Lingering Language

          When, recently, I came across a prose sentence that contained the words ‘desuetude’ and ‘decrepitude’, it struck me as having crossed over into the field of poetry. Was that the author’s intention? If avoidance of poetic form had been intended, they could have chosen to write ‘decrepitness’ (though, on checking, I see that it is generally no longer in use. It has, as it were, fallen into a state of desuetude.) Besides, alliteration and assonance are but two of poetry’s constituent ingredients.

          I’m probably overthinking the issue, but that can happen when you’re out for a solo stroll – or a ‘constitutional’, in old-fashioned parlance. When our local gym closed for a two-year re-fit, I was spared the indignities of traipsing up there in sports wear to slog away on a cross-trainer to keep the old ticker in shape. I made a plausible case (to my Other Half) for not joining another, nearby, on the grounds that it was twice as costly and I could get my exercise by walking and cycling instead. Not only are they cost-free, but these are useful activities that can be co-opted to a purpose, like running errands for her, for example. My case having prevailed, I now undertake, most days, to make such excursions.

          Whether I walk or cycle depends on both the weather and my intended goal. Cycling in the rain is no fun and can be dangerous – in traffic especially. Walking in the rain, if you surrender to the spirit of it, can be akin to the childish delights of puddle splashing. Cycling on a fine day can be exhilarating, though the ‘wind-in-your-hair effect is these days somewhat cancelled by safety helmets. Still, you can cover a lot of ground on a bike in a short time, which is ideal for multi-stop missions. Walking in fine weather is a more leisurely affair and allows opportunities to listen to a podcast or observe and consider one’s surroundings. Some days, it’s a toss-up as to which I’ll choose.

          One particular day, I walked across a park and, on coming to the road, had a view of the back of the parade of shops along it. One of them, a restaurant, displayed an advertisement painted directly onto the brickwork. Although in an advanced state of decrepitude, the old-fashioned typeface remained unambiguously legible: “Catering for Beanfeasts, Parties & Clubs”.

          It was the word “beanfeasts” that intrigued me. Reminiscent of the era of Billy Bunter and jolly bunfights (whatever they were), it seemed quaint and in need of having its origins explained. The dictionary is unsure of the etymology but describes it as a meal given by employers for employees; but who “feasts” on beans these days? Even vegan cuisine has more exotic options for celebratory meals. The word may be heading for redundancy, but one certainly hopes that the tradition will not.

          Whether we like it or not, some words inevitably lose their relevance or pungency because of changes in behavioural patterns, economic activities and social etiquettes. Future generations may well scratch their heads over the origins of everyday verbs, such as ‘to google’, for example. But lose some, gain some; the English language continues to give birth to words and phrases as required, not only by behavioural changes but also by other languages and cultures mingling as the internet universalises communication between us. The Oxford Dictionary is updated regularly to acknowledge the newcomers, so I anticipate a new verb soon will replace ‘to google’. Could it be ‘to AI’?

         I hope we can come up with something more elegant than that but, meanwhile, it’s encouraging to see the adoption of words and phrases from across the globe, for while the mother nation itself faces decrepitude, at least its language has not fallen into desuetude.

 

Suits You, Sir

          It was slow in arriving, but winter finally nipped at our heels last week. With a touch of frost and blue skies, it showed its benevolent face, the one that invites you to take a walk in the park, simply for the joy of it – and, perhaps, to justify the purchase of that puffer jacket.

          Yes, you guessed it; I am curious about the ubiquity of puffer jackets. What started as a down-filled garment intended for mountaineers and arctic explorers, became essential kit for outdoor adventurers at all levels of competence. So far, so understandable. Then it began to appear on the high street, which also makes a degree of sense if, for example, you’re a weekend hiker who lives in, say, Sunderland, in which case you might as well get some daily use out of the warm jacket you bought for slogging around the fells.

          Where it gets less obvious is when people wear arctic-grade jackets in the city, in summertime. Notwithstanding the claim of the Andrew formerly known as Prince, I doubt there are many of us who don’t sweat when the temperature rises – and it surely rises steeply when you don a down-stuffed gilet, jacket or full-length, Russian-style overcoat, complete with fur-trimmed hood, just to go shopping. There is, of course, a rational explanation for such an irrational choice of garment: fashion.

          Is there anyone who can resist the urge to be fashionably dressed? Despite having reached an age at which the chains of vanity begin to fall away, I have not yet given up on it. But if we don’t want to fade out quietly, along with our dated wardrobes, we older people are faced with particular challenges, as High Street clothing retailers focus on younger markets. There is always the fallback M&S option, but it doesn’t suit those who have more flamboyant tastes reflective, one supposes, of their desire to express individuality, youthfulness or, well, flamboyance.

          Whatever drives one’s choice of garb, I have concluded that these few guiding principles are useful in narrowing down my shopping list: comfort, quality, utility, colour co-ordination and absence of conspicuous branding – although the last requirement is undeniably a form of fashion statement in itself. My aim is for my outfits to accommodate my current lifestyle, interests and activities, which I suppose is the same for everyone, excepting actual fashion victims.

