without a hitch and we all duly met at the theatre. The morning and afternoon of the second day I spent in the National Museum of Scotland, working my way through tray after tray of flint arrowheads in their collection, compiling preliminary data for my undergraduate dissertation*. The museum is a 19th century pile with little accommodation for students, so a desk had been set up for me in one of the public galleries. My basket containing notebooks and files was on the floor beside me, and when I left from time to time to go to the loo or collect another tray of flints, it didn’t occur to me to take it with me. My purse was well hidden below all the other contents, and in any case there were rarely any other people in the gallery.
But by now you should be able to guess where this is heading 😉
Come the end of the afternoon I returned home to dump my files etc. and grab something to eat before I headed to the theatre, but when I emptied the basket the purse was missing. I checked all the contents again, but there was no doubt about it. Panic! At that time there were no credit or debit cards and there hadn’t been very much money in the purse – though to a student on a maintenance grant every little mattered. It did, however, contain various other vital items such as my library cards and, oh woe! my theatre ticket.
My flat mate wasn’t in, probably because she had a late lecture and was going straight to the theatre, so all I could do was to follow, in the hope of encountering others of the party who might be able to vouch for me in the foyer. Unfortunately the delay entailed in my reporting the theft meant that by the time I got there they had all arrived and gone in, so the best I could do was to try to explain my plight to the man in the ticket office. He gave me an old fashioned look but called the manager, to whom I repeated the story. I couldn’t remember the row or seat number, but explained that I knew approximately where the seat was, and that all I needed to do to find it was to spot the others of the party. I pleaded and all but wept over him – not that I would ever resort to that, even in extremis, and whether I convinced him of my honesty and sincerity, or whether he simply had a weakness for small blonde damsels in distress, he gave me a chit which authorised my admission. By that time, though, the lights were going down in the auditorium and the curtain was going up, and there was no possibility of locating my friends. So I watched the whole of the first act sitting on a step at the top of the gangway.
*I don’t know how it is now, but for Honours Archaeology students in Edinburgh in those days there were was very little formal teaching in the fourth year of the course other than a few seminars, and we were supposed to devote our time to further reading and to original research for the dissertation which formed a major element in our finals assessment. It was then that I discovered that research was my forte; I was never entirely at ease working from secondary sources.
7 September 2018 at 20:55 #64054@missy @thane16 @bluesqueakpip
It isn’t all that long ago, and well within my lifetime, that it was still more usual for white actors to be cast in the role of Othello. In Edinburgh in 1965 I saw the acclaimed National Theatre production of Othello with Olivier in the title role and Frank Finlay as Iago*. Olivier was blacked up – face, arms and front of torso, and with facial prosthetics, and at that date and in that context it wasn’t a matter for particular comment. Iago refers to Othello as a ‘black ram’ but, as @pedant says, at the time Shakespeare was writing and what he had in mind, was far more likely to be someone from a North African country bordering the Mediterranean than someone from sub-Saharan Africa, so the exact shade of brown in the skin is scarcely the most important consideration.
For that matter, I have also seen an effective production of the Scottish Play with an all black cast, and it doesn’t take too much effort of the imagination to transfer the scenario from early medieval Scotland to a 20th century African country, any more than it does to a 1930s European setting.
The NT on tour were alternating Othello with Congreve’s ‘Love for Love; and therein lies a tale of the soft heartedness of a theatre manager, though I will withhold that anecdote unless any misguided person is avid for further off topic ‘musings of Mudlark’.
* In the original production in London the role of Desdemona was played by Maggie Smith, but not, alas, in the touring production that I saw; and I’m ashamed to say I cannot remember who it was that I did see on the night in question. It was Frank Finlay’s Iago that struck me more forcibly at the time
5 September 2018 at 21:00 #64027Sorry to hear about the diabetes. Life, as the years accumulate, tends to be increasingly unfair when it comes to matters of health so, although that particular condition isn’t one of my problems, you have my sympathy and good wishes.
5 September 2018 at 20:37 #64025Yup! nit-picking grammatical pedantry go hang. I must consign my largely unused 3rd edition of Fowler to a charity shop and hie me to the nearest book shop forthwith to purchase the 4th edition.
When it comes down to it, all that matters is that grammatical structure, syntax and punctuation should convey the intended meaning in clearly comprehensible, unambiguous and, in ideal circumstances, stylistically elegant fashion – unless, of course, ambiguity is intended 🙂 That is where the emphasis lay in what I was taught, and all I really meant by my original gripe about sloppy writing, inspired largely by my browsing on internet sites. I have, though, read complaints from people in a position to know, that too many students who have qualified for university places arrive with insufficient knowledge of these matters. And the misplacing of apostrophes, if sometimes comical, can also sometimes be irritating.
As for beginning or ending of sentences with prepositions or beginning them with conjunctions, I think we were advised not to do so in exams as a matter of style, but I had read enough by then to realise that it was purely a matter of style and context.
Postscript: perhaps the arguments concerning fewer v. less began because the connection between few and comparative fewer is obvious, whereas the connection between little and less is not obvious, and the comparative lesser does not have quite the same meaning as fewer* Which reminds me of the pun, ‘the lesser of two weevils’.
*or have I had one too many glasses of wine and started to ramble 😕
5 September 2018 at 18:09 #64022De gustibus non est disputandum . ‘Nuff said.
But whether you prefer builders’ tea or a delicate infusion, sugar is undoubtedly optional. I gave it up at age ten, once I realised that tea tasted better without, and if someone now mistakenly gave me sugared tea, that is the one circumstance in which I might refuse to drink it.
Whisht, I doubt somehow that you drink more tea than I do, or can you match an intake of around 1.5 litres on an average day ? If I drank it at the strength you prefer I dread to think of the likely state of my digestive tract 😮
4 September 2018 at 21:17 #64006Ouch! gown, not grown.
4 September 2018 at 21:06 #64005The Tardis is a space ship as well as a time machine, remember – Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. So yes, all of the Doctors have had adventures in space.
