Weed management and other crucial issues

 

Apparently, I’m worried about weed management solutions, controlling sucking pests, glypholate (whatever this may be), government advertising on fossil fuels, the need to “kick fossil fuels out of my super”, climate change and domestic violence; oh, and I speak Spanish. My Kindle is infested with bizarre ads each time I refresh my Solitaire screen. And because I like to play Solitaire with my morning several cups of tea, the machine also thinks I like to gamble and advertises gambling sites in a strip at the top of the screen.

Saving the world is hard, one ad tells me. Well, I know that, thank you very much. We Jews are brought up on the notion of Tikkun Olam, the need to save/repair the world. Sorry it’s taken you multiple thousands of years to catch up.

All of which almost adds up to “Yaa Boo Sucks” for Artificial Intelligence.

Except for one other thing which is decidedly creepy. When I’m typing an email, the computer knows what I want to say and finishes my phrases or sentences for me. It also supposes that it’s better at grammar and punctuation than I am, a conclusion I would seriously debate. Mind you, considering the appalling level of grammar and punctuation one comes across in almost everything one reads, perhaps this computer aptitude is A Good Thing. Have you ever reflected how hard some people find it to know when and where to put the apostrophe in “it’s”! I would have thought this to be blindingly obvious but I’m wrong again.

I sometimes reflect on the fact that thanks initially to computers, this is the first generation in human history when children know more than adults. During the interminable weeks of “Grandma School” with the seven-year-old, the hours were punctuated by calls to the 12-year-old to navigate round some part of the computer and fix my various problems. The teachers, most of whom are much younger than my own children, all seem perfectly attuned to prepare lessons for on-line learning and talented at making the work colourful and appealing as well as necessary. Obviously teacher training has a large visual/computer component if occasionally deficient in broader knowledge. For example, they were teaching the children about onomatopoeia. I would have thought this word rather too adult but what do I know! Well, actually, I do know that you can’t ask children in a writing exercise to include “AN” onomatopoeia. Grrrrr!

I know I’ve lost the battle to keep media and data correctly plural. Media and data are – not is – but who cares these days. I also haven’t won the “using verbs as nouns” issue but I continue to tread my lonely path refusing to diarise. I won’t ever use the phrase “going forward” or tell you how some action has “impacted” the situation; what’s wrong with “had an impact on …”? I also loathe the radio journalists’ use of the un-verb “commentate”; it’s comment, dear. And there’s my other bugbear; collective nouns are supposed to take singular verbs. So the government is, not are; so is the local football team, the Council and multitudes of other examples.

I have recently come across some examples of modern language gone mad. These were genuinely used during a meeting very recently. The participants were urged to use a “pure bottom up cell backed view” and – this is priceless – “list and drop and then aggregate with some quantitative overlay”.

As Shakespeare said: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

However, I’m not entirely sure that any of these grammatical and punctuation issues are worth a row of beans. I suspect that I’m the one who’s wrong, not because any of the grammatical causes which I espouse are incorrect but just because it probably doesn’t matter any more and I’m just left out in the grammatical wilderness.

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Samuel Goldwyn, renown for his mangling of the English language

“An oral contract is not worth the paper it’s written on.”

“They’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.”

 

 What girls were supposed to be

 

In my youth, I owned an autograph book; I think most girls had one. It was used to collect autographs which at the time was a cool thing to do and was also the place for your friends to write a sententious collection of aphorisms and rhymes which ranged from soppy to nauseating. I remember three which will give you a taste.

Good, better, best,

Never let it rest,

Until the good is better,

And the better best.

 

The wise old owl, he sat in an oak.

The more he heard, the less he spoke.

The less he spoke the more he heard.

Why can’t we be like that wise old bird.

 

And the most sickening if all: “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will, be clever”!

(This last practically encapsulated the attitude to women in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Our school was unusual in having a “careers advisor”. She was an elderly woman and given to telling all in the top classes that we should go to university and study Arts. Being told to go to university was a great leap forward for girls, but I recall that we were generally encouraged to become nurses, not doctors, legal secretaries and not lawyers and possibly other lower tier jobs in the sciences.)

In our teenage we collected other soppy writing and poetry the most nauseous of which was a book called The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. Thanks to the wonders of Google (given that my copy of The Prophet has unaccountably disappeared) I can bring you a flavour of the work.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.”

 

Much more endearing was the poetry of Omar Khayyam, in translation by Edward FitzGerald. Herewith some samples …

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes - or it prospers; and anon,

Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face

Lighting a little Hour or two - is gone.

 

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai

Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,

How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp

Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

 

All this stuff was very girly. I’d like to bet that no bloke of my generation had ever read either.

At my school, we were also exposed to masses of poetry and drama, especially of course to Shakespeare. I still have the poetry anthologies of my school days which I think did a good job in exposing us to the breadth of English literature. Our English teacher was a remarkable woman called Mrs O’Dell who had been a prisoner at Changi concentration camp in Singapore. She inculcated us with a love of poetry that I suspect most of us still have today. And I’ve written before about how my school celebrated Shakespeare with annual performances, and how I performed famous Shakespearean soliloquies in Eisteddfods.

Oddly, I didn’t study English at university but I think it was this early immersing in poetry and drama which contributed to those talents which I may have brought to journalism and certainly to speechwriting.

I’m feeling most sentimental right now, so I think I’ll end with another Omar Khayyam quatrain:

“I sometimes think that never blows so red

The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;

That every Hyacinth the Garden wears

Dropt in its Lap from some once Lovely head.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Sir James Goldsmith: “When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy.”

 

 Dunny days

 

Is it possible that toilet paper is the greatest invention of civilisation? Just think about it for a minute and imagine its predecessors. In Australia we know about cut up newspapers in the backyard dunny. For my overseas readers, the dunny was a freestanding small building in the back yard with a rudimentary toilet, the cut-up newspaper on a nail and red-backed spiders, one of our most poisonous species, lying in wait. I’ve never experienced one, I hasten to add, but the image is part of Australia’s mythology. Interestingly, in the first of Clive James autobiographies when he talks about his early years in Kogarah, a middle-class suburb, he records the dunny man coming to empty the septic tank/dunny. I’ve no idea what preceded the cut-up newspapers; perhaps in upper class environments it was cloth, in which case some lowly menial had to not only collect and empty the chamber pot from under the bed but wash the cloths as well!

I should, I know, give the “greatest invention” title to the wheel or the invention of writing in all its wondrous forms or, so much later, the printing press. I’ve recently learned things about two of these.

We have tended to label a culture without wheeled transport as “primitive” and marvel at, for example, the Inca who, despite huge achievements all around in every aspect of society apparently didn’t have the wheel. An article I read in preparation for this blog told me differently. Apparently they knew about the wheel – children played with wheeled carts – but chose not to use wheeled carts for transport. The author’s explanation is to point to the high Andes where the Inca lived and notes that like high mountain ranges elsewhere, the best method of transport is on foot for the people and on animals for the goods; in the case of the Inca it was llamas.

(“The one-l lama he’s a priest, the two-l llama he’s a beast and I will bet a silk pyjama there isn’t any three-l lllama”: with thanks to Ogden Nash.)

In thinking about the printing press, I viewed a first-rate documentary on Guttenberg’s invention with Stephen Fry as the narrator and enthusiast. I suppose there are some of you out there who don’t take to Stephen Fry but I think he’s utterly marvellous, across all genres. In this documentary (which I came across on YouTube) he not only tells Guttenberg’s history but encourages a craftsman to actually make a Guttenberg press, no easy thing as there’s no image of the beast other than a sketch from some time later. Fry also gets involved in making the moveable type in the precise type-face of Guttenberg’s civilisation-changing Bible and made rag paper in the traditional way to print it on (although some few of the Bibles were printed on vellum). And finally he was able literally to get his hands on one of the only 48 Guttenberg Bibles left in existence, only 21 complete.

I’ve read Fry’s marvellous books on Greek and Roman legends – Mythos and Heroes­ – and his equally marvellous Troy, and laughed out loud during episodes of QI. What a polymath; we could call him a true Renaissance man.

Now after that bit of eulogising, let’s return to Citius Altius Fortius or oldest, finest, best (English is such a difficult language – it should be bestest) and so on.

The Roman orator and moraliser Cicero once wrote that the Jews “were the only people to have contributed nothing to civilisation”. Pity he isn’t alive today so we could stuff those words back down his sanctimonious gullet. To be a little bit fair, he apparently said this in the white heat of a legal case he was arguing – but who wants to be fair.

Interestingly, someone has recently pointed out that the Jewish Bible has the precise instructions for coping with the spread of illness that we are now dealing with during COVID 19. In Exodus 30:18-21 the Lord tells Moses that Aaron, the high priest, and his sons “throughout their generations” must wash their hands with water “so that they may not die”; in Leviticus 13:4,5,46 it tells us that if we are infected with a “leprous disease” we must keep our distance, cover our mouths and avoid contact with others. And if we are infected, we must remain between seven and 14 days in quarantine!

