Words, wasps and whatnot!

The French word "meurtre" which now means "murder" originally meant bruise. The English word "kill" originally meant "hit", giving a little insight into "a hit man". This is one of the odd facts I have picked up over the last week. 

Here's another: texting while driving kills more American teenagers than drink-driving does. I wonder what the statistics are for the UK? And how many people do you see on a regular basis using their mobile phones while driving? Too many. Texting is extra crazy, however, even if you think you can text-type without looking. The average texter, I read, takes their eye off the road for less than five seconds but at 55mph, that’s like driving the length of a football field blindfold. Selfies come into this madness as well. One in three Britons under 24 admitted snapping away while at the wheel in a recent survey for Ford. The latest stupidly dangerous trend is for making Vines, or short video clips, while driving; last month it emerged that a 23-year-old had filmed himself being chased by the police at 60mph through Burnley, ending with the prophetic words: “I’m going to prison now.” Not my kind of thrill seeking! 

Last night we stayed up late to watch TV. Phil goes out to play chess on a Thursday evening and when he came in last night we decided to watch the last episode of a series about the fire of London: The Great Fire, a romp through the London of Charles II, with splendid sets and well dressed rich people and dirty looking poor people. Not a bad series, it had a rather Disneyworld happy ending where Thomas Farriner (the aptly named baker from Pudding Lane - surely Farriner must have connections to farine or flour) saved his sister in law from being hanged for starting the fire as part of a papist plot, King Charles proved himself to be a strong king, despite what his brother thought of him earlier and good old Samuel Pepys and his wife learned to live with the love they had. As I said, a bit sugary! 

Oh, and the adverts! Because the mini series was on ITV there were commercial breaks. We have lost the habit of having our watching interrupted in this way. I swear the breaks were almost as long as the segments of drama. Back when I was a teacher and had to produce complicated lesson plans for inspections and observations, we were advised to plan our lessons in 10 - 15 minute chunks. This was the maximum expected attention span of students! Really! I wanted mine to study a text, work together at understanding it and extract some facts to relate back to the class. This demanded being on task for rather more than 10 minutes! However, if that is truly the maximum attention span of today's 16 to 18 year olds maybe it is as a result of watching TV programmes with too many commercial breaks. OK, another rant over! 

Anyway we stayed up late and so I went to bed later than usual. Phil stayed up even later and went off to sleep in the attic so as not to disturb me. All in vain because at five in the morning he did disturb me when he was woken by an angry wasp who stung him, probably because he turned over in bed and disturbed its waspy slumbers! Where did a wasp come from in November? Had it inadvertently flown in one sunny day and decided to winter over in our attic bedroom? How long would it have stayed there if Phil had not rolled over and made it angry? All unanswered questions. And that was the end of the wasp's attempts to spend winter in a warmer place than the great outdoors! And the end of the wasp, in fact!

Now, when I commented yesterday on the difficulty of keeping to any kind of routine, I wasn't expecting disruption of that kind!