The lack of a pressure suit in that scene is a bit worrying, though maybe the 5th Doctor is within the Tardis field – whether or not the writers had yet invented the concept of a Tardis field in the 1980s. Had they done so? I can’t remember.
4 September 2018 at 20:58 #64004there was one explaining how you arrived in a very cold house with your parents after moving into a different are & neighbours came to the rescue with warm water etc.
That would be in February 1947, a famously cold, snowy and prolonged winter, when I was four years old and we moved from West Yorkshire to Norfolk. We came down by train and arrived, but the van containing such furniture as we then possessed got stuck in a snow drift somewhere. There was no telephone, so even if the van driver had been able to get to a call box he had no way of letting us know what was happening, and we just had to spend two days waiting in the new house.* Everything was completely iced up and I remember going upstairs to explore and running down again in great excitement to announce, ‘The water in the lavvy’s frozen’. I don’t think my parents shared my enthusiasm at this discovery.
The neighbours did, indeed, come to our rescue, with hot soup and enough kindling and fuel to make a small fire in the living room grate. Any fuel we had would have been in the van with the furniture, but I suspect that my parents may have had to resort in the coming weeks to scavenging fallen timber in the surrounding woods. Shortage of fuel was a major problem that winter and caused considerable hardship. Coal was still rationed, anyway, and the shortages were compounded by both a coal miners strike and the weather conditions which hampered the transport of such coal as remained stockpiled in the depots. The problem wasn’t ice on the rails, such as causes problems for modern locomotives, but the huge quantities of snow that had to be cleared regularly from the lines.
‘Mudlark’s Musings’, hmm. Perhaps if I live to be very old, some bright-eyed student of oral history may come and record my maundering reminiscences, but I doubt if my life history and experience is unusual enough or of sufficient general interest to warrant a book.
Talking of oral history and tea, one of the anecdotes handed down in my mother’s family concerns the household of her maternal great grandparents. My gt gt grandfather Samuel Wright was a shoemaker by trade and had a shop and a small holding, so the family would have been reasonably comfortably off, and their laundry was done by a washerwoman who came in once a month. Their daughter, my great grandmother in the maternal line, was born in 1841, so this would have been in the 1840s or 50s. On wash day the washerwoman would be given a meal and tea to drink and, so the story goes, she had a saying, ‘Better the belly bust, than good tay be lost’ and would always ask if she might have the tea leaves from the pot – the idea being that she could dry them and they would be good for a second, if more insipid brew.
* We did spend the nights at a hotel, though; the Great Eastern, next to the railway station, where I had my first taste of cornflakes and decided I didn’t like them. I always preferred wheat flakes, then and now.
4 September 2018 at 19:53 #64001She was wonderful as Servalan, surely the most elegant and stylishly dressed villain ever. I read once that the brilliantly OTT clothes originated with a suggestion by Jacqueline Pearce herself; the intention at first had been to dress her in military-style gear which would not have had nearly the same impact.
Not least of her accomplishments was the ability to run in high heels and a slinky full length grown, sometimes over rough ground, without either tripping or breaking an ankle.
4 September 2018 at 11:31 #63992I have just checked my copy of Fowler and realised that it is the Burchfield edition. Bugger! that probably explains why I have found it of so little use, and consult it so rarely that the dust cover appears pristine.
There is a great deal of unnecessary fuss about making and serving tea, and the milk-in-first/milk-in-last business seems to have arise out of pure snobbery. I’ve read several explanations of how it originated, perhaps the most plausible being that if the milk was added after the tea ones guests could do it for themselves, judging the amount according to preference. Another, less convincing suggestion is that posh people drank tea from porcelain cups which wouldn’t crack when near boiling tea was added, whereas people who were not at all posh drank from earthenware, which was liable to crack if exposed to sudden heat; and the people in between were left thoroughly confused 😕 If tea is poured into a cup without milk as a buffer it tends to stain the cup, but this wouldn’t have bothered the upper classes because they didn’t do the washing up. In any case, back in the days when tea was very expensive and came mostly from China, milk wouldn’t normally have been added at all.
Number of teaspoons? As far as I know there are no rules other than those common sense dictates. I just ask who takes sugar and hand them out accordingly, although for obvious reasons it’s best to have a separate spoon in the sugar bowl. Milk-in-last people will probably serve the tea in cups with saucers, and everyone who takes milk will need a teaspoon to stir the milk in.
As for choices like loose leaf v. teabags, or whether you make it in a teapot or individual mugs, it’s a matter of personal preference. The main rule is that the water should be freshly boiled; it has to be really hot or the tea doesn’t infuse properly. On the whole I prefer loose leaf tea to teabags, and single origin, whole leaf teas to broken leaf and cheap blends, and I make it in a pot * – a. because I drink large quantities and b. because the amount of tea can be adjusted according to preference and left long enough to brew properly and develop the full flavour of the tea. Tea made with a teabag in a mug will, if the bag is left in long enough to brew properly, be too strong for my taste. If I’m making tea just for myself I make it relatively weak, but make it stronger if I am serving others. Not that I would ever be so rude and inconsiderate as to refuse or complain about tea made otherwise. I’m not that fussy.
The water here is very hard, and tea made with it forms a nasty scum which floats on the surface and stains the mug and the inside of the pot. I have a water softener unit and a filter for drinking water, which does away with that problem, plus the kettle and the water pipes don’t get furred with calcareous deposits 🙂
* The pot has an integral strainer which fits into the top and which holds the tea leaves, so no mess.
3 September 2018 at 20:07 #63983Thanks for your vigilance! I zapped both Ariana and Lambarth Peter into the trash bin as soon as spotted in my inbox today. All these dodgy looking strangers begging for my friendship leaves me feeling anything but friendly 😡
3 September 2018 at 19:58 #63982It’s donkey’s years since I read the quartet, and your memory for the details is a far better than mine. What remains in my mind are chiefly the general impressions. Probably I read too much for my limited brain to retain everything, and/or I just have an inefficient memory. In any case it’s high time I read the books again as a refresher.
