Julian Barnes, English littérateur with an affinity for La Belle France, was short-listed for the 1984 Booker Prize with Flaubert's Parrot. I might have read it at the time, because it's a bit off-kilter and "post-modern". But I can't really remember the story of one man's obsession with the stuffed parrot(s) which may have sat on Gustav Flaubert's desk. Something set me to thinking about other left-field object-person associations: like Captain Danjou's artificial hand.
We were passing through Waterford to put Dau.II on the train back to Dublin after a couple of days of driving lessons. She asked to stop in LIDL to see if they had more of their €4 hot-water bottles, they were sold out in Smithfield. And that's how I was persuaded to buy an olive drab hot-water bottle - not my first choice; my only choice. My McCauley hotties tend to shocking pink or polka dot.
You can maybe see where this is going? We all know that
I may be over-empathizing but I can imagine him sitting in the Pres Palace when the central heating is fritzed again. If only I had a Грілка he might muse. Although he has a sense of humour, hugging a pink polka dot hot-water bottle might be a bridge too far in the propaganda war. A LIDL olive drab number might supply some discrete core-body warmth.
You are at liberty to imagine Julian Barnes' grand-daughter writing a post-apocalypse memoir about her search for the authentic hot-water bottle with which Zelenskyy saw Ukraine to victory. Lionel Messi's world cup soccer shirts sell for $1 million each.
One of the potent metaphors in Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing [prev] is that the the family's holiday home place is on the Irish Sea facing coast of Wexford. They've been going down there every year since the foundation of the state and every year another section of cliff has been undercut by the waves and the sea is a few inches or a few feet closer to the back door. It's like Lal and Willie Pierce's place in Ballyhealy.
Hemsby in Norfolk has been in the news at the end of November because a 30m section of a concrete road, servicing a couple of dozen wooden homes, collapsed into the sea during a storm so unspectacular that it didn't even warrant a name. This came a couple of months after a palpably sad tale of compulsory eviction and preemptive demolition of a widow-woman's home. It was one of five homes grubbed up and taken away under the same order. No compo, no counselling, no option, little notice. I suppose, it's better thus that allowing all that timber & paint & nails & copper-wire to float out to sea like a fleet of Fukushima shipping hazards. On Saturday 9th Dec, the 5 houses isolated by the collapsed road were demolished.
There is a long history of lost villages all along the East coast from Ipswich to Scarborough. From the top: Clare, Shipden, Foulness, Whimpwell, Keswick, Eccles, Waxham Parva, Ness, Newton Cross. It's not all about global warming and sea-level rise; because geologists reckon that the East side of England is pitching down as the West side of the tectonic platelet rebounds from its load after the last ice age.
I was so taken with the story that I pitched it to Metafilter on the 7th Dec where the response was quotidian. Florida is a bigger story on disappearing beach-front property, especially if you value dollars over "heritage".
There is a utilitarian argument to be made. Nederland is throwing a lot more treasure, steel, groynes, pumps and dyke at the rising tides than Little Hans plugging a hole with his fist; although it has sometimes been een dubbeltje op zijn kant. The Brits can't or won't protect the whole of their exposed coast, so someone must decide who/what shall be saved. Even a few kilometers of rip-rap rock berm costs out at £15million - rising to £20m adjusted for grift inflation. That's about 2x the value of the 60 homes which have been lost to the waves over the last 30 years. It cost £80m to beef-up the sea wall in Dawlish [bloboprev] with, like, a proper engineered solution. But Dawlish is a town and its railway is a vital infrastructural bottleneck. It's easy for the mandarins in London to write off and Other the alternative types who live in wooden chalets among the eroding dunes of Hemsby.
Something can be done . . . if Shell Oil picks up the tab to keep its North Sea gas terminal.