          And so to footwear, formerly known as shoes. In anticipation of a few weeks of travelling to and from Italy, by train, I decided to minimise baggage and take just one pair of multi-purpose shoes. They would have to be comfortable yet stout, to withstand touristic trudging in and around cities come rain or shine. You may think this a tall order, yet I do have such shoes; it’s just that they are on their uppers and I would hate to be seen unfashionably and shabbily shod in Italy, of all places.

          I took some time to go shopping, without my OH as style consultant. There is, of course, no shortage of hiking shoes that would meet the specs, apart from the aesthetic stipulation. Their unsubtle designs and colours would not coordinate with the palette of my limited wardrobe of travelling togs. Black and restrained is my requirement. I trawled the shops with racks of regular, black leather shoes and found none that met the other criteria. I tried the casual, fabric styles, which were comfy but useless in the rain. I peered into the windows of trainer shops and recoiled in horror at the garish and outlandish designs.

          But all this hapless hunting around the High Street got me thinking I might be obsessing a tad too much. The shoes I had on were doing their job so well, it would be a shame to retire them. Perhaps a better course of action might be to call off the search and check out the scene in Naples, where I might just find everyone has adopted puffer jackets lurid trainers since last I was there. 

Delay, Repay, Repeat

          As our train approached Paddington station, twenty-nine minutes behind schedule, there was a palpable sense of anticipation among some of the passengers. This was due, not to the excitement of arriving in London, but to the possibility of getting monetary compensation for the delay. One more minute and we would qualify, on the sliding scale, for a 50% refund of our fare.

          The driver, of course, knew this. The question tormenting us was, would he side with the hopeful claimants and slow down a bit so that we could hit the half-hour jackpot, or was he a loyal company man striving to save his employer money by speeding up and limiting us to the mere 25% that applies for delays of up to fifteen minutes?

          There are, of course, relatively few travellers who would relish arriving late and getting some money back. The majority will have connections to make, appointments to keep and urgent business to conclude at their destinations. For them, time is money too – but in a negative way. For those of us with a laid-back lifestyle, the game is different.

          I travel by train frequently enough to have an idea of how often the ‘delay repay’ scheme kicks in. I am also well versed in the intricacies of a claim process designed to flummox the first timer and frustrate the faint-hearted. The last compensation I received was 100%, even though it was not really the operator’s fault that we were delayed for over an hour. There had been an incident involving the emergency services that screwed up the timetable for hundreds of journeys in the Somerset region. How do train operators factor this sort of phenomenon into their pricing structure? Considering, also, that there are the nine types of national 30% discount card and innumerable regional schemes offering similar benefits, it’s something of a mystery to me how train operators make a significant profit. Are there sufficient people prepared to pay the full price of a ‘walk on’ fare and subsidise the rest of us?

          Nor is this system unique to Britain. The last time we were in Italy, I noticed that train journeys there featured so many routine announcements urging passengers to claim compensation for delays that one speculated as to whether there was a Mafia scam involved. Making a claim, however, was forbidding for us foreigners. The online procedure was in the native tongue – naturally – and way too complex for my linguistic ability. So, since we are planning to travel by train to spend a few weeks in Naples over Christmas and New Year, I have decided to brush up on the lingo, using the free version of an app.

          The app is effective. It is also clever, in that it knows when you’ve skipped a day’s practice and emails you a useful reminder – though that last part may spook the paranoid. Speaking of which, the lessons so far have been focussed on finding one’s way to a railway station and asking about trains. Now, I had no choice of lesson topic, so it may just be a coincidence that airports don’t come up, but I sense the tentacles of Google at work. Who told Google about the trains? Was it Airbnb? Was it the payment platform we used to buy train tickets? Was this information valuable to the app in some way that I have yet to fathom?

          Anyway, I’m on day six of the lesson program and getting a little weary of repeating Dov’è la Stazione ferroviaria, per favore? Surely, it’s time to move on to “How do I claim delay repay, please?” Maybe that’s not included in the free version of the app and I will have to cough up some cash. No worries: our train driver obliged by arriving thirty one minutes late at Paddington, so I could use the refund I’m expecting.

 

Lucky Me

          From a window overlooking a car park, I observe a disturbing incident. An ordinary looking car pulls up and its occupants emerge. One, a young man, is screaming, flailing his arms and stamping his feet. He is in distress – emotional or psychological. Then, two young women of about the same age as the man get out. One is the driver. They stand by, calmly observing the man, whose tantrum resembles that of a toddler, intense but non-threatening. They appear to be accustomed to his behaviour. Are they his minders? After a while, they pull out vapes and puff on them while they wait for him to calm down. When he does, they cajole him back into the car, though his screaming continues, sporadically.

          I turned my attention to business in hand and, when I looked again, some fifteen minutes later, they had driven off. I can only guess at their circumstances, but one thing is certain: I’m thankful that fate has not, so far, placed me in a similar situation.