As it happens I’ve been on a re-reading kick all summer, ignoring the pile of new books yet to be read, but the hours and the days are far too short for all that I want and need to do, and I no longer have the stamina I once did 🙁 Indeed it is a matter of, ‘Had [I] but world enough and time … ‘ !
When I think back, I don’t think anyone ever actually taught me that there were rules about the uses of less and fewer; I just I seem to have acquired an intuitive sense of what ‘sounds’ right or wrong in a given context, probably from all the reading I did while growing up, and it is only recently in browsing the internet that I have seen the question debated. Generally speaking I tend trust my intuition in such matters, but whether or not my intuition is a reliable guide is another matter 😕
2 September 2018 at 22:06 #63972Oops 😳 Blank verse, not bland verse, and the inevitable typo, to instead of too. Memo to self to proof read before posting although, in extenuation, I was in a hurry.
2 September 2018 at 19:56 #63971More the latter, I think.
Shakespeare is credited with introducing about 1700 new words into the language; some of them of completely new coinage, usually based on Latin or Greek roots; others created by combining existing words or elements of existing words in new combinations so as to convey subtler gradations of meaning, or by using nouns as verbs – as in the example you cited – or creating adjectives from verbs, or by adding prefixes and suffixes.
More than that, though, is his gift for combining words in innovative ways so as to create images which stick in the mind. There are very many expressions now in common use and trotted out unthinkingly which originate with him. He lived in an age when language was evolving fast in the wake of the Renaissance and the expansion of secular literacy, but even in that context his contribution was outstanding. Compare Shakespeare’s plays or his sonnets to the works of Chaucer.
The comparison with Racine is perhaps a bit unfair, since the two playwrights had a completely different view of drama. The French at that time had a poor opinion of Shakespeare and other English playwrights, whose works they regarded as undisciplined, often with far to large a dramatis personae, and who – oh, the horror! – introduced comic interludes into tragedies. And, above all, they failed to observe the classical Unities. Racine was quite deliberate in restricting his vocabulary and employing it in a very formal and stylised way; he was looking back to Greek drama. He employed only about 4000 of the words potentially available to him, as compared with Shakespeare who used well over 30,000, and he wrote in Alexandrines, whereas Shakespeare employed bland verse.
Not to worry 🙂 The distinction between less and fewer is so widely disregarded now that soon, no doubt, it will cease to matter. Just as the difference in meaning between ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested’ seems to have been lost. Such things matter to me and a few other fogies, because it seems to represent an impoverishment of the language, but who are we to withstand the tides of linguistic change.
As for Racine, when I read The Virgin in the Garden I remember identifying with Frederica for that very reason – she could almost have been me at that age. Not so much in her later career, though.
2 September 2018 at 11:01 #63964Basque is, I gather, difficult for a non-native speaker to learn and does not resemble any Indo-European language in grammatical structure or vocabulary. It is generally supposed to be an isolated survival of an earlier language or group of languages predating the arrival of languages of the Indo-European group in Western Europe, though there do not appear to be any significant differences, genetically, between the Basque people and the surrounding population.
1 September 2018 at 22:21 #63961@TempusFugit @ichabod
I seem condemned to continue in linguistic/grammarian mode at the moment, so ‘wotthehell, archie, wothehell 🙂
The English language stems from the same common Germanic root as most of the languages of northern Europe – German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian – so the latter start with an advantage when learning English. Spanish, French and Italian, being Romance languages derived directly from Latin, have much more in common with each other than they do with the Germanic strain, though both have Indo-European roots. Finnish stands apart, with closest affinities to Hungarian, and Basque is unique.
My youngest brother has lived in France for over 45 years, is now a French citizen, and has children and grandchildren who are wholly French, and I remember one of my nephews telling me that he found Spanish much easier to learn than English or German. I, on the other hand, felt more at home with German than with French, even though I studied German for only two years, as opposed to eight years of French, and even to today I have problems speaking French, despite being able to read the language with reasonable fluency and with my French family connection. Some of that I attribute to the way we were taught, which put the emphasis on understanding and reading languages rather than speaking them*; but I think also that, because English is so widely spoken, the English have become lazy in that respect.
@TempusFugit
Your English is excellent, with only the occasional error to betray the fact that it is not your first language, and the errors are mostly to do with irregular verbs, which isn’t surprising. So, the verb ‘ to teach’ is irregular, and the past tense is taught, not teached – which doesn’t really make sense, but then languages develop by devious routes, and the end result doesn’t have to be logical 🙂
* and where French was concerned, we seemed to concentrate on 17th century literature, with occasional forays into the early 19th century, which doesn’t help much when you are dealing with modern, colloquial usage.
1 September 2018 at 20:55 #63960is “to totally…” THAT much of a grating alliteration?
It’s all down to personal opinion, of course, but it certainly grated on my sensitive inner ear. Those were the opening words in what was, as far as I recall, a piece publicising the excavation in question, and I may have been influenced also by the way it fitted into the sentence as a whole, which struck me as clumsy. I certainly felt I had a say in the matter, since I was the one in charge of the excavation, and I think he did eventually concede that my alternative suggestion – ‘A plan to excavate the whole site of … ‘ was preferable 🙂
less commas
or fewer commas? – you decide 👿
I’ve moved to teaching it as ‘written English is different from spoken English’.
Exactly so!
I think we’re headed right back to the days of making English spelling up as you went along.
But spelling and grammar aren’t the same. In the days when spelling was phonetic rather than standardised, and often reflected regional variations in pronunciation, the majority of people who were literate had received a rigorous monastic or grammar school education and understood grammatical structure. Writing in the 15th, 16th and 17th century may strike us now as convoluted and over-elaborate, but it isn’t ungrammatical. Not even practical texts such as manorial surveys written by parish clerks are that. The way I think of it is that, in the newly expansive age of widely available printed books, they were drunk on language and exploring its new possibilities. At the apex of that think of Shakespeare who, in his day, vastly expanded the vocabulary and idioms in common use. Compare the expressive range of his vocabulary and syntax with that of, for example, the French playwright Racine who, later in the same century, confined himself to a vocabulary barely a tenth the size, and to a highly disciplined syntactical range. Not that my intention is to disparage Racine, because his plays have their own dramatic force, if not the range; but they didn’t contribute to the expressive richness of the language as a whole.
