I check the pressure on our tyres, and am surprised to find that one of the tyres is badly underinflated again. I don't really want that to be a problem if Boris lets us visit relatives over Christmas/New Year, so I phone National Tyres to see if they can check it over for me. They say they can, but not till tomorrow, so I book the car in for 9 am.
flashback to last month: I check the tyres
and find the potential problem for the first time
In normal times taking the car to National Tyres would be a trivial outing, but in a pandemic it's more of a challenge, to put it mildly. And it's a pity that it's going to be a colder night tonight so I may have to de-ice the car windows tomorrow, which is something I could do without.
At the same time it's slightly thrilling to be doing something "normal" again, even if there's bound to be a risk attached, what with the omicron variant being around. But if they say the job will take a while, I can actually wander round the town centre, something I haven't done for nearly 2 years - my god: the excitement. Can I bear it haha ???!!!!
National Tyres in the town centre, just round the corner
from the Town Bus Station
Could I even go into a café and have a cup of tea somewhere while I'm waiting? Probably that's going too far, though, I suspect.
Otherwise it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. In the afternoon I design and print my Christmas card to Lois, and Lois starts to wrap a load of presents.
Lois, in the middle of wrapping a load of presents,
showcases a musical biscuit tin - if you rotate the lid
it plays some Christmas tune or other.
What could be more Christmassy that that scene?
I look at my smartphone. Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, has sent me a thoughtful article by Hanula Zsolt, taken from the Hungarian media (telex.hu), an article daring to ask the question nobody in the UK dare ask: Why does English use the same word for "pepper" and "paprika", i.e. "pepper" ?
It's nice to know that it isn't the fault of the Brits, for once. And Hanula puts the blame fairly and squarely on Christopher Columbus, following Anna Ewbank in atlasobscura.com .
"Goodbye Christopher. And don't come back #
until you've found pepper haha!"
When Columbus crossed the ocean blue, in fourteen hundred and ninety two, pepper-pepper was already a well-known and well-used spice in Europe, although mainly for the rich. So Fernando II, king of Aragon was enthusiastic about the possibility of Columbus bringing back not just gold but also black pepper from "the Indies".
Columbus struck out, however, but there was a "Plan B" to find something that would remind people of pepper: and he found (1) pink pepper, which looks vaguely like the black sort, even though it tastes completely different, and also (2) hot pepper, which has the same pungency as paprika.
After that, paprika came to be called pepper by the English, although the Dutch called this cheap new stuff "chilli", a word derived from an Aztec language, seeking to avoid confusion that could hurt their markets for the good stuff that only came from the Dutch Indies. The English stuck to the word "pepper" and added the "chilli" on the front: et voila: chilli peppers.
Does that make sense?
Confused? You will be, if you read the above a second time, which I don't recommend haha!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
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