Bank Holiday weekend and the weather is fine. With a Bank Holiday around the weathermen have stopped lamenting the drought and have started to say how fortunate we are to have some sunshine. It doesn’t take much to keep us happy, apparently.
Around here we’ve been having rainy nights and fine days, which suits me fine. Not good for those who work at night but that’s how it goes. We’re able to get the washing dry outdoors - I don’t have a tumble drier anyway - and we can go out for walks. We’ve been blackberrying again. At this rate, I shall have to start making jam!
Despite the rainy nights, the local reservoirs are low. We need some more rain. A friend of ours who lives on one of the Greek islands has been posting pictures and videos of the rain near her home, quite torrential rain not usually expected until the end of September. And the news is telling us of horrendous floods in Pakistan. The rain is falling but in the wrong places and at the wrong time. We can’t cope with it when it falls. The world has gone crazy!
There’s a story going round that the head of Thames Water is taking home £40,000 per week! If true, she won’t worry about the cost of energy. I wonder what she spends it on. Maybe it’s on stuff like this:
“A car used by Diana, Princess of Wales has sold for £650,000 at auction.
The black Ford Escort RS Turbo, driven by Diana from 23 August 1985 to 1 May 1988, sold to a UK buyer at the Silverstone Auctions sale on Saturday.”
It might well be a unique vehicle but once you’ve nought such an item what do you do with it? You would hardly want to drive it around the streets with the possibility of someone bumping into it or scratching its paintwork! Some people have more money than sense.
I’ve been getting annoyed about vocabulary. I read an article about monkeypox, one of the latest nasty diseases to pop up in the modern world. People are having difficulty getting vaccinations or as the article put it “jabs”. This was quite a learned-sounding article, full of scientific facts, so why did the writer use “jab” rather than “vaccination” or “injection”? A “jab” is something random, someone poking you with a finger, an umbrella or whatever they have to hand. In boxing it’s a short sharp blow. An injection or vaccination should be more precise. “Jab” is fine in a tabloid headline but I want proper scientific terminology in news reports, please!
In the weekend Guardian Seamus O’Reilly has a regular column which has been featuring his small son for quite some time now. Today he has been writing about his now four-year-old’s language development, including some of his amusing vocabulary mistakes. Among his favourites are “gerbils” for “germs” and the mispronunciation of “sandwich” as “samgich”. I suspect that last one will go down in their family annals. We are still likely to describe some very large thing as “fuge”, which was how Granddaughter Number One, now in her twenties, used to say “huge”. However, it might be time Seamus O’Reilly stopped using his son as column content. Some time in the future the embarrassment factor might kick in.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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