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Kindling and rekindling
Monday, January 5th, 2004 12:00 amWell, that was momentarily worrying. The computer took its own good time booting up, and a quick sachay into safe mode was unenlightning. It sems to be running quite nicely again now. Spontaneous problems and self-corrections always wory me where Microsoft is coincerned.
Well, it's 11.35pm on Sunday as I type this. I can no longer pretrend that the festive period holiday is still with us; it's back in the office tomorrow morning and within 10 minutes it will feel as though I've not had a fortnight off at all.
C'est la vie.
I return to my PC to find an e-mail from an old school mate of mine whom I haven't seen in nearly 27 years. Doesn't time fly? We were thick as thieves for a while at junior school, less so at Grammar School as the inevitable circles of friendship widened and separated and moved on. Then I went on to get a degree and lost touch. My folks moved out of Telford and up to Shrewsbury and so even the faint chance of our paths crossing again was painted over. And now, thanks to the old school website, he has got in touch, and I find myself faced with the need to reply. Except that I have no idea, after all this time what to say other than 'Hello, are you well? Did you ever pay me back that fiver?' When old friends have contacted me before I have been able to remember shared enthusiasms and reignite some kind of contact based on that. I can't remember any of the interests I once shared with Bill, and with the passage of years, there's no reason to suppose that we share anything now other than nostalgia.
Sad, really.
Over the holiday I managed to catch up on some of my reading backlog. Of particular merit and which I am now recommending to anyone with even a vague interest in the history of the English Language, is Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English which traces, in a very readable way, the development of the language from the disparate dialects imported to the British Isles by the Germanic invaders who eventually became the English, through to the development of modern creoles and even mobile phone txtng.
Being stoutly monolingual I have always been interested in the development of our language, and this book has rekindled that interest. Time, I think, to obtain a new copy of the Canterbury Tales and catch up on the marvels of Middle English. It is interesting to feel the rythmns inherent in the language and to noite that no matter how much it develops, imports new words and discards old ones, the underlying rythmn remains - particularly when spoken.
Since there is, or at least ought to be, an ordinance against me writing poetry (MacGonagle is a shining beacon of talent compared with Yours Truly), insofar as trying anything that rhymes, I think there may be more in the older, oral tradition of alliteration. Of course, breaking a piece of writing into the correct form to create alliteration on syllables as well as initial letters is no less challenging.
I feel a wave of research coming on.
But don't expect to see anything from me in the short term - as I've said, poetry is most decidedly not my forte. But there are people out there to whom it comes far more naturally, and it would be interesting to see if anyone could write a few lines of alliterative verse designed for declamation rather than silent reading...
Well, it's 11.35pm on Sunday as I type this. I can no longer pretrend that the festive period holiday is still with us; it's back in the office tomorrow morning and within 10 minutes it will feel as though I've not had a fortnight off at all.
C'est la vie.
I return to my PC to find an e-mail from an old school mate of mine whom I haven't seen in nearly 27 years. Doesn't time fly? We were thick as thieves for a while at junior school, less so at Grammar School as the inevitable circles of friendship widened and separated and moved on. Then I went on to get a degree and lost touch. My folks moved out of Telford and up to Shrewsbury and so even the faint chance of our paths crossing again was painted over. And now, thanks to the old school website, he has got in touch, and I find myself faced with the need to reply. Except that I have no idea, after all this time what to say other than 'Hello, are you well? Did you ever pay me back that fiver?' When old friends have contacted me before I have been able to remember shared enthusiasms and reignite some kind of contact based on that. I can't remember any of the interests I once shared with Bill, and with the passage of years, there's no reason to suppose that we share anything now other than nostalgia.
Sad, really.
Over the holiday I managed to catch up on some of my reading backlog. Of particular merit and which I am now recommending to anyone with even a vague interest in the history of the English Language, is Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English which traces, in a very readable way, the development of the language from the disparate dialects imported to the British Isles by the Germanic invaders who eventually became the English, through to the development of modern creoles and even mobile phone txtng.
Being stoutly monolingual I have always been interested in the development of our language, and this book has rekindled that interest. Time, I think, to obtain a new copy of the Canterbury Tales and catch up on the marvels of Middle English. It is interesting to feel the rythmns inherent in the language and to noite that no matter how much it develops, imports new words and discards old ones, the underlying rythmn remains - particularly when spoken.
Since there is, or at least ought to be, an ordinance against me writing poetry (MacGonagle is a shining beacon of talent compared with Yours Truly), insofar as trying anything that rhymes, I think there may be more in the older, oral tradition of alliteration. Of course, breaking a piece of writing into the correct form to create alliteration on syllables as well as initial letters is no less challenging.
I feel a wave of research coming on.
But don't expect to see anything from me in the short term - as I've said, poetry is most decidedly not my forte. But there are people out there to whom it comes far more naturally, and it would be interesting to see if anyone could write a few lines of alliterative verse designed for declamation rather than silent reading...
