UK – Page 89 – don't confuse the narrator

stereo-topical

students playing football, Midlands, England

I don’t often get involved with topical news stories on the blog, but this photo of lads playing football in the Midlands, taken on a glorious autumn afternoon a couple of weeks ago, seems doubly appropriate now as the Football Association celebrated their 150th anniversary yesterday and storms are forecast across the country today.

modern manners

I’ve been to several poetry readings in the last couple of weeks, including an anthology launch where I was among the readers, and one by the elderly New Zealand poet C.K. Stead.

The launch lunch for The Apple Anthology (published by Nine Arches Press) was a fairly casual event, with a number of readers, and a varied audience eager to sample the cider, sandwiches – and inevitable apples.

The other events, though, were more formal and I was disconcerted to see people in the audience tapping away at their smart phones and laptop keyboards when I thought they should be listening. (That’s why I chose the photo of the owl, an eminently educated bird, with those marvellously disapproving eyebrows I can never hope to match however much I frown on modern youth.)
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net value

In the moonlight
giant moths
gather on my bedroom wall

Actually, it’s the light of a street lamp, and therefore they only gather there until midnight and from 5:30am as the local council switch the lights off during the darkest part of the night to save energy.

And, of course, they aren’t quite moths. But they are near enough to have made me think about the poor creatures trapped in the net of the curtains and want to put the thought down here in case I can use it at some point in the future.

o me miserum

At school, my favourite subject was Latin. If the Classics teacher hadn’t got pregnant I’d have gone on to study Greek, too, and I suspect my life would have been quite different. Instead, over the years I’ve dabbled in maths, economics, English, Spanish, IT, poetry…

Not having a proper classical education has been one of my few regrets, so when I saw this on a poster at the university campus recently I thought perhaps I was going to have a chance to redress the situation:

iberianismos

As I understand it, air traffic control operations are conducted either in English or in the local language, making good English a required skill for international pilots. It always worries me, then, when a pilot’s accent is so strong that his announcements are incomprehensible.
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