After I got rained on coming back from my run yesterday morning, the day mostly improved but with occasional lapses into wet and wild once more. The greatest of the rollers out at sea had calmed down, there were fishermen out on the beach and I saw people walking out to the lighthouse again. During the last few days, such an activity might have seen you blown off the breakwater and onto the ocean.
In the afternoon yesterday I managed to join in the Italian conversation class on zoom. I had to go down to the foyer of the hotel to have a strong enough wifi signal. This was mostly okay but one of our group kept moaning about extraneous noise whenever anyone spoke to the receptionist at the other end of the foyer. So I kept having to mute myself except for when I actually had something to say - bang goes spontaneity! So it goes.
It seems there is another pro-peace in Palestine demonstration planned for Saturday in London, which just happens to be Remembrance Day. Consequently the Metropolitan police have been considering banning the march on the grounds that it would be inappropriate. How odd that an appeal for an end to fighting should be deemed inappropriate on a day that celebrates peace and remembers those who died to achieve it. The ever-compassionate Suella Braverman apparently said, “The hate marchers need to understand that decent British people have had enough of these displays of thuggish intimidation and extremism.” It seems to me that an awful lot of people are being wrongly labeled as “hate marchers” and “thugs”.
Now, something less serious. When we were university students one of our professors went on and on about Received Pronunciation, standard English in other words, the “correct” way of saying things. Now it seems that standard English is disappearing, replaced by MLE, Multicultural London English, the dialect of young ethnic minority people in London and the south-east of England, popularised by grime music and TV shows. MLE has risen in line with the decline of the accent that hitherto distinguished working-class Londoners: cockney. Most working-class, young, white British people in southern England today either speak MLE or the accent that characterises working-class white people in Essex and Hertfordshire: estuary English. Young footballers who originate from other countries speak it perfectly.
And although it has not yet replaced the Northern English accents, I hear traces of it. The letters “th” as in “think” and “this” become “f” and “v” - our own Granddaughter Number Two does it, and then maintains that she is physically incapable of saying anything different. And please don’t get me started on the demise of the letter “t”, replaced by the glottal stop, as in “li’’le bo’’le” for “little bottle”. Even some BBC presenters cannot say “t” in the middle of a word. So much for BBC english! I despair!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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