31 August 2018 at 21:09 #63937Moffat has stated repeatedly that the original intent was to cast someone older, but they were won over by Smith’s audition as old in a young body.
And how right they were!
I hadn’t come across any of Matt’s earlier work, and the initial publicity photos didn’t impress me: he looked so impossibly young. It just shows the folly of jumping to premature conclusions, because ten minutes into The Eleventh Hour I was convinced that he did, indeed, embody the essential Doctor, and his external appearance wasn’t an issue.
@ichabod @tempusfugit @missrori
I doubt whether RTD or Moffat deliberately intended to lure teenaged girls into watching; they were and are both too attached to the show and too much aware of its character and history. No doubt they simply wanted actors who could convey the character as they understood it; and while they wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible, they are surely as aware as anyone that no show runner, as they are now known, can please everybody all of the time.
Speaking for myself alone, I preferred Troughton to Hartnell, and Tom Baker to Pertwee, and both to the three who followed; though in retrospect I don’t think I gave Sylvester McCoy a fair viewing, because I gave up on the show before it – all too briefly – took on a new lease of life. In the new era, Capaldi is certainly the greatest so far, in my opinion, but that isn’t to say that I cannot see the merits of the others. Tennant was perhaps the least successful as an incarnation of the Doctor as I imagine him, and towards the end I became a little irritated by his mannerisms, but I continued watching happily enough, in the knowledge that regeneration and change would come.
Girls who watched the show largely because the leading actor was ‘hot’ never understood what it was really about anyway, so if they fall by the wayside, the only people who mourn their loss will be the people in the BBC whose main concern is Doctor Who as a money spinner.
As an aside, I’m not entirely happy to be labelled a ‘fan’, either of Doctor Who or of science fiction in general because I don’t like to be pigeon-holed. I am simply someone who has watched the show, and on the whole enjoyed watching it, more or less from its inception, and – like ichi – has been reading science fiction, as well as a wide variety of other fiction, since my pre-teen years.
P.S. @ichabod I haven’t encountered the label ‘mundanes’ before. I suppose that it never occurred to me that reading and enjoying science fiction set me apart in any sense. I must have been very obtuse in some ways 😕
31 August 2018 at 19:43 #63935Care is needed. Many of the grammatical truths were taught were not, in fact, truths at all, but the consequence of 19th Century Oxbridge nobs applying Latin rules to a High Germanic language.
What you say is perfectly true, and I have no quarrel with it; but that is not really what I was writing about, and it doesn’t really reflect how I and my peers were taught. If it appeared otherwise, I expressed my thoughts inadequately, and mea culpa.
Yes, we were taught technical terms for the parts of speech and their function, and we were taught the uses of and the reasons for punctuation, but the emphasis, and the focus of all the exercises that we did, was above all on syntax: how to analyse the logical structure of a sentence to convey meaning unambiguously, with the emphasis on clarity and simplicity, not on arbitrary ‘rules’ of the kind you mention. But nobody who was taught as we were would ever write ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’ or ‘could’ve, or fail to spot a dangling participle.
As for things such as split infinitives and the rest, I’m well aware of what Fowler wrote on the subject. And when it comes to ending sentences with prepositions, I seem to remember one of our English teachers citing the story, probably apocryphal, of Churchill responding to the tortured grammar in some official document from a Civil Service mandarin, with, ‘This is the kind of thing up with which I will not put’
When I write, I am generally guided by my feeling for to the rhythm and balance of the sentences, how they ‘sound’; and whether or not I split an infinitive or avoid ending a sentence with a preposition will be, as you say, for stylistic reasons and no other *. As for starting sentences with ‘And’ or ‘But’, a cursory glance at any number of my posts here, including this one, will demonstrate that I have no such inhibitions.
When I wrote that learning Latin giving me a greater understanding of the structure of language, it certainly wasn’t because I considered it a guide to English grammar. It was that the exercise of translating one from the other, and particularly from English into Latin, gave me a greater awareness of something more fundamental; a philological insight, perhaps.
I also make a distinction between written language, to which the above applies, and colloquial speech, including dialect usage, which is much more of a free-for-all, and all the better for it 🙂
* On one occasion I was given the draft of a newspaper article written by my boss to read through and comment on, and offended him mightily when I objected strongly to the opening sentence beginning, ‘ A plan to totally excavate … ‘ – not because of the split infinitive, but because of the grating alliteration.
30 August 2018 at 21:40 #63919Since I seem still to be in grammar pedant mode 👿
It’s an interesting point: why aren’t people now generally taught basic grammar and syntax as a matter of course? It needn’t be anything more than the basics. Most people who read a lot a will probably pick it up by a kind of osmosis even if, like you, they don’t know the technical terms, but I can’t see that it would hurt to have at least some formal instruction, especially for those who don’t read much.
Way back in the Palaeolithic era were taught the basics around age 10 or 11, if not before, and although it certainly wasn’t very exciting, it wasn’t particularly arduous, either. And our essays in creative writing were assessed for grammar and syntax as well as imaginative content. At my school, when it came to GCE ‘O’ level exams (usually at aged 15/16), we all took papers in English Language, and many of us also took Use of English, but we weren’t put in for English Literature as a separate subject, because our teachers thought that the latter wasn’t very helpful in developing critical thinking – too much learning by rote at that stage, and not enough allowance for understanding or appreciation in depth. Instead, they encouraged us simply to read, whether books they recommended or books of our choice. Personally, I think they had it the right way round, though others may disagree.