Speaking of Jews, our greatest contribution to civilisation is possibly the latke. Latkes are grated potatoes mixed with grated or finely sliced onions and a little potato flour, salt and pepper then fried in a good bit of oil. The first one always falls apart (only sissies add an egg) but the rest are simply ambrosial. Mind you, they’re best straight out of the frying pan so line the family up in the kitchen. Other cuisines have potato pancakes – the Dutch and the Germans come to mind – but I can assure you nothing beats a latke.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

J. Paul Getty: “If you can actually count your money you are not really rich.”

 

  

Elocution

 

For some reason which now escapes me, I did not learn ballet. Despite the fact that most young girls did, that I was skinny and small and that my beloved cousin Penny went to ballet lessons, it all passed me by. (Penny, by the way, does not remember learning ballet so one or other of us has a screw loose.)

Instead, I went to elocution. This was chosen by my parents to offset the Australian accent I was developing. I recall my father being somewhat puzzled at the broad Australian accent – Ocker as we called it – trotted out by even educated Aussies. Bob Hawke, for one, had two voices; one broad Ocker and the other a touch less rough, according to his company; I heard him use both.

We came from England and my parents had a kind of generalised British accent, not posh but definitely not regional. So, to elocution I went. My teacher was a nice little body who had made a very minor career out of performing A. A. Milne poems. But she had much grander ideas for me. Early on in the piece, when I was, I think, eight, she started sending me to the Eisteddfods. My first appearance was as one of 80+ children (all girls if I recall correctly) performing a completely unimportant poem called The Ant.

A year or two later, when I was around 10, I began performing Shakespeare in the category called Under 16 Character Solo Recital in Costume. So there I was, not even a teenager, reciting the sombre speech of Henry VIII’s Queen Katherine trying to persuade him not to divorce her and the passionate speech of Juliet as she took the potion. These were successful and I won more than once; in fact I have kept a cheque for one guinea and its accompanying letter for having won something or another back in 1959. Reciting Shakespeare, is, in fact, my only party trick; I can make sense of the language on sight. Unfortunately it’s not a skill called for these days – or perhaps ever.

I was blessed to attend Abbotsleigh high school under the direction of the marvellous Betty Archdale. Her brother was an actor and she was very fond of theatre. Each year, each class chose a scene from a Shakespearean play to perform for the school. They were adjudicated and the best few performed for the parents. The whole school also put on a play or musical each year. I recall being cast as Hortense, the French maid, in our production of The Boy Friend. Regrettably, to say I couldn’t sing is a gross understatement. So for Hortense’s solo number they had me “sing” it in front of the curtain while someone who actually could sing did so behind the curtain. It must have been convincing because Miss Archdale told my parents she had no idea I had such a lovely voice.

We Abbotsleigh girls also joined the Barker boys from their school up the road in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. I desperately wanted to play Lady Bracknell but was cast as the insipid Cicily instead. After all, Lady B had all the best lines: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

In our leaving year, our mandatory Shakespeare play was The Tempest. The school decided to put on a lavish production involving the entire year in acting roles and other years as helpers of various sorts. Parents were also involved, one having the sole duty of devising makeup for Ariel. I was cast as Caliban, the “monster”, and dressed with my own hair wild and matted and more hair growing from my cheeks; I also wore Balinese dancers’ metal fingertips reversed so they turned down like claws. For years afterwards people would come up to me and say they recognised me as Caliban. Not, I think, an unalloyed compliment.

I always intended to become an actress, planning to go to London and study at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); NIDA did not exist in those days. My parents were very canny. They said that of course I could go to London and study at RADA; they just thought it made sense for me to do a university course first so I would always “have something to fall back on”. They evidently didn’t think much of my chances to earn substantial funds as an actor (or actress as it was then).

Well, I went to Sydney University to study for an Arts degree and became one of the world’s highly educated unemployables. I recall trying out for a role at Uni in a Shakespeare play – The Tempest again – for a production John Bell was to produce; for some reason now forgotten, the play was never staged. Instead of theatre, I became totally immersed in the disciplines of Ancient History and Archaeology, including the very new (at Sydney Uni) discipline of Aboriginal Archaeology which was mostly taught out of the Anthropology Department. This led me to participate in several “digs”, archaeological excavations. One major dig was four weeks in the bush south of Sydney excavating a large cave. As I’ve written before, this not only introduced me to field archaeology but also to digging and sanitising latrines, spending days getting very, very dirty in a bikini for the heat, changing clothes in a sleeping bag and the wonders of a Coolgardie Cooler, a contraption of wood and wet cloth which used the principle of evaporation to cool the food on its shelves. I also dug more than once on the south coast and have fond memories of yarns round the campfire and billy tea just as if I was a real Aussie and not an almost acclimatised Brit.