In the run up to Dau.II's driving test, I was, several times, unceremoniously shoved out of The Grape in various bleak settings in SW Waterford City. My place being taken by Damian the driving instructor or Darren the driving tester. What to do? Driving School Centraal in Woodie's Car Park is a brisk 15 minute walk from, say, the City Library; but the RSA driving test centre is way off on the Ring Road. I had ~45 minutes to kill there, the drizzle was light, so I headed off towards a Stuff Shop called The Range which we'd passed on the way into the industrial estate. So much to tempt the unwary:
But I got caught in the craft section and bought one "Pack of 100 Art Studio Wooden Alphabet Beads" for what-could-possibly-go-wrong? €1.30. I thought they'd make a novelty stocking filler for Gdau.II [8] at Christmas. Returning home, I spilled the 1cm x 1cm cubes into a shallow bowl, resolved to thread the beads on a bit of string so that it spelled something nice. My nice is not Gdau.II's nice, though . . . I don't believe in unicorns for starters. The letter-bracelet -necklace was just an idea.
I scrabbled about looking for an S - the 8th most common letter in English and the normal way of making the plural. There was only one S! - and that a mis-shape. If you count this hirpled S, there was at least one bead representing each of our 26 letters, rarities like Q Z and J included. So the composition of the bag-of-100 cannot be random. The beads are made in - surprise! - the PRC = People's Republic of China. Perhaps the foreman or marketing manager chose them so that patriotic messages could be easily written with this tool. "LOLS" is difficult but Xian, Qi and Zhu are much easier. Bloboprev on letter freq.
Here's the scatterplot of the 26 letter freqs in the OxEngDict compared to PplRepChina as represented in the archives of Art Studio and The Range. The letters appear chosen to be completely unrelated to their frequency in English. So The Range, a British firm headquartered in Plymouth, are not serving anglophone literacy with this particular toy.
And here's Santa Nollaig:
Since 1st Aug 2014, drivers are required to display N for novice plates on the car for two years after passing the test. There are other restrictions. RSA's "research tells us that novice drivers are most likely to be killed on our roads in the first two years after passing their test due to their inexperience". But I doubt if they have separated out young [male] drivers from drivers immediately after their test; because the overlap between these constituencies is very high.
I know that Dau.II is a more careful driver than me . . . and for sure (for the next couple of months!) she knows the highway code and the meaning of the dozens of signs, some quite peculiar, that grace our roads.
Quiz. Please describe and define the difference between each pair of similar-looking signs! If you can't get 100% on this, I advise that you make and display on your car an S to indicate sign-ignorance.
And what about the dithery Olds?? [prev] Several years ago, my mother shared some news about one of her 80-something neighbours. This old dear had just deposited a car load of garden clippings at the recycling and compost centre. On leaving, she reversed at speed across the car-park and whannnnged into two other cars. The police were called. With commendable compassion and pragmatism, it was agreed that IF the neighbour turned in her driving licence THEN she would be spared an appearance in court. I felt a rush of empathy because the first time I, aged ?16?, was put behind the wheel of a car by my father, I contrived to reverse at speed across the car-park and whannnnged into a pile of roof-tiles breaking a few and the brake-light cover.
My current 10 year licence expires [5 months early] next June when I turn 70. Other road users need to know that someone with slow reactions, defective hearing and / or compromised sight is behind the wheel . . . to give us old buffers a bit more time, space and courtesy. I suggest E for Elder. Actually, maybe we can make it like pre-emptively declaring your pronouns on e-mail footers. If everyone displays a red letter on white sign according to their driving deficiencies, then the poor N for novices won't feel so stigmatized.
Last weekend we were resident in the Tramore Multi-species Care and Rest Home. The lines were quite blurry as to who was an inmate and who running this asylum. The Owner / Matron / CnC was away on a week's respite - absolutely deserved and not half long enough. The resident rescue dog has been in the wars these last couple of years: so many buffets of outrageous fortune. The poor cr'ature deserves a bit of coddling. But not coddle! "2 large onions, cut into slices" makes that streng verboden because dogs are lack the enzymes to process N-propyl disulphide, so that hangs around in the circulation to blat glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase in red blood cells resulting in anaemia. Propyl disulphides are what give onions, garlic, shallots their honkin' quality and make yor eyes water when you slice them.
The science is all at NCBI: Some food toxic for pets Interdiscip Toxicol. 2009 Sep; 2(3): 169–176.
Big red face! I volunteered to trot up the hill to [the nearer emporium] Supervalu to buy Knorr Beef Stock Pot 4's 112g [at front L] which is by contrast "slowly simmered with parsley and carrot". ONION!!
I cannot forebore to drill down into the ToC . . .