Oddly enough, another thing that I found helpful was studying Latin, which most secondary schools in Britain don’t teach at all now, and in (relatively) modern Britain were only ever taught to those who might want to go on to study the humanities at university. It wasn’t so much having to plough our way through Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which only served to convince us that Julius Caesar was a conceited bore, or even Cicero’s speeches or Virgil, which I quite enjoyed: it was what we learned about the structure of language in the process of struggling to translate English prose into Latin. I’m not advocating the widespread teaching of this ‘dead’ language, by any means, but on the other hand, a passing knowledge some Latin vocabulary, particularly in relation to the English words which are derived from Latin, might prevent such common errors as the spelling of desperate (from Latin spes: hope), as desparate, which suggests a confusion with disparate, or separate (from Latin par: equal to, like).
I know I shouldn’t fret about such things, and no doubt it is a warning sign of how old and crabby I am becoming, but spelling errors of this kind, grammatical errors such as the misuse of the apostrophe*, and mangled syntax which has me reading a passage several times before I can get a sense of what the writer is trying to convey, are like nails on a chalkboard to my sensibilities.
Rant over. I will now withdraw in administer a sedative to my inner pedant.
* Would it really take too much of a teacher’s time to explain that in English the apostrophe represents the omission of a letter or syllable, and to explain exactly how and when this applies and when it does not?
30 August 2018 at 10:15 #63913My skills lie elsewhere 🙂 Or is it “lay.” That particular word and its usage has always troubled me.
Ah, the joys and confusions of our mongrel language!
If we are using the verb in the present tense, the first is intransitive, the second transitive.
to lie, verb, intransitive; present lie, past lay, past participle lain: to assume or recline in a horizontal position; secondary meaning, by extension – as in your example: to be located
lay, verb, transitive; present lay, past/past participle laid: to place or put (something) down on a surface – e.g. to lay paving stones; to lay an egg. Can be used quasi-metaphorically, as in ‘lay a proposal before the committee’.
And that’s before we get to the words with identical spelling and pronunciation but different meanings – lie: a deliberate falsehood or to tell such; and lay: a narrative poem or ballad (from Old French); or lay: non-clerical (from Greek).
All grist to the mill that is the mind of the crossword addict. Talking of which, what is needed chiefly is a certain capacity for lateral thinking, a knowledge of the different kinds of clues and techniques of misdirection used by the setters, plus practice – of which I have had a good deal, since I have been doing the things on and off since I was a university student. A wide vocabulary helps, including British, US and Aussie slang, and for the Guardian and Times crosswords, at least, a fair smattering of general knowledge across the board, including current affairs, history, geography, the sciences, art, drama, music, etc. etc.
You really shouldn’t have wakened my sleeping grammar pedant 👿
29 August 2018 at 09:50 #63895SJW – Social Justice Warrior: a label applied as a pejorative by the Usual Suspects.
As for your comment above, I fear you credit me with too much! And the brain at the moment feels like mush; maybe because I have just been browsing the morning news and getting depressed in the process, or maybe I just need more caffeine. Perhaps tackling the Guardian cryptic crossword will kick-start some mental activity.
@Tempusfugit
My greetings and welcome to you, also. You may already have discovered the archived threads, but if you haven’t and are interested in reading some of the discussions of past episodes while we wait for the start of the new season, they can be found by clicking on Forums at the head of the page.
27 August 2018 at 19:37 #63872Somewhat against my better judgement I ventured BTL after reading the piece in today’s Guardian about the women in Doctor Who. There was some rational discussion, a fairly large dollop of nostalgia, and the usual disproportionately noisy contingent of whingers wittering on about how the show has not been the same since …. , and about the feminist/SJW agenda of the BBC and the Guardian, with patronising asides to anyone who ventured to challenge their views.
Amongst it all was a rather charming anecdote which was new to me – though perhaps not to some here – to the effect that the character of Leela was introduced after Peter Hinchcliffe had observed some children playing and noticed that none of the girls wanted to be the screamy, subordinate companion; they all wanted to play the Doctor, every bit as much as the boys.
And if those girls, now adults, are still watching, their day would appear to have arrived 🙂
25 August 2018 at 22:46 #63865Talking of Aussie place names; one of my great grandmother’s brothers* emigrated to Queensland in the 1880s and named the place where he settled Delamere, after the township where he had lived in Cheshire. I’ve no idea where exactly this was or if the name survives.
* i.e. a maternal great uncle of my mother. I have a cream jug from a tea set belonging originally to his parents, the rest of which he is said to have taken out with him.
25 August 2018 at 22:30 #63864There is also a St Sexburga, cause of much sniggering among young adolescents, who was abbess of another double house at Ely. The -burg, or -berg element derives from the word meaning ‘protection’, ‘stronghold’ or ‘defended settlement; ‘wer’, I think, is as in wergild or werewolf, meaning ‘man’ in the inclusive sense of ‘human being’; and the ‘sex‘ in Sexburga presumably derives from the same root as Saxon, or seax, which was a weapon like a long, single-edged knife – I will have to investigate further.
The role of women in the early church is an interesting study, and the evidence in the New Testament is discussed by Bart Ehrman in, for example. Misquoting Jesus , published also in Britain under the title Whose Word Is It? There seems from the very first to have been a divergence of opinion in the matter
The letters of Paul, which are the earliest documents in the NT, are quite revealing, although it is important to distinguish between those which are accepted as having been written by Paul himself and those which are attributed to him but which are either debateable or commonly agreed by biblical scholars to be by other hands. In the letter to the Romans Paul concludes with greetings to a long list of people including Phoebe, who is described as a minister, or deacon of the local church, and Junia, who is named as an apostle, no less; plus six women who are distinguished as prominent and active workers and missionaries in their local communities and beyond. The terms in which he addresses them imply a high degree of respect and confidence. One of them, Prisca, also appears under the name Priscilla, along with her husband Aquila, as one of Paul’s companions in Acts.
