Tag Archives: grammar

Pigs & Poppies

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Pig Gate Guard

Julia went for a walk yesterday. She came back with potato samosas and vegetable pakora from a vegan stall at the food market they hold monthly in Sherwood. That’s Sherwood, the Nottingham suburb where we live, rather than Sherwood the semi-mythical Forest where Robin Hood lived. The Wiki entry sells us a bit short – the churches section should include a synagogue and a mosque and we used to have two cinemas (the one from around 1912 is still standing) and a cigarette factory.

She stopped on the way back to add a Paneer Saag Wala and a lovely fluffy naan bread from a local takeaway. The Paneer Saag Wala was only pureed spinach, garlic and paneer but it was extremely good. I could have eaten more, and you don’t generally hear me say that about vegetarian food. I am going to look at ways of making something similar. I’m not sure I have the equip,emt for pureeing spinach, but will have to see.

Group effort at Lemon and Poppy seed biscuits in the shape of Scottish Poppies. The seed scattering technique varied in success. The poppy cutters were purchased from the Scottish Poppy Appeal – they are a different shape from the English ones which have a two-lobed design. The British legion, who attend to the English and Welsh Poppy Appeal, don’t do a cutter.

I also had trouble with my keyboard. I could still use the laptop keyboard but the other one stopped working. It has been giving trouble for a few days. The reason is that I have had to use an adaptor to give me extra USB slots. I have been charging camera batteries and the new charger works off a USB socket. As with so many cheap electricals, it has a hit and miss approach to working.

Perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say I have been using an adaptor because I’m lazy. It was on my desk so it was easier to use it than go and find a plug that would allow me to use a mains socket.

As I wrote adaptor for the first time in this piece, the new, irritating, spellchecker leapt into life.  Apparently, it’s wrong, so I looked it up. I always thought that adaptor was a piece of electrical equipment and adapter, not that I’ve ever felt to need the word adapter before today, was someone who adapted something. It isn’t. Nor is it just an American/British English thing, because adapter is the more commonly used word in both languages. Not that it means anything because the whole nation has had its education neglected for so long, and has watched so much American TV, that our entire lexicon has become corrupted.

Salt dough Poppies. We painted them for display. The cutter is plastic so it is OK for salt dough. The ordinary cutters, as we found, rusted after being used for salt dough shapes.

It appears that the Guardian style guide sides with me, though Fowler adopts his usual eay-going approach and is easy about such things.

I’m not sure whether that falls under “irritations in modern life” or “new things I learned today”. Whichever it is, the new spellchecker definitely come under “irritations in modern life”.

It also falls into the category of “poor educational standards in the Uk”. When I was taught English grammar teaching was considered a sin, I have grown up able to write grammatically because I have read good books and because i (unwillingly) did Latin. For some reason Latin grammar was fine, English was out.

Photos are more shots from past Septembers. Top one is a pig made from a silage bale – you can get coloured wraps, and Julia and the group applied a appendages.

Poppies on the windowsill – this one is from November – which is why we started them in September.

 

 

On Grammar and Worry

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As usual, I am running very close to some end of month deadlines. I had four sets of submissions to send and have only managed to finalise one set. That went off a couple of days ago and I have jut been informed that one has been accepted. It is only a senryu, so it’s almost embarrassing, as it’s still hard to see three lines as a poem.

Try as I might, they still seem like fragments rather than poems. I know it takes more work to get it right in three lines, but it doesn’t look like much of a result for month’s effort. To make it even harder, the subject was Ekphrastic poems. I only discovered the term three or fours years ago, so will explain it – it’s a poem about a work of art. If you already knew that, I apologise for being condescending. If you didn’t, these examples are interesting, as you will know some of them, even if you weren’t aware of the term.

At times like this, I think of all the poets who include English degrees in their writer biographies. They spent years learning all this stuff and then they find themselves in a journal rubbing shoulders with people like me who just pile words up  without a clue what I’m doing. There’s an editor who sometimes writes back to me with suggestions based on points of grammar. I would hate him to know this, but there are times I have to go to the internet to find out what he is talking about.

Last time this happened I was amazed by the number of people discussing a point which I had never needed to know about in over 60 years. And having learnt about it, I forgot it again.

I wonder if there’s room in the world of poetry for an Ekphrastic poem on the subject of Fowler? My only worry is that if I start to think about my language too much I may become too fearful to write. I already worry about it being good enough, but what if I add the additional worry about being correct?

 

 

Dogs, oranges and apostrophes

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You never have a camera when you need one do you?

I’ve just seen Edie the sheep dog leap from the back of the pick-up and run round in a big circle to gather a mixed flock of hens and guinea fowl.

The results were both spectacular and predictable, with one of the guinea fowl ending up on the barn roof and the dog looking perplexed as everyone disappeared in a flurry of beating wings.

There’s nothing wrong with her ancestral need to herd things, but there’s obviously a bit of fine tuning to be done.

Meanwhile I have discovered that a citrus-scented keyboard makes typing a more pleasurable experience. That’s a spin-off from my diet, as I’m now eating more fruit as snacks to kill the urge for biscuits and other bad stuff. The yoga group left some biscuits yesterday and they are still there. Well, most of them are. It seemed rude just to ignore the gift. At one time they would have been gone before I left on Thursday night.

The downside to the citrus-scented keyboard is that I can’t type any questions at the moment as the key that produces question marks is wedged by a piece of orange peel that fell from one of the fruity snacks.

I think the answer is probably to lever the key off gently using a penknife or small screwdriver and to clean underneath. Me, penknife, electrical equipment…

I may wait until Monday. If it dries out I may be able to get it going without further work.

If not, I may be able to work round it. Over the years I’ve managed to get round most of my apostrophe problems by rearranging my words. I mean, how difficult can it be to do without a question mark…

…ah!