Ugly
Ducklings
A pair of
swans on the Canal have produced a brood of cygnets, six of them, and at
present they have succeeded in keeping them all alive for a fortnight. I
imagine they are taking them onto the island in the Pool overnight, which is at
least safe from foxes. Usually they get picked off while still small by foxes
or dogs. A pair of Canada geese had a couple of goslings about a month ago, but
considering how many of them are on the Canal we see very few goslings. A first
for me last Saturday was seeing a baby Egyptian goose in Hyde Park, a delicate
thing covered in black and white fluff (unlike the Canada geese, whose goslings
rejoice in lemon and grey fluff). I have a soft spot for the rather charming
Egyptian geese, who always go round in pairs rather than gaggles, and don’t try
to bully you, like Canada
geese; we sometimes have a pair on the Canal, but they don’t seem to be
permanent, so perhaps they fly up from the Serpentine (following the course of
the Westbourne River, maybe?)
Alright for
Fighting
Yesterday
evening I came to the Parish Office at a quarter to seven and was transfixed by
an enormously loud row going on outside the pub opposite (The Squirrel,
formerly The Skiddaw). A youngish woman was screaming abuse at the top of her
voice at a woman seated at one of the tables outside the pub with a companion,
who were responding. I was on my bike, so not really in a position to give my
full attention to proceedings, but people waiting outside St.Peter’s for the
self-help group meeting had been watching for some time and reckoned that the
standing woman was drunk. Remarkably, it hadn’t progressed to actual violence,
but the fury was of such a level that you feared that it could escalate at any
moment. The landlord seemed to be trying to stop it, but without much success,
though I presume he must have succeeded eventually. It was the volume that was
so striking, together with the (presumably alcohol-fuelled) disinhibition in a
public place in broad daylight. A reminder of the fragility of social
stability.
Pining for
the Fjords
One of my
Churchwardens was called to the public lavatories in Maida Hill Market a few
weeks ago, because “There’s someone dead down there.” She was understandably
anxious, and so went down with caution. She ascertained that the woman in
question (lying on the floor) was not in fact dead, but drunk or high, so she
gave her a slap to wake her up, which was effective. Getting the woman out of
the loos and set on her way home was a bit less easy, but some help turned up
after a while. You’d think people would be able to distinguish between dead and
dead drunk, but apparently not. Sometimes, in an environment like this where
chaotic things do occur, people leap to the most melodramatic conclusions.
Franglais
I’ve noticed
that the English have a tendency to pronounce any apparently foreign word as
though it were French (I guess it’s because French is the default foreign
language for us). For instance, my mother used to pronounce bergamot (the oil
which flavours Earl Grey tea) as “bair-zha-moe” (which ironically wouldn’t even
be correct in French). Another example is Farage, a name that appears French
and so gets pronounced “Fur-arzh”, but why? It’s not quite the same as the
genteel pronunciation of garage which seems to have won out over “garridge”
(which was quite normal when I was a boy) but that’s not natural English
either. Surely it’s the same syllable as at the end of manage, salvage or
porage? It’s very odd; why is he not Mr “Farridge”?
The BBC gets
itself into terrible confusion over some French names, with a desire to be
correct, but not be too pretentious (and actually pronounce things in a French
way). A recent test case was the rugby team Racing 92, who the BBC scrupulously
called “Rasseeng Ninety-Two”. Could they not spot the illogicality? “Rasseeng
Quatre-vingt-douze” would have been okay, but not “Rasseeng Ninety-Two”. Just
saying Racing 92 in English would probably have been better. They seem to have
abandoned their insistence on pronouncing the first S in Catalans Dragons which
they persisted with for some time, but that one is a total mix-up, because if
it’s French you wouldn’t pronounce the S, but if it’s Catalan you would, but
either way “Catalans” is an adjective which ought to come after the noun it
qualifies. Their website proclaims them to be Dragons Catalans, which makes
sense, and surely that (pronounced in a French way) ought to be their name.
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