This contrasts with the notorious passage in I Corinthians 14 which enjoins women to be silent and subservient, which is often quoted as evidence of Paul’s misogyny. The problem with this passage is, as Ehrman points out, that it is not consistent with what Paul wrote earlier in the letter, where he refers quite happily to women speaking and prophesying in the community, stipulating only that they cover their heads in acknowledgement of a higher authority*. Nor does it fit thematically in context, and it is suspiciously similar to a passage in I Timothy, a letter which most textual analysts have concluded was written by a later follower of Paul. In fact there is good reason to doubt that it was in the original letter, and may well have originated as a marginal annotation by a later commentator and subsequently been slotted in: in some early copies it does not even appear in the same place in the letter.
Some copiers seem to have made a deliberate editorial attempt to airbrush women out, or downplay their significance. So, for example, Junia the apostle, becomes the male Junius in some later versions; or women who in the presumed earlier versions are named before the men, are demoted to secondary status.
The fact that so many relatively early copies of the books of the NT are now available for study, that approximate chronologies and ‘family trees’ of the copies can be worked out and discrepancies compared, has opened a whole can of worms for those who want to cite scripture as an authority for keeping women ‘in their place’. But the people who do that are not those likely to respect the conclusions of those who examine the texts analytically and historically.
* In the context of the 1st and 2nd century Roman and Hellenistic world it was the social norm for women to cover their heads with a stola or veil in public, so this wasn’t solely a religious injunction. And even as late as my youth, as no doubt in yours, it was usual for women to wear hats or some kind of head covering when going out, and not just in church!
23 August 2018 at 21:39 #63853And what they all have in common, but which Moffat pushed to the foreground? That they are women who had the brass-bound audacity to talk back to the Doctor.
I hadn’t really considered it in that light. Because I don’t often have the patience to stick around the kind of fan site where this sort of push-back figures largely, I have tended to assume that it was women who were complaining about Moffat’s writing of female characters – which didn’t really make sense. If it is the nerdy ‘Doctor Who is for boys” contingent who are beefing about it, it makes more sense; and they certainly have never, from the first, cottoned on to what the show is really about.
Rose, Donna, Amy and Bill were limited by their circumstances; but when the Doctor offered them something more – much more, they seized it with both hands – as did Clara, eventually.
I did not start with their disadvantages and cannot claim to own even a fraction of their audacity and vision, but there was a moment in my life, aged 21, when I was offered an opportunity for which I knew I was neither qualified nor prepared. I was terrified but I accepted thinking, ‘if I fail, I fail, but who knows? ‘. And that decision determined the whole of my future career. So on that level I have empathy.
23 August 2018 at 20:55 #63852Woah — an Abbess, in charge of monks?
Yup. There were a number of such double houses founded in the 7th century in England; exactly how many is uncertain, because the records are relatively sparse. The majority were in the northern half of England, which may reflect the influence of the Celtic/British church and associated traditions of monasticism, spreading back from Ireland to the mainland well before Pope Gregory sent his missionaries to convert the Saxons in the kingdoms of southern England. Double houses were also known in the regions of Gaul where missionaries from the Celtic/North British church had also been very active, though I’m not sure that a causative link has been established.
All of those in England seem to have been under the rule of Abbesses, the most famous of whom was St Hilda, who founded a double house at Whitby and before that had been Abbess of another double house at Hartlepool. According to Bede she was a highly capable administrator, noted for her learning and wisdom, whose advice was sought by both kings and church dignitaries. Bede’s account also suggests that she was much admired and loved by the community she ruled. She is perhaps best known for her part in the Synod of Whitby (664 CE), in which liturgical differences between the British/Celtic church and practices established elsewhere in the West were thrashed out.
These abbesses seem to have had the same independence, powers and authority as abbots, including the power to hear confession and give absolution, though I think that he latter may have applied only to the female members of the community. In the communities they ruled the men and women were presumably housed in separate accommodation, but shared the work and worshipped together in the same church. The male members of the community would have included ordained priests who could preside at the Mass. Most, if not all of the abbesses would have been from noble, often royal families, and were well educated; in fact all the other women of the communities and many of the men were likely to have been from a similar background.
As for the abbesses of the monastery on the site I was involved in excavating, the first recorded was St Werberga. Another, recorded in 697, was Alfthritha, whose chief claim to fame is that it was to her that St Guthlac came to be received into the monastic order. As far as I am aware, the name of the Abbess at the time the Viking Great Army arrived is not known.
A decree of the 2nd Council of Niceiea (787) forbade such double houses, but it took a very long time for this to take effect, and in England it was probably only the incursion of the Viking Great Army and the establishment of the Danelaw in the 9th century that finally put an end to them.
The thing to remember about this period of the early church in Britain and Western Europe is that things were far less centralised and standardised than they later became, and there was a good deal of fluidity and variation in practice. The conversion of incomers such as the Franks and Anglo Saxons involved a certain amount of judicious adjustment to local custom, and underlying that were the surviving elements of the late Roman church, which provided an administrative structure as well as a core of belief and tradition. The schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Romanism still lay well in the future, but Byzantium was a long way off, and the Bishops of Rome did not yet have the authority and power that they later acquired, though they were working on it.
22 August 2018 at 22:28 #63844Many people like to say Moffat can’t write for women. I find this a bleak and frankly stupid idea.
Agreed, although with some very minor reservations. All the major female characters in AG Who, whether or not written by Moffat, are strongly delineated and well able to hold their own in the Doctor’s colourful and sometimes bewildering and frightening universe.
If we focus on the companions, one recurring theme is the young woman – Rose, Donna and Bill in particular – who, until she is drawn into the Doctor’s orbit, has achieved little in life and seems to have very limited horizons and ambitions, but who, through her association with the Doctor, realises her potential and achieves full agency. Amy is the same in some respects, except that her life from childhood onwards was shaped – and warped – by that brief first encounter with the Doctor. When she met him again as an adult she, too, had achieved very little in her life, but on the other hand she knew on some level what she was looking for. Martha is different in that she clearly had a career and ambitions already, and her interaction with the Doctor actually inhibited her – although that is probably not how RTD intended her to be seen. Clara, on the other hand, is an anomaly, because we first encounter her as a super-competent claricle; and for the first season after she joins the Doctor in her primary persona she is presented as an enigma rather than a fully rounded person. I confess that I never fully warmed to her, not because she hogged the limelight – she didn’t, but because she never seemed to me to entirely add up to a real person; there were too many inconsistencies.
