21 December 2004.
Inspired by .
One of the nice things about being temporarily back in Yorkshire is those moments when you're reminded that Alan Bennett is less a great writer and more a great transcriber of typical overheard Yorkshire conversations.
Onesuch in Harrogate this morning, from a man on the phone: "This is the first time I've ever spoken to someone on a horse."
And othersuch, in a secondhand bookshop:
Elderly man, entering: Is my friend here, do you know? I sent him this way on the expectation of finding Dashiell Hammett.
Shopkeeper: There was a man in here not long ago, but he bought a book on Indian armour and another on French embroidery.
Man: Yes, that's the fellow.
21 December 2004.
Inspired by .
"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
"When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose.
"Once a journey is designed, equipped and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognised can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it."
-- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
So that was Barcelona. I kinda liked it, in its way. New personal hi score.
Level up. To Madrid!
06 December 2004.
Inspired by .
Matt Webb's fingers are mightily impressive. (And yes, I too was sent to St Malo on a school trip, but all I learnt was how easy it is to buy cheap French lager underage.)
The fusball players of St Malo's bars aside, Matt's counting methods remind me of my time in Hong Kong, where I learnt to count to ten on one hand. Although not very expressive with their hands, Chinese people would always make the symbol for a number while saying it, often sub-consciously. The numbers I learnt were a bit like these, although 8, 9 and 10 were slightly different. By extension, it's easy enough to count to 100 using both hands to represent digits.
But that's nothing. The Chinese had an ancient manual counting system which seems to rely on memory as much as finger position - or incredible manual dexterity - but it got up to 100,000. As ever, the Venerable Bede had his own method, as do the users of Chisenbop, a great name for a kids TV puppet series if ever I heard one. (American Sign language also does one-handed counting, but relies more on the direction your hand is facing.) And in case you were thinking all this is only from the age of woodcuts and engravings, think again.
As well as bequeathing us the metric system, dactylonomy has left an inevitable handprint on certain languages as well.
"In Indo-European languages we are used to unanalyzable roots for the numbers; but in other families number names are derivations, often related to the process of counting on fingers and toes - eg. Choctaw 5 = tahlapi 'the first (hand) finished'; Klamath 8 ndan-ksahpta 'three I have bent over'; Unalit 11 atkahakhtok 'it goes down (to the feet)'; Shasta 20 tsec 'man' (considered as having 20 countable appendages)."
The same thing occurs in the Innuit language of Greenland, effectively a base-20 system where any number above 20 is "second person first hand".
Aside from all the finger puppetry, this list of Cantonese classifiers is rather fun too, and reminds me of the ever-wonderful Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge.