Another weird day for me – doing things that would have seemed completely routine and unremarkable this time last year.
Firstly I get in a taxi to go downtown to pick up our car from the tyre company. I sit in the back seat with a mask on, on the nearside so I’m not directly behind the driver, who’s slightly to my right of course: this is so that my “droplets” are not within too close a distance from the back of his head. I don’t have to talk to him during the 10-minute journey – what a relief! Luckily he has BBC Radio 4 on, and the afternoon play, so there’s no embarrassment -we can both enjoy the play!
Secondly, when the taxi driver drops me off I go into the tyre company’s reception area, chat with the guy who did the work on our car, and pay the bill. Lois and I decided yesterday to get 4 new tyres for our car – they’re the original ones from when the car was manufactured 8 years ago, and they’re really in need of replacement, no doubt about that. Typical of Lois and me is we never realized that the car had locking wheel-nuts but NO KEY – so the tyre company guys had to take it to another garage this morning to get the wheel-nuts removed – what madness!!!!
It’s quite lucky that Lois and I have never had a puncture since we bought the car second-hand 6 years ago – my god!
Seeing the National Tyre and Autocare business is quite nostalgic for me. It’s just around the corner from the town’s bus station – outside the "National" is where we used to drop off, and pick up, my late brother Steve, who used to visit us from Oxford using the bus. He died in 2013.
The two above experiences today – the taxi and the tyre place - are quite weird to me. For the last 8 months we have only interacted with people on our doorstep: neighbours, delivery guys, plus Mark the Gardener, Ian the Window-cleaner, and not much else. Yikes!
20:00 We watch some TV< the third and final part of an interesting series on “The Secret History of Writing”.
Lois and I both love the presenter of this programme, Dr Lydia Wilson – quiet, unassuming, no
make-up and she can chat in fluent Arabic with young Egyptians – what’s not to
like???!!!!!
The Latin alphabet that we Europeans have always used has so many advantages – both in ease of printing and ease of educating children – compared to other more squiggly scripts, and in the twentieth century various non-Europeans started to notice this, and wanted to “modernize”.
The Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal was the first to take action: in 1929 he forced the Turks to change from Arabic script to Latin script giving them little more than a year to carry out the change, actually going as far as to make the use of Arabic script illegal - yikes!
It must have been quite traumatic for the Turks to cope with this
change, but on the other hand they only changed theirs script once – and they’ve stuck with the Latin alphabet ever since.
The poor Uzbeks, who have also traditionally used Arabic script have not been so fortunate. In the late 1920’s Lenin imposed a Latinization, and just over 10 years later (1940) Stalin changed the alphabet again, to the Russian Cyrillic one, to bring them into line with the rest of the USSR. And finally in 1991, an independent Uzbekistan changed back to the Latin script in a conscious effort to throw off its unhappy Soviet past.
Needless to say, the Uzbeks hold the world record for most numbers of script changes.
Poor Uzbeks!!!!!
China has been more resistant to these kind of changes, but even in China and also in the Arab world, use is now being made of previous failed attempts to produce phonetic writing systems, just because young people love to text, tweet and do all the rest of the social media chitchat stuff. So the discarded “Pinyin” in China is now being revived, and is being used so much by young people that many of them are forgetting how to write in their traditional scripts – young Chinese are forgetting how to write proper Chinese characters, for instance.
And so-called "Franco", originally invented by online gamers in the Arab world, is now being used by young people to text in.
I suppose it’s a bit like many young people in the west only being able to write in emojis and text-speak – “lol”s and the like.
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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