Where I think the critics may have touched on something, is that I rarely got the sense that the writers had truly got inside the skin of those characters. They seemed for the most part to be observed from the outside, albeit very closely observed. For me, the most fully realised of the companions was Bill, and with her I did get some sense of her inner self. Missy and River were on another plane; techni-colourful and larger than life and to be judged accordingly, although I thought that the River of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead was very sensitively drawn, and she certainly packed an emotional punch – and that was Moffat, of course.
22 August 2018 at 21:13 #63843Oops! I’m not sure how that extra millennium crept in. The date was, of course, winter 873/874.
22 August 2018 at 13:06 #63842Those Vikings were *everywhere*. What a mob!
Indeed they were. What we had stumbled on was in fact the winter camp of the Viking Great Army, documented in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle in 1873/4.
The Saxon church was adjacent to a monastery, a double house of both men and women, ruled by an Abbess. The Vikings sacked the monastery and built an earthwork fort around it, using the church as a strong point and gatehouse. We found ample evidence of their looting, as well as the burials of a number of them who had died over the winter, complete with weapons and, in one case, a Thor’s hammer pendant.
22 August 2018 at 12:50 #63841The person you are thinking of is Hypatia of Alexandria and, although no surviving writings or commentaries can be attributed to her with any certainty, she was an eminent and highly respected Neoplatonist philosopher, mathematician and astronomer in the late 4th/early 5th century CE. Alexandria at that time was still a great centre of learning, and she taught students from all over the Mediterranean, both pagan and Christian, as well as giving public lectures. Although she herself had no particular quarrel with Christians, as a pagan she eventually fell foul of a group of fanatical Christians. She was rumoured to have advised Orestes, the Roman Prefect of Alexandria, in a dispute with Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, which led to her murder in 415 CE by a group of monks who pretty much tore her to pieces. Afterwards she was revered as a pagan martyr and eventually, in the medieval period when the facts had been forgotten, adopted as a Christian martyr. Such are the twists of fate!
There is a film, Agora, based loosely on her life. In it, inevitably, she is portrayed as young and beautiful, with a love interest, and the circumstances of her death are toned down. In fact she would have been in her forties or fifties, if not older, although the exact date of her birth is unknown.
21 August 2018 at 22:19 #63825(moving the conversation here, since it doesn’t really belong on Spoilers)
I had the pleasure of working with teams of volunteers from Earthwatch over several seasons during the 1980s. The excavation was one in which, as a glutton for punishment, I took part in during my annual leave from my official paying job. It began in 1974 when I was lured into it by the promise of a fun two weeks with a small party of friends, almost all professional archaeologists or architectural historians, conducting a dig next to a Saxon church in Derbyshire, with the object of determining the date of construction and the ground level at the time of construction – both a matter of heated debate. It seemed like an opportunity to pretend, for a brief while, that we were just happy, carefree diggers again, getting down and dirty with our trowels.
The fortnight’s work resolved the matters under debate, but revealed further intriguing questions, including evidence of Viking occupation; so back we came the following year for another two weeks of excavation, and then another, and another, with the area of investigation, the problems to be solved, and the length of the season ever increasing, and more and more volunteers needed – hence Earthwatch; and muggins ended up in charge of a large area and a band of up to 20 volunteers, many of whom needed training from scratch. So not a lot different from the day job except that I wasn’t in overall control; and still in my free time and unpaid. Not that I have any regrets.
One or two of the Earthwatch people were disgruntled at the fact that they were actually expected to work long hours in all weathers and that the accommodation provided was less than luxurious, but most pitched in very happily in both the work and the after-work social life, and there were some who returned year after year.
Switching to the topic of cats and walks, my family did have one – a Siamese – who loved going for walks. Although very much a free-range cat and a might hunter, she took readily to walking on a harness and lead. Normally the lead was only used in towns and built-up areas, when usually she would ride on my father’s shoulder, quite unperturbed by traffic and the crowds. In the countryside she would happily trot in front or behind like a dog, and after my brothers and I had flown the nest she would often go on holiday with my parents, walking in Snowdonia, or the Cotswolds, or Exmoor. When my parents eventually bought a small touring caravan she loved that, and if my mother even went out to it to fetch something she would jump in looking expectant, as if to say, ‘When are we off, then?’ Normally she took everything in her stride, but there were occasional incidents – as when, on Exmoor, she stopped to investigate an interestingly scented woolly mound beside the track. When the sheep got to its feet, she shot about 2 feet in the air and streaked for the horizon. It took my parents half an hour to track her down, perched high in the only tree for miles.
21 August 2018 at 21:27 #63824I haven’t yet seen the hedgehog – they tend to be nocturnal – but there has been plenty of visible evidence around in the form of droppings, and one of my next-door neighbours confirmed that she had seen one sleeping under her garden shed. It is a fair few years since we last had one in the neighbourhood and is very welcome, not least because they eat slugs, but this summer they have been suffering greatly because of the long drought in this region which has meant a scarcity of food. Now that we have had some rain at last they should do better.
I also have squirrels – cheeky buggers who are rather less welcome, because they are North American greys which have become something of a pest, at least as far as farmers, foresters and conservationists are concerned. Some misguided person introduced them to Britain in the 19th century and in the past five or six decades they have all but driven out the native red squirrels – smaller and prettier, with tufted ears. Not only are the greys larger and more aggressive, they carry a disease to which they are immune but the reds are not. When my family first came to Norfolk we lived in a small house with woods and a field with a shelter belt of Scots Pines at the back and red squirrels were a common sight and used to come into the garden, where we fed them with nuts. Some became quite tame. But not long after that they disappeared locally and now survive in only a few enclaves, mainly in Scotland and a few areas of northern England.