I put the acting to good use in my early 20s when along with some others I founded the Sydney Jewish Theatre. It produced a number of plays over a few years which the community faithfully supported. My mother and my Uncle Cyril (the one who should have got my piano!) were also part of the troupe, which was rather lovely. Many years later I also performed in a neighbourhood theatre but mostly I have used my theatrical skills, such as they were/are, to “act” the speeches I was increasingly having to give. I had never learned to speak extemporaneously so all my speeches were written, by me or others. Like Winston Churchill, my mother told me. I then read the speeches, but did that with, I think, reasonable flair.

With my memory the way it is, there’s no chance in God’s wide world that I could ever again perform in a play, but I’m still up for speeches should anyone want me.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: From the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in the ‘70s: “The Great Wall, I have been told, is the only man-made structure on earth that is visible from the moon. For the life of me I cannot see why anyone would go to the moon to look at it, when, with almost the same difficulty, it can be viewed in China.”

 

The cost of old age
 

Getting old is an expensive business. I trail clouds of doctors behind me, all of whom have to be paid occasionally very large fees. I have, or have had recently, a general practitioner, a cardiologist, a gerontologist, a nephrologist, a respiratory physician, a neurosurgeon, a gastroenterologist, an ENT doctor, a dentist and an optician. I also spend more on pills and potions at the chemist than I ever do on beauty products – that’s pretty obvious – and the only reason the hairdresser hasn’t sent me bankrupt (apart from COVID) is what has proven in retrospect to be a fine choice not to dye my hair and stay grey.

Because for me getting old included getting fat, I’ve also spent small fortunes on new clothes, despite purchasing them from – as I’ve said before – less than high class stores. I am very acquisitive when it comes to cheap clothes and have done some COVID shopping on-line. So I now have racks of very large shirts which I can wear and other racks with very small shirts which I can’t. The fact that I can’t go out wearing my nice new shirts is a problem; on the day lockdown ends I shall emerge as a (fat) butterfly from my COVID chrysalis and model my purchases outside.

I shall, of course, have to buy new earrings to match my new shirts; since I had my ears pierced at the age of 72 I’ve been purchasing new earrings from market stalls and car boot sales and anticipate continuing on this course as the sort of jewellery I purchase is not ruinously expensive. And because buying new earrings is FUN!

My other expenses are my hobbies, indulged in far more now I’ve retired. I patchwork (expensive fabric and classes), embroider (expensive kits) and have projects on the go in needlepoint, creative stitching (very expensive), basket weaving and knitting (not so expensive). The cancellation this year of the Craft and Quilt show has saved me hundreds of dollars but denied me the pleasure of wandering around for an entire day and visiting a kaleidoscope of stalls with fabrics, buttons, embroidery threads, needlepoint and embroidery kits and more fabrics!

Let me talk some more about fabric. There’s a saying I’ve heard from patchworkers: “She who dies with the most fabric wins”. Your collection of fabrics is called your stash and is principally made up of “fat quarters”, quarter-metre fabric lengths cut in a particular way, not cut across the bolt from selvage to selvage. (The selvage is the “self-edge” where the fabric is gripped by the machine used in its manufacture). Patchwork shops from all around the country have stalls at the craft fair with boxes full of fat quarters standing on edge – a cornucopia of colours and patterns and utterly irresistible.

Apart from fabric, my other collecting passion is threads of all different types, colours and textures. I have boxes of them, stored in what originated I believe as tackle boxes for fishermen – plastic boxes divided internally into small cubes.

Other expenses associated with increasing age are book purchases. Since I’ve owned a Kindle I’ve bought literally hundreds of books this way and I also buy “real” books from time to time. Given my difficulty in remembering what I’ve read, you would imagine I’d stick with the same books and read them over and over. But the stunning variety of books available to you on a Kindle is as enticing as buying fat quarters from the craft show.

Fortunately, I have no interest in bling so my spending isn’t in jewellery shops. Nor is it for multiple-thousand dollar shoes or handbags and certainly not for the even greater expense of couture clothes.

I am perfectly comfortable in my Katies shirts reading my Kindle books or doing my embroidery or patchwork and glad I still have the eyesight to do it all.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations: Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilisation: “I think it would be a good idea.”