Friday October 1st 2021

I spend the morning putting the final touches to my so-called "presentation" that I've agreed to give to Lynda's local U3A Middle English group on zoom this afternoon.

a typical U3A zoom meeting (not ours)

Meanwhile Lois goes out for a walk on the local football field, and she takes the opportunity to spy on the latest horrible new building site, which for several weeks now has been hidden behind a hideous fence, destined to be later painted a horrible bright blue - yuck!

flashback to August: the horrible fence in happier times - 

when it first went up, and wasn't painted bright blue yet: happy times !!!!

Today Lois goes a bit further and finds out that the fencers have forgotten to fence the building site on the crucial south side - a rookie error, and what madness!  So she gets a good view of what's going on behind the fence for the first time.

What a horrible mess - it's total madness !!!! And we feel desperately sorry for the people who live next to the site and have to look at it from their windows day after day. The builders have also sought to cut costs by only painting the fence on one side, which is good economics, but leaves rather an unsavoury and "sloppy" impression, that's for sure!

All in all, the whole thing leaves a nasty taste in her mouth, she says. So it's lucky we've got something nice for lunch - cheese and tomato on toast: yum yum!

14:30 Our U3A meeting starts, and I launch into my presentation. My topic is "How the Vikings Changed Our Language".

I have to say it is well received: the only problem is that so many questions and discussion points are raised as I work through what I have prepared, that the total run time is 100 minutes, and not the 40 minute estimate that I gave to Lynda, the group leader. My god !!!!

One of my slides shows how, with the arrival of the Vikings, their Old Norse language quickly began affecting, in particular, the dialects spoken in Yorkshire and also in Scotland.

According to Geipel “The Viking Legacy: The Scandinavian Influence on the English and Gaelic Languages” (1971), 

....“to the great-great-grandparents of many of today’s Yorkshire folk, pigs were grice, heifers quees, and bullocks stots, yellow was gool, soft was blowt, large was stor and steep was brandt; bairns would laik where nowadays children play, and a man would risp if he had a lop on his rig where today he would scratch if he had a flea on his back”.

bairn	ON barn ‘child’
crake	ON kráka ‘crow’
erne	ON örn ‘eagle’
fell	ON fjall ‘mountain’
firth	ON fjörðr ‘deep valley’
foss / force	ON foss/fors ‘waterfall’
gate	ON gata ‘street, road’
gill/ghyll	ON gil ‘ravine’
gowk	ON gaukr ‘cuckoo’
grice	ON gris ‘pig’
lop	ON fló ‘flea’
ness	ON nes ‘headland’
nieve	ON hnefi ‘fist’
rig	ON hryggr ‘spine’, ‘ridge’
sca(u)r/skerry	ON sker ‘barren rock in the sea’
tarn	ON tjörn ‘lake’
thorp(e)	ON þorp ‘village’
thwaite	ON tveit ‘reclaimed part of land’
toft	ON toft ‘homestead’
wuthering	ON hviðr ‘breeze, gust’
blowt	ON blautr ‘soft’
gool	ON gulr ‘yellow’
sakless, sackless	ON saklauss ‘innocent’
laik	ON leika ‘play’
risp	ON rispa ‘scratch’
thole	ON þola ‘endure’

We've got three "Yorkshire folk" in our U3A group, and one Scotswoman, so I take the opportunity to ask how many of these words they understand or have used.

Surprisingly I find that they know most of these words, even if they haven't used them since their childhood.

What a crazy language we speak !!!!

16:15 The meeting ends and I feel totally drained. I'm getting old, no doubt about that! [You don't say! - Ed]

Tomorrow I'd better go out and buy myself a couple of new mugs - yikes!

Oh dear !!!!! A lot to learn before we visit Yorkshire again, that's for sure, let alone Scotland!

16:00 I have tea on the couch with Lois and I tell her about my "triumph" this afternoon, and she's pleased. 

However, I have to admit that there were a few awkward questions asked, by the usual suspects in the group. One person asks me what the "yellow line" means on my Viking slide. This is some random slide I got off the internet because it showed the routes that the Vikings took when they arrived in the British Isles.

                             my "Viking" slide with the mysterious yellow line crossing the North Sea,

and also curling round in the top left-hand corner of the slide

When the question was asked "What's that yellow line mean?", I tried to make a joke out of it, saying it was probably something meteorological, the "jet stream" perhaps. But it's a fair enough question, to which I had no immediate answer.

I decide to find the original map on the website where I took it from, but the yellow line isn't explained there either. The website belongs to a "Mr Allsopp", obviously some history teacher somewhere in the UK, so I send in a comment to him, asking what the yellow line means. I'll just have to wait now to see if he replies. What madness !!!!

20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in Mary Beard's series "Inside Culture", this week given over entirely to an interview with Hillary Clinton, who was at time of the interview in Oxford to receive her honorary degree, prior to travelling to Nothern Ireland to become Chancellor of Queen's University, Belfast.

This isn't really a political interview with Hillary, other than when she and Mary are talking about women's rights, and how much (or how little) progress has been made since Hillary made her protocol-busting, unprecedented speech, at her Wellesley College graduation or "commencement", in 1969. I think Donald Trump gets one mention during the interview, but he's passed quickly over - probably a wise decision!

Hillary making her "commencement" (graduation) speech in 1969

The interview tonight concentrates mainly on Hillary's writing, and on the production company she runs with her daughter Chelsea.

But we do hear a lot about "women's issues", that's for sure. And we see a clip from her speech in 1969, in which Hillary said that, "For too long, our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible, and the challenge now is to practise politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible". 

It's interesting that presenter Mary Beard is famous in the UK not just for her books or TV documentaries, but also, for deliberately not making herself look glamorous for the TV documentaries she writes and presents: a habit which has drawn the ire and venom of male chauvinists in the press and of trolls on the internet.

In response to Mary's enquiry about "looking good for the cameras", Hillary says that in the 2 years leading up to her running for president, she spent in total the equivalent of about 20 x 24 hour days with hair-stylists and make-up artists.

She reminds Mary how Margaret Thatcher changed almost everything about her appearance and her elocution in order to be acceptable as a potential Prime Minister. And how Theresa May was roasted by the popular press complaining about her shoes etc. What madness !!!!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

Mary asks Hillary if she can see now, some of the mistakes she made in the past that she didn't realise were mistakes at the time.

She says, "Yes, I came to public awareness far beyond what I'd had on my own behalf, because of Bill's successful presidential campaign, and I was very confusing to many people in the press. I didn't fit into neat categories that had already been established, and then when I took on the very difficult task of trying to change our healthcare system, that became such a flashpoint, like - What's a first lady doing? 

"And I could have, and should have, in retrospect, done a much better job reaching out to the press, trying to explain the best I could, not that they all would have bought it or agreed with it, but nothing prepares you for being in the hot, hot light of the Presidency and the White House.

"I could have done more, but I got into a little bit of a defensive crouch early on, because there was so much nonsense being written about me, And rather than being a little humorous about it, I got quite defensive. In retrospect I could have, and should have, been less defensive."

Fascinating stuff!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!