My frogs certainly don’t disappear in the rain. As soon as the rain starts I see them hopping out of the pond and across the lawn in search of the juicy slugs which also emerge when it is wet. Like the hedgehogs, they have suffered in the drought, both from lack of food and heat stress, which has left them vulnerable to disease, but I am relieved to see that at least some have survived.
There were originally fish in the pond; in fact I dug it originally to house five fish from my mother’s garden pond after she died. For many years they thrived and proliferated until they numbered about 24, but then the pond was discovered by a heron, and in a series of dawn raids over a period of about a year it gobbled the lot. I used to see it perched on the top of a conifer in the garden, or on the ridge of a neighbour’s roof, bold as brass, but never discovered any way of deterring it.
We have also had foxes, though not in the last two or three years, and a wide variety of birds. In fact there is a surprising amount of wildlife considering that this has been a heavily built-up area since the 1930s, with closely spaced houses and blocks of flats, not far from the city centre. On the other hand there is a disused railway track, now a footpath/cycle path bordered by trees and scrub, which forms a corridor from the surrounding countryside.
20 August 2018 at 19:23 #63818Your talk of vintage cars prompted a memory of the most glamourous car my family ever owned, back around 1950/51 when I was a mere sprout. It was an MG WA 2.6 litre sports saloon, of which less than 400 were produced between 1938 and 1939 and, to cap it all, the registration was MG 6277. It was going cheap – maybe because, if I remember correctly, petrol was still rationed – and my father was persuaded by a neighbour to buy it, against his better judgement, to replace our first car, a Morris 10. I loved it, although my youngest brother, then about 4 years old, has less than happy memories of having to sit on the drive shaft casing when there were additional elders to transport. Trouble was, it needed a lot of maintenance and cost a packet to run, and even if he had had the time to tinker with it, my father was not mechanically minded, so after about 18 months, and to my everlasting regret, it was traded in for a boring Hillman Minx.
I confess to having something of a soft spot for moggy minors although, having never driven one – as opposed to being driven – I wasn’t aware of their defects
20 August 2018 at 18:11 #63817getting back up again — Yog-Sothoth! What a hassle
You said it! Getting down is not too much of a problem in my case, but these days, getting up from a kneeling position, I resemble nothing so much as an ancient and arthritic cow getting to its feet, rump first. Fortunately when gardening I have a handy piece of kit – a folding frame which doubles as a stool and as a kneeling pad with high railed sides by which to lever myself up. Long gone, alas, are the days when I could leap lightly in and out of trenches and assume and sustain the most contorted positions for digging in narrow spaces or to excavate something fragile and awkwardly placed without damaging it 🙁
20 August 2018 at 17:52 #63816I meant to add to the above how sorry I was to read about the accident and to add my commiserations, but had to break off and run when I realised I was about to be late for an appointment.
Thank goodness your OH was not too seriously hurt, but even when there are no serious injuries that kind of thing tends to leave one badly shaken up; and then, as you say, everything is compounded by all the ensuing hassle of insurance etc. etc.
I do hope that now the hassle is over there will be no further repercussions.
20 August 2018 at 10:18 #63815Not your point at all, I’m afraid. My fault you misunderstood, because I realised after I had hit ‘submit’, but too late to edit, that what I had written was ambiguous and could be taken the wrong way.
By ‘cod science’ I meant the kind of specious reasoning peddled by the hirelings of oil companies and their like who have a vested interest in persuading people that if global warming and climate change is happening at all, the release of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels is not a primary cause. Or the by writers of denialist blogs and their followers – like some of the responders to Simon Lee’s tweet which @pedant posted above – who parrot the same arguments, and with some highly selective facts and a smattering of jargon think they can disprove the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, whose work is based on an ever increasing body of observational data and constantly refined and updated systems of computer modelling, and which has undergone extensive peer review and been published in reputable scientific journals.
Don’t count me among the doubters
19 August 2018 at 19:11 #63805There could scarcely be a more graphic demonstration of the difference between the local and the global in terms of climate trends, but none so blind as those who refuse to see – or who allow themselves to be convinced by cod ‘science’!
18 August 2018 at 21:37 #63800Moving the conversation here, since it long ago wandered off topic for Spoilers.
I sure hope those frogs are thankful!
While I was putting the finishing touches to the pond – arranging pebbles on the shelving shallow end to enable hedgehogs and other small creatures to come down and drink, or pond life to climb in and out – they kept bobbing up to investigate with what looked like broad grins on their faces, but it’s hard to tell with frogs, really. At least they are behaving as if less stressed now.
As for working in 35C temperatures, I think that I became inured to that back in the notoriously hot summer of 1976 in England, when I was conducting an excavation on an exposed hillside and the daytime temperatures remained at that kind of level for over a week at a time. The situation wasn’t improved by the fact that the ploughsoil had been removed over an area of over hectare, exposing the subsoil of sandy clay and ironstone rubble, baked to something resembling the surface of Mars, from which the heat radiated like an oven. Understandably, I became quite lax in the matter of long lunch breaks.
Thank you for posting the Hippopotamus song – always a favourite of mine among the Flanders and Swann oeuvre, but then I don’t think that I have ever outgrown the allure of mud pies 🙂
17 August 2018 at 20:24 #63786he said that when 12’s costume was originally being developed with his input, there were complaints from BBC higher-ups that it wasn’t going to push a lot of toys,
Sadly, that seems to epitomise the changes in the Beeb since the early days of Who. The show then was made – relatively speaking – on a shoestring, but the producers, directors and innovators were generally in the driving seat, and ratings and commercial success weren’t so much an issue. Now it is the bean counters and management ‘suits’ who too often call the shots, and they are averse to the innovative, visionary and risky, wanting to stick with formulae that have proved successful, with their eye always on the balance sheet. In the 1960s and 70s the BBC output was, to say the least, uneven,and there was plenty of pedestrian time-filler, but it seems to me in retrospect that a higher proportion of the output was adventurous and exciting, and the imaginative dimension was more than enough to compensate for the less-than-cinematic production values; I can’t recall ever being bothered by the latter – the wobbly and less than realistic sets etc.
-
AuthorPosts
