Yes, dear Reader! Were YOU an annoying little brat when you were 3 years old or thereabouts? Most of us were, I think, although maybe don't like to admit it. But if YOUR first thought is to utter a shocked "No!" as your answer, then first tell me your answer to this "supplementary"...
When you were 3 years old, did your parents SIGH a lot? Aha, thought so! I think I've touched a nerve with that one, haven't I - go on, admit it haha!
I think my parents must have sighed a lot over me, when I was three, because my dear late mother says that even before my 4th birthday, I insisted on learning to read and write, while still practically only little more than a toddler. And before I was 5, I had even started to teach my little baby sister Kathy to read and write. What a madness all that was!!!!
flashback to 1950: me aged 4 and already an (unpaid!!!) English teacher
to my little baby sister Kathy - what utter utter utter madness !!!!
And still, many years later, at the age of 11, I was being routinely mocked by schoolfriends etc for my tendency to read a book on the beach in preference to playing beach cricket like they all did. What madness (again) !!!
flashback to 1957: me aged 11, reading a humongously long book
on the beach, while my friends were out of sight playing beach cricket -
what madness (again) !!!!!
flashback to Christmas 2023: me with two of my grandchildren:
twins Jessica (centre) and Lily (right), both voracious readers
who will devour a book a day no problem - Jessica's then current "read":
"Escape to River Sea" by Emma Carroll, can be seen on our little table in front of her.
Emma Carroll was described as "a dangerous writer" by poet Ted Hughes - yikes!
George Szirtes, the Hungarian-born poet almost as old as me (!),
who has been awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry by King Charles
Szirtes came to England as a 8-year-old refugee after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 had been crushed by the Soviet Army. As a winner of this annual "royal" prize he follows in the footsteps of writers such as WH Auden, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, Ted Hughes and others.
Reporter Csorba Anita breaks the news to readers of Hungarian
tabloid "Blikk" about the award of the King Charles (Károly király)
Gold Medal for Poetry to Hungarian poet George Szirtes
When Szirtes arrived in England in 1956, however, he was not able to speak a word of English, as is pointed out in the Blikk article:
And here Szirtes talks on social media about the honour he has won, with an amusing sideswipe at Nigel Farage's favourite organ, GB News (!).
Poor Nigel !!!!!!
Yes, reading and writing is a great aspect of human life, isn't it, and to me personally the invention of the alphabet was more important than the invention of humanity's other landmark achievements, e.g. the invention of the modern steam engine by James Watt in 1776, or of the non-iron shirt, invented by Ruth Benerito of the US Department of Agriculture in the 1950's, to name but two (!).
Call me an iconoclast if you like haha!
(left) a non-iron shirt of the type invented in the 1950's by Ruth Benerito of the
US Dept. of Agriculture, and (right) how the invention of the alphabet might have
been "unveiled" to pressmen by one of e.g. Steve Jobs' ancestors, thousands of years ago
To start with, reading and writing was kept from the masses. It was the closely guarded secret property of a few "shaman" type figures, and associated with magic and magical powers. Hence our English verb "to spell", a word which still has magical connotations.
Well, who DID invent the alphabet? Well, the jury's still out on that one, as explained by an article that Steve, my American brother-in-law, has passed me also this week.
The accepted "wisdom" for some time has been that an alphabetic system of writing was first developed in the areas of Egypt and Sinai, around 1800 to 1900 BC, but clay cylinders discovered in 2004 at Umm-el-Mara, east of Aleppo in Syria appear to have earlier alphabetic writings on them, which would push back the history of alphabetic script to the previous millennium, since they can be fairly accurately dated as 4.400 years old.
these 4,400-year-old cylinders dug up from graves at a site in Syria
appear to have alphabetic writing on them: the earliest examples ever found
The cylinders were found inside a group of high-status tombs in a mortuary complex by veteran archaeologist Glenn Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Although the results were first publicised in 2006, the academic world has been slow to accept the new theory - because of vested academic interests or conservatism perhaps? Or maybe people are, perhaps justifiably, waiting for further corroborative evidence from an additional source? I think we should be told, don't you?!
artist's impression of the man (or bearded woman) who may have
carved the world's earliest alphabetic inscription
If only the person who carved those 'letters' had known what might have been made of them 4,400 years later!
