topical – Page 26 – don't confuse the narrator

political priorities

On the BBC lunchtime news today they were talking about the new MPs at Westminster whose attempts to find their way around would be hampered by the fact they don’t know if they are part of the government or the oppostion.

I was particularly taken with the comment that they’d be:

learning how to use their new laptops, learning how to use their new phones and learning how to do their expenses.

Just think how much more confident the public would have been in the political system last year if MPs had been taught how to claim their expenses correctly.

health check

I received a very worrying newspaper cutting through the post this weekend. (Yes, I know people who still communicate by ‘real’ mail and take the trouble to clip and send on articles of interest.) It came from the UK Metro, and the headline read Take the Pill ‘for a long life’. What was particularly disturbing was the following phrase that also appears on the web version of the story:

Women who take the contraceptive are 12 per cent less likely to die compared with those who never have.

The same story on the IBTHealth site says:
Continue reading “health check”

por un tubo

Some Spanish and English words, such as tubo and “tube” are clear and indisputable cognates, at least in some contexts. “A tube of toothpaste” is, indeed, un tubo.

But when we talk about the tubería in a season as wet as this winter has been, we’re probably not referring to the internet being a “series of tubes”, but about the waterpipes and whether they will cope with amount of rain that continues to fall.

water pipes overflowing — A series of tubes

(mis)reading skills

From a BBC news story, yesterday:

“Plans have been published by ministers in England to tackle the “social exclusion” of adults with autism.
[…]
[T]he cross-government strategy sets out a range of measures to help them have “rewarding and fulfilling” lives, including training for Jobcentre staff.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with Jobcentre staff. I’m not even sure they were called “Jobcentres” back then. Surely we used to go to sign on at the Labour Exchange? (Was it the Tories who implemented the name change, afraid that the ignorant unemployed would believe their benefit cheque was funded entirely by Labour and vote accordingly?)
Continue reading “(mis)reading skills”

hiraeth

The round-shouldered cobblestones nudge
at my sandalled feet. They are smooth
as the pebbles that sang on an Anglesey beach,
as the present-from-Beaumaris paperweight
whose faded dragon still parades
across my desk. They are warm
as cottage loaves fresh from Powell’s,
or bakestones from the griddle. The gulls
shriek with the same harsh voice, but the river
is an unfamiliar olive green and runs
beside a motorway that leads me
away from you.

(Not a new poem, but appropriate for March 1st, the feast day of Dewi Sant.)