          As it happened, I was already counting my lucky stars just the day before. It was a dreary, wet and windy Sunday, ideal for hunkering down in front of a big screen, so I headed to the cinema with some enthusiasm. Unfortunately, I had not factored-in the subject matter of the film, Die, My Love, a dramatic study of a woman’s struggle with perinatal depression. Harrowing is the word I would use to describe the story and, when I left the cinema, the weather looked somehow even more grizzly. The only bright spot was that I had never had to deal with such tragic drama in my own life.

          These two instances of psychological turmoil – one in real time, the other as re-told – caused me not just to be thankful for my own good fortune, but to ponder the importance of empathy. None of us knows the troubles that strangers have to deal with. If we did, we might look with more compassion on their plight, such as we might hope for ourselves if the tables were turned.

          But not all of my week was spent in the bubble of an undeservedly charmed life touched intermittently by other people’s woes. I experienced something almost unheard of in recent times: I got an unsolicited and unscheduled phone call from an NHS doctor. I had heard of their existence and had even seen one not so long ago, but I assumed they were in very short supply and far too busy to bother with the worried well, such as me, but it transpired that I had unwittingly provoked one of them into taking action.

          The previous day, I had asked the receptionist at the clinic to cancel my prescription for statins. She asked if my reason was to do with side effects and I answered with a flat “no”. We left it there but, in fact, there has been a side effect, of sorts. It amounts to an ongoing discussion with my Other Half as to whether we should be taking drugs – preventative or otherwise – without questioning their efficacy and the ‘big pharma’ motive behind their promotion. I know for certain she’s not an anti-vaxxer and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to see my early demise, so I thought I would abstain until my next round of blood and cholesterol tests, just to show openness to the argument.

          The receptionist obviously ratted on me, which explains the doctor’s call presenting to me, personally, the statistical case for the preventative powers of statins. I caved. After all, he was doing what the NHS is supposed to do (and what for-profit medical systems shy away from): pre-empting the need for future, costly medical treatments. My charmed life is to be extended for as long as can be and with as little expense as possible to our NHS – or so they would have me believe.

Apostrophic Tradition

          The apostrophe having dropped out of the word Halloween is something that would concern me inordinately if I thought it were due to grammatical dereliction. In that case, it would be up there, on a par with potatoe’s and other abominations in my line of fire. But the omission of the little punctuation mark in this case signals something altogether more sinister: the erasure of history! How many kids who dress up as spooks on the last day of October know that the origin of their capers lies in a Christian feast day? And what is the relevance of spiders to this ritual?

          One of the benefits of living in a block of flats is that your door is generally inaccessible to trick-or-treaters but, on this last occasion, I did not escape scot-free from the intrusive shenanigans. The flat in which I took refuge is in the centre of Manchester, where it was not children who caused a nuisance, but adult revellers in the streets, whose noisy, drug and alcohol-fuelled antics went on until dawn, as did the sound of sirens from the emergency vehicles dispatched to rescue them from self-harm. How many of them were out celebrating the eve of All Hallows Day? What even is “All Hallows”? Well, in modern parlance, it translates as all things holy, or “all saints,” according to ecclesiastical practice. You would never have guessed that from the goings-on in Manchester.

          The present form of Halloween, largely the business of children, originated in the USA and was adopted here only lately. Boomers like me have no recollection of pumpkins featuring in our childhood. We might have been aware, to a greater or lesser extent, of the mark on the religious calendar, but nobody dressed as ghosts. It’s not surprising that we can’t bring ourselves to embrace the artificial and apparently random spookification of All Hallows. It adds nothing of value to our lives (unless we’re in the fancy dress business). To the contrary, it erases an aspect of our social history, already fading in the light of secularism.

          Lest my tone be mistaken as advocating against American social imports, I should point out that my generation enthusiastically adopted rock’n’roll (apostrophes and all), though by then, of course, we had pretensions to adulthood and were on the cusp of becoming paying consumers. One assumes that it is the parents of today who provide the wherewithal to kit-out their kids in faux scary and help them carve faces into pumpkins. Speaking as one with no experience of parenthood, I can only imagine there is irresistible pressure within children’s peer-groups to out-Halloween each other. Far be it from me, therefore, to advocate discouraging the purchase of mountains of disposable tat for their excited offspring. That way lies tearful tantrums, so I’m told. Rumour also has it that there is an entire city, somewhere in China, whose raison d’être is to manufacture this stuff and were its customers to fade away, its economic future would be dire. But hey, c'est la vie, capitalist-style.

          Five evenings after Halloween, there is another celebration, irrefutably British and indisputably secular in origin. As such, it is resistant to foreign interference. Guy Fawkes night still follows the same rituals now as it did when I was a kid: children blagging money from adults with their “penny for the Guy” schtick, a box of fireworks for dad to let off in the garden and a bonfire on which to burn (an effigy of) Guy Fawkes. It’s all good, harmless fun – as long as you’re careful with the combustibles and don’t take the effigy-burning too seriously. Apart from fancier, more expensive fireworks, there doesn’t seem to be much scope for further monetisation of the tradition. Could that be the reason for its enduring sameness? Mind you, there is simmering controversy as to the title. If this night belongs to Mr. Fawkes, surely there should be an apostrophe in the spelling?