And what a great shame that he (or she, obviously!) forgot to sign his (or her, obviously!) name on them, at the bottom, or on the back of the cylinders maybe? Was he/she just "too busy", or "couldn't be bothered" ??? Or maybe he/she said, "Everybody will know it's me - I'm the only person who can write!". Again, I think we should be told.
But what a shame, because he (or she, obviously!) would have been justly "feted" today, if he (or she) had just done that one simple thing. A pity.
17:00 Nowadays we "simply" print a document off, sign it with a pen, drag that poor Mrs Smith from across the street to be a "witness", scan in the result and then email it, don't we, hoping that the printer won't try and "mangle" the piece of paper or try to "eat" any signatures on it along the way!
flashback to December 12th: our printer (bottom left)
has just "chewed up" an important legal document
needed for us to buy our new house in Liphook, Hampshire.
What madness !!!!
And my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois and I have done enough of that kind of "malarkey" - signing documents "pseudo-digitally" - this week to last us a lifetime, that's for sure. We're currently planning to sell our new-build home here in Malvern, Worcestershire and move to a new house in Liphook, Hampshire, to be nearer our daughter Alison and family. And as our hot-shot city lawyer, Oliver, is based in London, we have to sign all the contracts etc here, and then scan them and email them to him, to save us having to take the train into London every 5 minutes (!).
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
And today is the "big money" day when I'm waiting around for "the money" - which is, like, a billion pounds, more probably (!), almost as much as the Great Train Robbers famously stole from that train in Buckinghamshire back in 1963, which is the kind of money you need these days if you're buying a house anywhere near London's so-called commuter belt.
Liphook, Hampshire is nearly in London's commuter belt
- you can get to London (Waterloo) by train from Liphook in a "mere" 2 hours
- what a crazy world we live in !!!!
The money "leaves" our mortgage-lenders' bank account around 12 noon, and I'm waiting around here in Malvern all afternoon, checking our bank account every 15 minutes, until the money finally arrives around 4:15pm.
Yes, this is "the big money deal" all right, but we can't go to Brazil on it, like Blondie wanted to !!!!
Because of all this "waiting malarkey", Lois and I can't go upstairs for our usual nap this afternoon, and Lois finds the wait excruciating. She eventually goes out for a walk round our new-build estate, where she finds Santa himself a little bit the worse for drink on somebody's front lawn, so he's obviously having a bad day as well - oh dear!
us this afternoon - we can't go to bed, and Lois finds the wait for the moneyto arrive "excruciating", eventually deciding to go for a walk around our new-build
estate here in Malvern, and finding Santa himself on somebody's front lawn,
a bit the worse for drink, so he's obviously having a bad day too.
16:15 The money has arrived in our bank account, so I have to print off a bank statement to prove that Lois and I aren't drug-dealers or arms-traders (!), scan it and email it to Oliver, and then I transfer the, like, literally billions of pounds to him through something called CHaPS or some such nonsense. What a madness it all is !!!!
[That's more than enough madness for one day, Colin! - Ed]
17:00 At last it's all done and I get to celebrate with a gin-and-tonic. I can't celebrate with Lois because at the moment she's doing her chair-yoga on the internet with her great-nice Molly in Leeds, so we'll just have to do something later to make up for that [not shown].
I celebrate with a G&T - a lot of cash, like, a
billion pounds, more probably (!) - "rests" momentarily
in our account today, before hurrying on its way to our
hotshot 'big city' London lawyer, Oliver
meanwhile Lois is doing yoga online with her great-niece Molly (left), a part-time
yoga teacher, seen here with one of her groups of young women in Leeds
Oh dearie me! Still, it's been a successful day overall, so we can go to bed in a good mood, which is nice.
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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