A worsening day. Dog & people beds. Some stuff about words. Plastic people.

It was fine when I went for a run at 9 o’clock. Later I went out to catch a bus to the supermarket and it was just beginning to rain. By the time I came out of the supermarket, it was raining heavily. The day has been deteriorating!

I went running later than I intended as I am still reluctant to leave my nest, aka my bed, in the morning. Scanning the newspapers I came upon this article in which Tim Dowling writes about a “Snuggle Pod”, a sort of dog bed for humans, advertised as “The perfect spot for quality bonding time,” in one online offer: a kind of nest for humans and dogs, in other words. He admits to having a dog bed, one intended for a dog, not a human, in his bedroom. Why he wants his dog to sleep in his bedroom, I simply cannot imagine. The dog apparently settles down in its own bed and regularly migrates to his owner’s bed in the middle of the night! He even agrees with those who say you should not sleep with your dog. So why does he allow it to sleep in his bedroom? As ever, I am mystified by the habits of dog-lovers! 

Now, here’s some stuff about words. 

It seems that January 30 is the Day of Saudade in Brazil. I have often remarked that there is a ‘day’ for everything but it must be odd to wish people a Happy Day of Saudade. A contradiction in terms. Saudade, you see, is a feeling characterized by a sad yet tender longing for something or someone absent. The word captures a sense of nostalgia and an acceptance that what is longed for may never return. You get a lot it in fado songs. It’s more than just nostalgia, involving sadness but also giving a sort of pleasure in feeling sad. In Galicia they also have ‘morriña’, the deep longing that Galician emigrants feel for their homeland. That’s why in countries like Switzerland you can find people playing the ‘gaita’, the Galician accordion, and dancing tradition dances in Galician folk costumes. 

Apparently the Welsh have something similar called ‘hiraeth’ and the Germans have ‘Sehnsucht’. I think we just have nostalgia and usually there will be somebody telling you not to be so soft. 

I found a list of Africa-related collective nouns, some of which we all know already but some new to me: 

A parade of elephants

A band of gorillas

A journey of giraffes

A clan of meerkats

A troop of monkeys

A dazzle of zebras (one of my favourites!)

A pride of lions

A flock of ostriches

A crash of rhinoceroses (another of my favourites!)

A coalition of cheetahs

A bloat of hippopotamuses (yet another of my favourites!)

There you go!

There are rather a lot of things that are really useful but which we might have been better never inventing/discovering. One of these is plastic. Our bodies have probably absorbed huge amounts of what they call ‘nanoparticles’. We are becoming plastic! They’ve been doing some research into the situation on the tops of the highest mountains and they’re still finding nanoparticles, carried up there presumably by the wind. And the biggest source of nanoplastics is car tyres! The motor industry has a lot to answer for. Here’s a link to an article about it.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!