Storm Ciaran, a name that nobody is quite sure how you pronounce - it must be Irish - anyway the storm is on its way off the Atlantic, so Lois and I decide to take a little walk on the common and drop in at the Poolbrook Kitchen and Coffee shop, while the rain isn't too heavy and there's the occasional burst of sunshine.
That's the plan anyway!
10:30 We have our little walk on the common, and luckily it isn't raining, which is nice.
we go for a little walk over the common
Next we stop by the local pub, The Three Horseshoes, the beating heart of this community, to see what the latest "vibe" is here on the street.
oh dear! - not much going on just at the the moment, then!
Disappointingly the pub's "What's On" board seems to be posting a "nil return" at the moment. Still, this is Malvern after all haha! And to judge by the last "event" that's been 90% scrubbed off on the board, nothing much has been "on" since September - oh dear !!!!
11:15 We drop into the local Poolbrook Kitchen and Coffee Shop, where newish owner Andrew presses us to this week's special offer - three "bite-size" cakes and a regular coffee for just £3.50 - is that cheap or not? We're not sure, but the words "special offer" suggest to us it could be a bargain, so we go for that.
Well, you're only old once, aren't you haha!
Poolbrook Kitchen and Coffee Shop, seen here in happier times,
when it wasn't raining or blowing a gale
new owner Andrew serves the couple on the next table
When I check my blog, I realise that we haven't been here for 6 months, due to pressure of other work
[Haha! - Ed].
The last time we came here, in April, the new owner Andrew had just taken over from the previous owner, Alison, and we were lucky enough to meet both Andrew and his parents, who were helping him settle in.
And later we saw the story "splashed all over" the local Malvern Gazette, as broken by the Gazette's ace reporter, Matt Hancock-Bruce.
11:45 Before going home for lunch, and as the rain begins, we stop by at the OneStop convenience store, and I note with disapproval that, although Halloween is well and truly over, the members of staff here obviously "haven't had the time" to take down the "Zombie Zone" "Do Not Cross" tape-malarkey that's stuck amusingly over the entrance door.
Oh dear, that's a bit shabby!
if you look carefully through the left-hand glass panel
of the entrance door, you'll see Lois casting a wary eye about her
in case there are any zombies still lurking here today
If you look carefully through the left-hand glass panel, you'll see the shadowy outline of Lois battling her way along Aisle 1, although she tells me later that the obstructions were all caused by other customers, and that "there were no zombies to be seen", although she didn't check the back rooms. So all in all a bit of a mystery, to put it mildly!
The entrance door looks the same way it did on Sunday, but why haven't they cleared the zombies out yet - a bit dilatory, isn't it???!!!!
flashback to Sunday - pre-Halloween and the zombies
have "taken over" OneStop, although Lois is more than willing to
battle them in Aisle One - what a woman I married!!!
[That's way more than enough about zombie stickers! - Ed]
We ourselves can't complain too much about other people's left-over Halloween stickers. We are guilty of leaving left-overs around ourselves, because we haven't yet removed out "welcome pumpkin" from our front-doorstep. And today, when we inspect it, we can see that the local slugs have been having a party in it overnight, and "going to the toilet" in it as well.
the local slugs have been having an all night party in our
pumpkin - and having a lot of fun at our expense !!!
15:00 It's afternoon, and we check our smartphones as we have a rest in bed, browsing the quora forum website.
And we're delighted to see that one of favourite pundits, zany Frenchman Fabrice Arfi (crazy name, crazy guy!) has been weighing in on the vexed subject of "Why did the Vikings adopt French as their language when they came to Normandy?"
Fabrice writes: There were only very few [Vikings who settled in Normandy], and they were isolated in usually extremely small communities, over centuries, in a world where absolutely everybody else spoke French.
