I love old maps, and the sense of history, of knowledge still left to uncover, that they contain within them.  I adore sitting there thinking “You got this right, but you shouldn’t have connected Australia to China.”

I notice that in this blog entry I wrote:

69. DO YOU LIKE MAPS?
Sure, especially ones from centuries ago. I’d love to have one on a wall.

I’m happy to say that I now have one to put on the wall.  Or, more specifically, twelve.

When Radio and I were scouring bookshops in Birmingham as penance for losing her bet about the non-existence of the word onimous we visited Borders, and paid a quick visit to their bargain boxes.

I didn’t find any books that particularly interested me, but I did spot something that was most unexpected:

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I had a bit of a mission yesterday. I had to go out to someone who had a brain injury.

He’d been living with his parents, who helped him. His father recently turned 70 and was astute enough to acknowledge that, statistically, there aren’t a million years left for him, and he was now another year closer to leaving his son on his own.

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Poetry is a lost artform on me. The only time I ever feel even slightly impressed by it is when the meter runs perfectly and the endings rhyme. Then I consider it creativity. Otherwise, I cannot stand it.

Radio (and many others who know me) might suggest that I lack a certain … emotion and so can’t invest myself in it.

This post, however, is about poetry. It’s in Moldovan and was written by Mihai Eminescu. (Actually, I should say Romanian, since they’re the same language and Moldova came into being as an independent country a century after his death.)

Here’s the poem as he wrote it: (more…)

Amazing service from The Economist.

I was abroad at the time so didn’t notice, but it appears that they were a day late despatching one of their editions recently.

I know this because they have my email address and know that I’m a subscriber, and so emailed me an apology, inviting me to inform them if I had been so desperate to receive an issue that I’d sped to the local newsagents and bought a copy from the stand. If this is the case, all I have to do is say so, and they’ll extend my subscription by two issues to cover the cost of the issue I’d paid for.

Not only did they email me, but they then went to the trouble of printing (on GLOSSY paper) the same message and including it with the following issue.

Check this out for a start:

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Maybe we measure to different degrees over here.

The fact that I can speak a foreign language (well, to different degrees, a few) often causes people to express disbelief or reverence here in England.

Why? I presume because languages are hard and, so, having any degree of understanding in them ranks as an elite achievement. So be it.

It sometimes happens at work. I pronounce Indian names or foods as they should be, and people seem surprised. “I couldn’t do that, mate.” Heck, even the Indian carers themselves, who pick from a menu of Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Kutchi, and others seem impressed.

It must be relative. It’s not the fact that I can say “Tamaru nam su che?” when speaking with an elderly Indian lady who struggles with English that should strike them. I guess it must be the fact that I’m a white English person doing it.

And that’s the point of this post.

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… and loves it!

Of course, the newspaper is written in English. But what brilliant English it is!

I like to think that I’m not the world’s worst speaker of foreign languages. I might even allow myself to claim to be ‘advanced’ in a couple of them.

But there’s no way that I even approach the level of the contributors to The Slovak Spectator.

Check this out for an opening paragraph in a story over the sacking of a cabinet minister:

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“Don’t you mean ‘late’?”

“No, I mean ‘early’. It got to the stop before I did.”

That’s a real conversation I had with Mrs Bandenburg, my old French teacher. It got a quick laugh, which is what I was after.

I discovered the other day that there was some truth in this story, when I met the world’s smartest bus driver.

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Creativity astounds me. So do things that seem so obvious that you have to ask yourself “Why didn’t someone think of that before?!”

That’s the thought that entered my head the second I encountered a two-in-one ketchup and mustard. I’ve elected to refer to it as metchup, casting kustard to one side for obvious reasons.

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An unusual title and worthy of a little elaboration, methinks.

I was looking for a play on words that would wittily lead into a post on irrational things I’ve seen lately on eBay. There was an Ebay-based pun that jumped out at me, but I’m going to save that for a rant post, should I ever need to write one.

The phrase is a rip-off of irrational exuberance, a throw-away remark once made in the middle of a speech by Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve. Those two little words illustrated the influence that the world’s foremost economist possessed; no sooner had he said them, the stock market slumped, financial-sector workers latching onto them and taking heed of his warning and causing a slowdown in what had been a booming economy. Whoops.

Well, I’ve been privy to some irrational behaviour on eBay lately. The tie-in with economics writes itself too, since it’s clearly boom behaviour.

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I went to church today.

Nothing special in that; some three million of my fellow Britons did too.

In my case, though, it was a bit different. I don’t believe in deities. Not those of the Greeks of antiquity (not even when the Romans took them and changed their names), not those of the Vikings, though they live on as part of the days of our week, nor the Judeo-Christian, Muslim, or Hindu versions, regardless of their popularity in certain environments.

The sun would still have risen had Montezuma taken a day off from removing people’s hearts, rain will fall or not fall irrespective of whether villagers dance till their feet are nothing but worn-down stumps, and praying, however earnestly, for someone’s salvation the second you hear that he’s been in an accident won’t magically make him undead.

Yet at 10:30 this morning (plus an additional ten minutes of characteristic unpunctuality), I was present at Living Rock Church of my own volition, preparing to experience a morning’s worship.

Quite the paradox. Vegetarians don’t go to the butcher’s, feminists don’t visit strip clubs … and atheists don’t frequent churches.

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