Also, as I like to recall, medieval people didn't usually bring up their own kids unless they were beyond poor. Children were put into the care of wet nurses who in the case of these children, exclusively spoke French. As a result, even the Vikings’ own children didn't speak a Scandinavian language.
the Vikings in Normandy - couples speaking Old Norse to each other,
but farming their children out to Frenchwomen to bring up
And as Fabrice says, it was quite a different story when the descendants of those Vikings, now fully-fledged French speakers, invaded England in 1066.
1066 was a completely different scenario: entire families came from absolutely everywhere, from Normandy, Anjou, Flanders etc, to absolutely everywhere in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and they took over farms, villages, towns and cities and effectively seized the reigns of power.
I recently met a woman who traced back her family history to people who originally came from outside Rouen and took over a farm in Devon.
The Normans imported their own monks, artisans, architects [into England] and they proceeded to rebuild the country from the ground up. Lastly, they imposed French as the language of the monarchy, wrote and communicated extensively in that language. French very quickly become a language of literature and learning. The rest, as they say, is history.
That's it, really isn't it. And I think that we've been told, and without having to ask, which makes a pleasant change!
16:00 Lois and I chew over Fabrice's theories, and, as we roll out of bed, we feel satisfied after his explanation.
However, we're slightly worried about what it was like for those other couples, the Viking couples in Normandy, lying in bed listening to their children "jabbering away" in French, and not really knowing what they might be saying about them.
a typical Norman couple in bed, chatting to each other in Old Norse
while their children "jabber away" in French, just feet away from them
On reflection, however, it must be the same problem even today for parents in London who speak the traditional Cockney version of English, as exemplified by Dick Van Dyke, who famously played Bert the Cockney chimney-sweep in the film version of "Mary Poppins" (1964).
Today's traditional Cockney-speaking parents are now finding that their children have adopted one of three different new modes of speech, as reported by the Daily Telegraph on Monday.
To Lois and me, the weirdest of these accents is MLE - multicultural London English. We don't hear it in Malvern, needless to say, but the modern-style BBC, in an effort to be "inclusive" perhaps, has some continuity announcers who are using it, we suspect. And when they say a programme will be available on iPlayer, the BBC's catch-up service, it sounds to us like these MLE announcers are saying "Ay-play-aww".
But on reflection, maybe that's just the new name for the service, and Lois and I are just behind the times again, as we tend to be. [You don't say! - Ed]
Nevertheless, I must write to the Editor of the Telegraph to complain about it all, and about all the other things too that we don't like about the modern life - don't worry, my letter will be long but strictly anonymous: I'll sign off with my customary nom-de-plume "Disgruntled of Malvern", so that I don't get any angry postcards from MLE speakers: just a precaution, you understand!
[That's enough about accents! - Ed]
20:00 Lois disappears into the kitchen to take part in her church's weekly Bible Class on zoom. When she emerges, we decide to go to bed on the last programme in the fascinating series "Moulin Rouge - Yes We Can-can!"
Before we saw this series, Lois and I didn't know that Paris's famous Moulin Rouge nightclub has recently been kept going mostly by British dancers and British choreographers and artistic directors etc, after the club's French dancers and directors all left in droves during the pandemic and returned home to the provinces, never to be seen again.
Something else that Lois and I didn't know - it's the night of the big TV spectacular, but nobody is saying the traditional English superstitious theatrical phrase about "Break a leg!" before they go on stage. They've all adopted a translated version of the French equivalent, so we hear instead, "Wishing you lots of s*** tonight!" (French: beaucoup de merde!).
Artistic director Janet, from Leeds, explains the origins of this greeting to her new dancers.
Aha! And it's all beginning to make a crazy kind of sense now, isn't it!
It's nice tonight for us to see a bit more of these dancers, literally in some cases, and it's certainly all a girlhood dream come true for newbies Jan and Erin from the north of England.
But when it comes down to it, these girls, however much or however little they wear, are sending audiences home happy, aren't they, which is the important thing, isn't it.
As their choreographer puts it:
And what prouder boast could any entertainer have?
Fascinating stuff !!!!
22:00 We to to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment