£350,000,000 worth of Zumba Maths.

The £350m etc explained through the medium of Zumba, written during the week running up to the Referendum.

This is all an analogy – it’s not really my mum, the fee is not £35 etc etc.  It’s just a way of explaining something that seems to be confusing people.

I pay a monthly license fee to teach Zumba.  Let’s say, for the sake of clarity, that this is £35.

However, a few years back, my Mum went to see the Zumba head office and asked if I could just pay £25, instead.  They said yes, which was jolly nice of them, because there wasn't really a reason why I should, but I said I wouldn't play, otherwise.

I get a CD every month, with Zumba music on, for which the Zumba people have paid the Performing Rights – so I can use that music for free.  Every other month, I also get a DVD of choreography.  I don’t have to use these, but it probably works out at a value, for a CD and half a DVD every month, of – let’s call it £18. 

So I’m paying a £35 license fee (which is actually £25) but I’m getting an £18 value back.

There are other inherent outgoings, such as hall hire, insurance, footwear, exercise gear, physiotherapy etc etc.  When I add the costs up, they’re a lot.

However, I get the right to enter the Zumba market and teach my classes.  This earns me a considerable amount more than I pay in, even after the outgoings.  I know how much I earn from Zumba, and I reckon it’s a bloody good deal.  What I can’t put a figure on is all the other things I’ve gained.  Through meeting people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, my other businesses have also flourished, I have extremely good friends I’d never have met otherwise, I have learned styles of dance I didn’t know before and listen to music I would never have come across, and my life has been enriched beyond measure by all of these things.  But they are unquantifiable, and I don't want to muddy the water - I'm going to assume you understand that.

I could set up my own system of dance classes, where I don’t have to pay the license fee.  I would have to pay out for market research and marketing to make sure that I chose something that was going to work, and got it out there in front of people, making them want it more than something they already know about and know to be effective.  I would have to do a lot of research in terms of safety etc to ensure that I wasn’t teaching anything dangerous- BUT!  I would save myself that £35 (or rather £25) but I wouldn’t get that £18 CD and DVD.  I’d still be saving myself £7 a month, though.

I’m not sure I could do all that research and marketing for £7, but maybe I should give it a go.  And hope that people come along.

The daughters will squeal with delight and suggest we use the £35 (£25) to join a gym.  I will laugh and explain that it is not enough to join the gym, plus I haven’t earnt that £35 because I haven’t been teaching Zumba to earn it, and besides, I’d rather spend it on shoes.

Meanwhile, Zumba would still be going on, with other instructors, and people would be entitled to choose to go to them, of course.

As to that pesky old share of the Basingstoke Zumba market (AKA World Trade):

Five years ago, when I started teaching, 100 people a night attended a Zumba class in Basingstoke.  20 of them came to my class.  I had a 20% share of the market.

Now, 200 people a night come to Zumba.  30 of them come to my class.  I only have a 15% share of the total market.

And yet I have grown my business by 50%.

Get it?  Got it?  Good.

Eye eye.

On Friday morning as I drove Olivia up to school, we looked up to see the most glorious sunrise.  It was stunning.  Awe-inspiring.  The kind of thing which stirs you to your very soul.  I nearly burst into tears.

I'm sometimes a bit emotional about beauty, but there is a good reason for this particular bout of emotion.

This week, I nearly lost my vision in one eye.

I need to remember how it unfolded, and I want people to know the symptoms because it might help someone else not lose their sight, so for that reason, I'm writing it all up here.

There'll be a bit of anecdotal rambling first, because I'm incapable of avoiding that no matter how I try, so if you get bored, scroll down to the big asterisk below.

Background information, first.

Back in October, I had a routine eye test.  Being pretty fiercely myopic (-6 in both eyes), I don't think twice about eye tests.  In fact, I have them so regularly that I question how valid they are because I can actually reel off the letters on the chart with my eyes closed.  I have begged for a new chart, but no dice.

Anyhoo.  This particular eye test was a little different.  As I was casually reeling off such literary delights as VOTH and LPED, I realised that, with my right eye, as I looked directly at the letters, they disappeared.  I could see them if I looked around them but if I looked directly at them, they simply were not there.  The optician could not see any problems with my eye, but suggested that it was probably worth looking into.

The following week was half term and we headed over to Belgium to visit my parents.  My mother has had serious problems with her eyes, and as such is on first name terms with Belgium's premier eye doctor.  It's a two month wait for appointments, but he agreed to squeeze me in two days later.  His examination showed something odd and he said that I needed to be seen urgently by his mate who had a machine specific to the problem which he thought I had - a super-powerful HD imaging thing which would scan a slice of my eye and show us exactly what was going on.  Unfortunately, that wasn't going to be possible before we returned home the next day.  Once we were back home and back into a week, I rang Moorfields and was admitted the next day as an emergency.

Various machines wot go ping (and some wot actually ping physically ON your eyeball - bloody unnatural) came into play, including a super-powerful HD imaging thing which scanned a slice of my eye and showed us exactly what was going on, which, it turns out, is a touch of the old vitreo-macular traction, resulting in a blind spot and surrounding distortion right in the centre of my vision.

It looks like this:

Yeah, that's the inside of my actual eyeball.  Nice.  It's hard to see, but above the thick undulating layer, very close to the top of the image, there's a thin white line which follows the curve.  This is the macula.  Where the little dimple is in the middle, the white line actually pitches down sharply and attaches back to the main bit.  This is the traction.

And this is what it looks like from my side:

Somewhere between picture one and picture two, but much smaller - it hasn't affected that proportion of my eyesight.

Not ideal, but apparently no major drama, and it was a question of having a check-up 6 weeks or so later, as it's the kind of thing which can conceivably just sort itself out.  A letter was typed off and dispatched to my GP, asking him to arrange a referral, and a copy was handed to me for my own reference.  Nice touch.  We don't get enough of that. 

6 weeks or so later was Christmas, and as a result, it ended up being nearer to 8 weeks by the time I remembered that this should have happened, and chased my GP, who denied all knowledge - for one reason or another, he had never received a letter from Moorfields instructing him to arrange a referral for a follow-up.  

I would have chased this up straight away, but I was a little preoccupied, as the reason I was at the GP's in order to check this was that Olivia had a hacking cough, for which she had already been seen once, with a horrendously high temperature.  She was given antibiotics and I thought I'd go home and chase up Moorfields over the next couple of days.  Olivia, however, got worse, and on Friday last week I took her back to the Doctor where he checked her SATS (oxygen saturation levels in the blood) and asked me whether I was okay to drive her to hospital or would I rather he got us an ambulance.  I elected to drive, and while he was doing the paperwork, I mentioned that Maddy had had a collision in netball at school on Tuesday and was still complaining of a sore shoulder in the collarbone area.  He stated categorically that I should haul her out of school and down to A&E for an X-ray.

Potential logistical nightmare, but as fluke would have it, Simon was off work, so while I rang school to have Maddy sent out and drove Olivia to the hospital, Simon collected Maddy and drove her along, too.  So there we were.  Me on the 6th floor with Olivia.  Simon in A&E with Maddy.  

This seemed bad enough, then Maddy was diagnosed with a broken collarbone, and Olivia was put on oxygen and admitted for an undetermined stay in the hospital.  I can't really express how frightening that was.  If your children have ever been in hospital, you know, so let's not labour the point.

Four days later, late on Monday, we were discharged and Olivia was allowed home.  

Tuesday was a relatively normal day, with Maddy at school and Olivia having a final day off to recuperate.

Wednesday seemed like it was finally going to be the proper, real start to the year, with everything under control, work being possible, children learning stuff and not being critically ill.  Aces.  

Thoughts turned to myself, and I rang Moorfields, who found my notes and faxed a copy of the referral letter to my GP, for adding to notes, but told me meanwhile to come in as an outpatient in the next week or so and they would give me a follow-up appointment without needing the involvement of any other parties.  Pretty cool.

I had noticed over Christmas that I was getting some flashing lights, when I blinked at night.  By Wednesday, I was able to see these during daylight and for most of that day that I had a small floater (snurk snurk - sorry - I know - pathetic) in the corner of my eye, meaning that I spent a high portion of the day whipping my head around to look over my shoulder.  I kept thinking that something was creeping up on me.  Most distracting.

In the evening, I went out to teach Zumba, feeling perfectly fine.  In the middle of one of the tracks, and noticed that the floater had become far bigger and was beginning to move across my eye.  It looked like ornate, black ink, scroll-work or calligraphy flourishes.  Very attractive but scary as fuck.  Over the course of the next few seconds, it continued to move across my vision and suddenly exploded in slow motion across my vision.  It looked like when you drop marbling ink on water:

First this:


Then this:

I stopped the music and turned to my class to say that I had to stop and go home.  As I very seldom so much as take a day off sick, it was clearly a bit of an event.

My participants were very understanding and I left quickly, driving home (hmm) to ring Moorfields.  I described the symptoms to the very nice man on the end of the phone, who told me to come in.

Me:  First thing in the morning okay?
Him:  No.  You need to get here now.

With the girls newly out of hospital and with a broken collarbone respectively, we didn't feel we could offload them on someone while we both charged up to London - too scary for them - so, pausing only to whip out my lenses and sling both a book and kindle in my handbag (chronic fear of being somewhere with nothing to read *shudder*) Simon drove me to the station (still in my Zumba gear, thankfully not sweaty as it happened early in the class) and put me on a train to London.  

Of course, while on the train, there's nothing to do but worry, is there?  So from being calm, together and getting on with it, I turned into a gibbering, sobbing, snivelling wreck and did what all self-respecting gibbering, sobbing, snivelling wrecks do.  I rang my mum.  As she'd only just gone home having raced over to help us out over the weekend with the whole "being in two places at once" scenario, I forbade her from coming over again, and rang my brother to see if he was in London.  After a bit of panicking re non-answering of phones (he was a the theatre), I got through and my lovely brother met me at Waterloo and accompanied me throughout the rest of the night, doing a bloody good job of taking my mind off it all.

We got to Moorfields around 10.30pm, where we were efficiently checked in, triaged (possibly not a verb) and seen by a second nurse who did various preliminary tests.  Around midnight, I saw a doctor who began the consultation with what came across as an everso very slightly smirky "so what has prompted you to run all the way up from Basingstoke at this time of night?".  I guess he sees a few hypochondriacs.  Either that or I totally projected my own fear that I was being a drama queen onto his entirely innocent question.  He smirked a little less when I told him it was not my first time at Moorfields, and still less when he'd had a look in my eye.

"Ah, you have a bad tear in your retina.  We will need to operate first thing in the morning."

What?  What?!  A torn retina?  Hm.  Okay.  Kind of what I was expecting, if I'm honest.  How serious is it, Doc - will I lose my sight?

"If fluid leaks through the tear and lifts your retina away, you will get a detached retina and lose the vision in your eye."

"Do you mean go blind in that eye?"

"Yes."

"Okay, and the likelihood of that is?"

"There's no way of telling, but we will operate first thing in the morning.  It's a nice fresh tear" (oh good!!!) "so the chances are good that there will be no complications."

"Is there anything I can do to minimise the likelihood of fluid leaking through?"

"Not really, no.  Don't jump off anything high.  Or operate any pneumatic drills."

Thinks:  "Great."

"Just show up tomorrow morning at 8.30 in the retinal emergency unit, with this letter."

We returned to my brother's via a comedy cab ride - "you two had a lovely evening, have you?  You lawyers, are you?" - er, no and no, but so it went on.  Jon distracted him beautifully, allowing me to wake Simon up and tell him what had happened.  The cabbie managed somehow to find all the cobbled streets and speed bumps between the City and Kennington, so I spent most of the cab ride hovering above the seat trying not to jolt my eyeball about.  Great for the thighs.

At 8am, after four hours of not very efficient sleep and some pretty funky dreams, I was back in the hospital, clutching my letter, and feeling sick as a bloody pig, my loves.  In all the excitement, I hadn't asked enough questions.  I like to know what is going to happen.  I didn't even know if I would be okay to leave the hospital unaccompanied.  As Jon had had to go to work and I was on my own, this was a pretty stupid question not to have asked.  It turns out, yes - not a problem.  Which was kind of reassuring about the whole thing.

I was the first person called, which was nice, and the lovely nurse assessed me and put dilating drops in my eyes, with many jokes about how she likes doing this to young men as it makes them cry, but doesn't like doing it to ladies.  I'm sure she has a different line for all the different patients she has - one which would put anyone at their ease.  She was an Asian lady of indeterminate age - tiny and birdlike (such a cliché, but she was), beautiful and funny, efficient and charming.  

With pupils like a fully committed pill-popping maniac, I returned to the waiting room, assuming I'd be there for another hour or so, and was once again called almost immediately.

"Hi, I'm Miles, I'll be doing your retinoplexy today.  Let's have a bit of a look and see how it's presenting."

Miles, like everyone I have met at Moorfields, was an entirely charming person.  They are so quietly confident in their ability to save your sight, and so delightful in their self-deprecation, I felt that I was in the best of care throughout the whole horrible experience.  I cannot emphasise enough how frightened I was that my tear would prove inoperable and I would lose my sight.  I also cannot over-emphasise how little fear I had that the operation would go wrong.  Even as I signed the consent form confirming that I was aware that the operation could result in permanent loss of vision, not one iota of me brooked the possibility that Miles in particular, and Moorfields in general, would let this happen to me.  I hadn't really worked that out until I'm writing it now, and to be honest, it's made me totes emosh.  *dabs eyes, womans up, carries on*

Miles filled my eyes with numbing drops, which are absolutely amazing.  I don't have any squeamishness about things touching my eyes, as I've worn contact lenses since I was 12 years old (profoundly short-sighted and a fairly serious ballerina - couldn't wear glasses for dancing) but I can't say I relish it.  He had a good peer into my eyes and pronounced the tear thoroughly operable and fairly easy to reach apart from a couple of areas for which he would have to use a tool directly on my eyeball to depress it and deform it so that the edges of the tear were attainable.

Boak.

Yeah, I take it back.  I discovered a little squeamishness when he demonstrated the kind of thing and I worried that my eyeball would actually pop or pop OUT, but it was pretty much painless, just uncomfortable and icky.  Technical term.  Meanwhile my phone sprung to life and started pinging, ringing, vibrating, dan-dan-daaaaan-ing and general making its presence felt.  Miles patiently (and unnecessarily) suggested that I switched it off.  He explained that while he was firing the laser into my eyeball, it may be distracting.

At this point he told me that a not inconsiderable amount of fluid had begun to leak behind the retina.  If I hadn't rung straight away and come straight in, that leaking would have continued.  There is a very good chance that, as I'm sitting here two days after surgery, I would have been completely blind in my right eye.

The laser machine, it turned out, was in the other examination room, so we needed to wait for that to become free before he could perform the retinopexy, so it was back to the waiting room, this time with eyes which were not only junkified but numb, too.  Mental!  Again I expected a long wait, and again I was pleasantly surprised.  I was checking all the phone things which had happened, which included a call from School to ask if Olivia was allowed to stay for debating club, a message from Simon that Maddy had decided not to go to A&E after all (arm playing up following Olivia falling over and grabbing Maddy's arm for balance the night before) and FB messages from team members and customers - the life of a self-employed working mother.

I'd dealt with school and was ringing Simon to let him know that Olivia was staying late when I was called in - it couldn't have taken more than three minutes.

This was the big one.  It was finally happening.  I was a little nervous (ahahahahahahahaahah) about what was about to happen, so, as is my wont, I asked Miles to describe exactly what he was doing as he was doing it.  He was kind enough and patient enough to do so.

First thing was to lock the door.  Apparently you don't want people barging in while you're firing lasers into people's eyeballs, as it can cause complications.  If the door needs opening after the laser has been set, the whole process needs annulling and starting again from scratch.

So, we're locked in.  The chair made a dentist's chair look like a bit of an under-performer, and I was comfortably supine.  Meanwhile, Miles set a contraption on his head which looked like a combination of an optician's glasses:

And a miner's helmet:

The lamp bit being the laser.  Yoinks.

I'd read the Moorfields leaflet on the procedure (which a friend very kindly drew to my attention at 2am - thank heavens for friends who live on the other side of the world) and had half an idea what was going to happen.  One of the points in the leaflet about the actual treatment is that it can feel like electric shocks in the eyeball, sharp pain, burning etc.  So you'll forgive me for being a little trepidatious.

Miles asked me how the numbness was and if I wanted any more drops.  As I tend to morph into desperate comedy mode under stress, I responded that I've never knowingly turned down a drug in my life.  I know.  He's heard it all before, hasn't he?  But he laughed patiently, and further numbed my eyeballs.  I breathed deeply and tried to concentrate on keeping my heart rate nice and steady.

I should mention that there is no restraint whatsoever involved in this.  You hold yourself, your head and your gaze motionless.  The surgeon angles his head to point the laser where he is looking and activates it with a foot-switch.  Your eyeball is the size that your eyeball is and the laser enters it through your dilated pupil.  The margins for error here are tiny.  The chances of rupturing a blood vessel or slicing across the optic nerve are, presumably, considerable (I didn't ask, but unfortunately have always been quite interested in human anatomy etc and know just a little more about the inner workings of the eye than I wished, at that point, I knew).

This is what happens:

The dots on the wall of the eye are the small welds to reattach the retina where it belongs.

What amazed me is that there was very little sensation, let alone actual pain, involved in what ensued whatsoever.

I found it quite mentally disturbing, however, as it was almost exactly like a recurring dream which I have had for many years, and which has woken me into insomnia on many an occasion.

The laser, you see, completely dazzles you.  So your eye is open, you have to hold it as absolutely still as you can (or you'll end up with someone's tag graffitied on the inside of your eyeball), which in my case was looking up and left, but you can see nothing at all.  Your eye is numb, you're looking up, and you see nothing.  I don't know why this has been a recurring dream/nightmare for me, but it has.  If it were not for that, the experience would not have been in the least bit unpleasant.

 There were moments when I could feel the laser on the inside of my eye.  Not going to lie, that wasn't nice, caused me to go "argh" and Miles to say "Shall we stop for a minute?", which he did.  And then we'd proceed.

The bits when the depressor was on my eyeball weren't nice either - mostly when they were close to muscles which are not used to being prodded about.  But it was easily, easily bearable.

A couple of times, Miles called the head of department in to have a look at how it was going, and she suggested he could turn the laser up from 250somethings to 400somethings (at which I turned into tedious comedy patient again, and more or less told her to fuck off, because Miles was doing just fine - I need gagging, really, in these circumstances), which he did, and it was a little more obvious that something was going on in the eyeball, but still entirely bearable.

I ended up with two rings of welds around my tear, and three at a couple of points where it was tricky.  It was harder to get the retina to adhere where the fluid had crept through, so he had to pull back from the tear, leaving more of a space between tear and weld.

Every time we stopped, I was completely blind in my right eye - I checked that this was normal.  I like to know these things.  But my vision would slowly creep back.

Miles would tell me "we're about two-thirds of the way around, and you're doing very well", and generally keep me informed.  It felt very much like team-work, which clearly it wasn't.  He had years of experience and study and a huge amount of pressure on his shoulders, whereas I just had to keep my eye still.

I think the whole thing probably took about half an hour, but I'm not entirely sure.  What I do know is that 12 hours after I arrived at Moorfields with an undiagnosed eye problem, I walked out cured.

It didn't cost me a penny.

I am SO FUCKING LUCKY!!!

I came *this* close to losing my sight, and I know what to do if it happens again.

*
If you read all of that - well done.  If you've skipped down to avoid my rambling, that's fine, too.

What you need to know:

If you are very myopic (short-sighted), you are at an increased risk of having a torn retina.

It can happen at any time - it could happen while you are asleep so if you wake up with blurred or occluded vision, do not hesitate to have yourself checked out.

Indications that you are at risk of a torn retina are flashing lights and floaters across your vision.  These can be specs, lines, dots or larger areas.

If you see these, get checked out.

Find out where your nearest Opthalmic A&E department is.  It may be your local hospital or it may not, but if you're very short sighted, you ought to find out just in case.

If a large floater appears and does that marbling thing - sort it out!  Don't delay.  Don't feel like a twat for bothering t'doctor.  Just do it.

Delay marks the difference between saving and losing your sight.

Don't be afraid of the operation.  It's not bad at all.

False Friends and Not Having The Words

Nothing unpleasant here, chaps.  I am very happy to say that I have many true friends and no false ones.

What I'm talking about is those words in two different languages which SEEM to mean the same thing, but don't.

*Time-travel note*  That was what I STARTED intending to talk about, but I've gone down several alleys already - some of them blind and some of them intriguing, so, frankly, this could end up being about more or less anything.  You carry on reading, and I'll scroll back down to the bit I've got to so far, which is about Cardinal Richelieu, just so you know, when you get there.

We all know that Britain and America are famously separated by a common language - a phrase attributed to George Bernard Shaw - but then pretty much everything which wasn't attributed to Oscar Wilde around that time was attributed to GBS.  For all we know, it could have been my ol' great grandma who said that, but someone thought it sounded Shavian.  Anyway.  Meanwhile, Oscar Wilde was cleverly actually WRITING DOWN a similar sentiment - "We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language." 

I'm actually, possibly surprisingly, quite a supporter of the way the Americans speak English.  A lot of it is a more perfectly preserved version of the English we spoke back in the day.  Sidewalk is of course a far more logical (and original) word for a pavement - certainly before the advent of tar-penetration macadam - or tarmac, as we call it.  On a side note, I briefly dated a chap in my late teens whose surname was MacAdam, and who swore blind that his grandfather invented Tarmac.  As I did know that it's more proper name is tar-macadam, I accepted this blindly until just now, when I checked, and it was invented by a chap named Edgar Purnell Hooley.  Bloody swizz!  Cheeky bastard.  

Meanwhile cookie, once you know that the Dutch for biscuit is koekje, is far less irritating.  Lots of the words which are different between English and American are actually Dutch derivations.  Cupcakes still piss me off, though.  Whatever happened to fairy cakes?

Anyway, this is not meant to be about English and American, although I've got interested in it, now, so in a couple of years, next time I get around to sitting and having a bit of a blog, it might be.

But while I'm on English and American, I'll just give you two examples of false friends.  Bum.  And Fag.  Thanks.  Glad I got those off my chest.

What I WAS going to talk about was the English and French false friends.

The first time I came across these was when we all got in a fit of giggles when accompanying my mother to the dentist.  I should perhaps clarify at this point that I was about 9 at the time, although I'd still sooner my mum came to the dentist with me than go on my own.  Wimp.  Anyway.  The dentist had rather excellent English, and was therefore merrily chatting away to Mum about her teeth, while poking sharp things in her mouth.  She winced, and he informed her that oh dear oh dear, she has very sensible teeth.  The poor man had no idea why my brother and I were stuffing our hankies in our mouths and snorting inelegantly in the corner, because, in French, les dents sensibles are sensitive teeth.  

I've been on the lookout ever since and I'm delighted to report that there are many examples.

The thing is, you see, that the French just don't have the VOCABULARY that we do.  I have mentioned this so frequently that my children now spout this particular piece of wisdom with a world-weary air - "Sigh - they just don't have the WORDS, do they, Mummy?"

The words for like and love are the same.  For kiss and - pardon my French - fuck.  While in English someone can trick you or play a trick on you, or, heaven forfend cheat you, in French they can only tricher - a verb.  Il m'a tricher.  He cheated on me, he tricked me, he played a trick on me - you decide.  It's all in the context because they don't have the WORDS, do they, Mummy?  As we know, only something like 20% of communication is in the words, the rest is body language, intonation, facial expression etc - which is how you can get in so much damned trouble writing to people.  Hence the meteoric rise of the 'emoticon'.  

It is, of course, ridiculous to try to count the number of words in a language, and it always makes me think of the Samuel Johnson episode of Blackadder II.  However, it is a generally accepted almost-fact that the English language has approximately 250,000 words.  It is equally generally accepted that French has approximately 45,000.  Even those of us who had to spend maths lessons sitting in the corner in pointy hats can work out that this is less than a fifth of the number of words.  Extraordinary, no?

But then, you see, while we spot words and phrases in other languages and joyfully adopt, adapt and make them our own, showing savoir-faire, joie de vivre and a certain je ne sais quoi, the French have the Académie Française, devoted to retaining the purity of the French language.  

This idea has always made me laugh a lot, and finding out that it was started out by that bastard, Cardinal Richelieu (of course, I have only Dumas's word for him being a bastard, but I like Dumas, so I'm sticking with his version of events), suppressed during the revolution (VIVE LA REVOLUTION!) and revived by that dispeptic genius, Napoleon, has only made me laugh harder.  Honestly - who'd have thought that Richelieu would STILL be making the French do as he says!

Anyway, if you're not familiar with the Académie, briefly, it has 40 members, known as les Immortels (the Immortals - I mean REALLY!  The NERVE!) who are granted their posts for life.  Unless they do something really naughty.  The mind boggles.  Maybe using the subjunctive incorrectly, or referring to "le weekend".   

Actually, I just got interested in that, and rather pleasingly the most recent expulsions were for Academy members cohorting with the Nazis during WWII.  I actually feel a tiny degree of warmth towards them for the first time, ever.

Anyway (again - if you don't have to start at least 14 paragraphs in a chat with the word 'anyway', you've probably stuck to the point toooooo much), basically, it's their job to stick the French language down and approve or disprove any cheeky little words that try to sneak into the language from other places.  I can only imagine that this job has become more and more difficult as technology accelerates.  They had a great success with 'ordinateur' when computers first came in and people started off by saying 'le computer', but it's all moving so fast now, and I (possibly unfairly) assume that they are not the most technologically literate of croups of people, so it must be hellish hard to keep up with, m'loves.

Of course, there are two sides to every argument, and while the Academy's pinning down of the French language, which I always envisage as all the words being literally pinned down like butterflies in one of those Victorian cabinets, is the diametric opposite of our liberal "What's that you said?  Ooooh, good word!  We'll have that!" approach to language, it does give French writers a certain amount of fluff space which we don't have.

Hm.  I know what I'm trying to say here, but I'm not sure that fluff space is hacking it.  





Well, actually, let's take aimer and baiser, as they were the examples I gave above. There's room for a lot of double entendres (there's another adoption) with those two alone. When you try to translate from French to English, if it's not a technical document, it can sometimes be quite tricky for exactly this reason. The writer may well have deliberately left a wodge of ambiguity for the reader to play with, but the translator has to go in and PIN DOWN the author's meaning! Aha! That's strange, don't you think? That the limiting of words in a language can actually allow for more interpretations?
So while I think it's fabulous that we have five times as many words for funny as the French do, I RAIL at the English subtitles to French films because I almost always entirely disagree with them.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a CLASSIC example of this, and when I am an old, old lady, confined to bed and with nothing else to do, I am going to sit up and re-translate that film because that idiot Anthony Burgess made a proper bloody fist of it. The film is in verse and for some reason best known to himself, Burgess decided the put all the bloody subtitles in verse, too, thus, more often than not, absolutely KILLING the language. Why he wanted to do this is beyond me. Why someone actually let him do this is further beyond me. And how he managed to sleep at night after he'd put his name to this travesty of a translation is beyond me. While, in French, Gerard Depardieu is buckling his swash, swaggering, declaiming and roaring with wit and poetry, Burgess, down in the subtitles, is mincing around like a complete tit strangling - no, too strong - holding a pillow over the face of the film and slowly killing it. I have to put masking tape over the bottom half of the screen to even watch the film these days. TIT.
Well, I told you I'd gone down a blind alley, and I've given you almost no examples of false friends at all. The Nice Man From Asda has just delivered my groceries, and there's a bag of raw frozen prawns thawing out somewhere amongst it, so I must whoosh back to real life and get on with My Chores. I've got loads more to say about this, but if I don't post it, it will never happen. So publish and be damned, woman.
Please feel free to post your false friends in the comments section below. I would be most grateful if someone would haul this blog back towards something resembling its original title...
Cheers.

Temporary Luddite

From January 2014 - never finished, until now!
_________________

My computer died!

This.  Was a tragedy.

To be fair, it had warned me that it was on its way out.  It had shown me glossy estate agent details of farms it was considering buying, put up warning signs regarding buckets it was at risk of kicking, and indicated to me that if I could pass it its slippers in order to aid it in its shuffling off of this mortal coil, it would be most grateful.

As a result of all of this, I had actually made preparations.  I know.  Extraordinaire.  I had taken it to the McHospital (iHospital?) where the Nice Doctor (McGenius?) had a look and said it was basically terminal.  We needed a brain transplant.  Where, I asked in shock, would one get such a thing?  Was it frite-fly expensive?  And complex?  The Nice Doctor, whose bedside manner was entirely charming in a very trendily geeky way, explained to the Poor Old Lady that one would get such a thing online, it wasn't very expensive, and the surgery itself was sufficiently simple that even the Poor Old Lady would be able to perform it by the simple means of waving a screwfer at the back of the MacBook until its bum fell off.

Or something.

But, further, that if this was beyond the capabilities of the POL, the Nice Doctor and his friends would probably help, if the POL came in and wept a bit, although they're not really supposed to do that kind of thing.  Helping, not weeping.  And that once the brain was in, the Nice Doctor would be able to rehabilitate it, and that it would be such a special and wonderful brain that it would "see you out".  That's a quote.  I wondered at that point whether the Nice Doctor was quite as nice as I originally thought.

Anyway.  No matter how many things I tell the computer to remember in the future, it will apparently still be alive and able to pass me my slippers when it's my turn to shuffle off this mortal coil.  Hurrah!      

All this happened JUST before Christmas (*2013).  So I ordered the replacement brain.  It was easy!  It arrived ten days earlier than advertised, while we were away for Christmas.  It arrived the next day, too, and the next, and kept arriving daily until eventually I switched my phone on and found that The Yodel Man (in an appropriately echoey way, considering his company name) had been bouncing to and fro daily, trying to deliver.  Sigh.  So I rearranged delivery for when it was meant to arrive in the first place.

__________

So all of that was now so long ago that I barely remember it (although my feelings on The Yodel Man have, if anything, deteriorated), and the McDoctor put the new brain in the Poor Old Lady's computer, and the POL's MacBook Pro was once more ready to ROCK!

Until the POL invited her dear friends over, and Penningtons, Milligans and Parkins did imbibe of the gin.  In generous quantities.  And not just the gin of the Gordon's and the nice Bombay Sapphire people, but the actual home-made Hedge Gin (see elsewhere on blog if you wish to *spoiler alert* hurt yourself and kill your computer) which is largely based on Asda's own brand gin.  And Hedge.  There then ensued some playing of tunes in the kitchen, just like in the olden days, all gathered around the keyboard.  Although not THAT like the olden days, given that the keyboard was operating iTunes and not a piano.  At this point, tall glasses of prosecco, with generous measures of various home-made (but not home-distilled, as That Is Against The Law) spirits such as blackberry vodka and raspberry gin, very much à la Kir Royale, but a bit more Kir Pleb, seemed an inordinately good idea.  Well, it turns out that the combination of the playing of the music with the waving of the arms, the drinking of the spirits, the quaffing of the bubbles and most especially the placing of the very tall glass next to the laptop was actually an inordinately POOR idea.

Emergency action was immediately implemented, and the drinking and waving of arms resumed (although without the music - shame).  On rising, bleary-eyed the next morning, it transpired that the emergency action, with which we had been quite pleased, on the whole, at the time) had pretty much stopped at making the laptop into a little tent shape, tipping it up and placing a whole roll of Plenty, still on the roll, in its little cavity, as if for a nice night under the stars.

Needless to say, this cost a fucking FORTUNE to sort out, and took bloody weeks on end.  Initially, it was thought that it could probably be done for a couple of 'undred, and hence no need to bother the household insurance wallahs.  But once they'd got the bonnet off, there was much sucking of teeth and "werlllll, you've got liquid innit, 'aventcher?"ing from the McChaps.  Which was an extraordinarily astute diagnosis, given that I'd taken it in and said "I tried to make it drink spirits but it didn't like it".  And RAM was discussed.  And top - er - top hampers?  No, top - er - something boards.  Not washboards.  Something though.  And something expensive, natürlich, mein lieblings.  And some other bits which also didn't take kindly to having booze forced upon them.

At this point, I told them to just go ahead and fix the bloody thing, as I live my LIFE on the computer.  I write recipes on it, blog on it (occasionally, hem hem), sell jewellery on it, do all my Zumba paperwork on it, talk to friends far and wide on it - you get the idea.

Once I'd finished weeping and breaking the news to the kids that there would be no Christmas, I realised that - tadaaaaa!  It actually wasn't going to cost a bean more than the original £200 because this is (probably) what household insurance is for!  The nice man at Direct Line was very sympathetic, and once he'd finished tutting about the fact that I'd already sorted it out when he would have liked to have had a go himself (or get some of his friends to have a look or something - presumably for further sucking of teeth and "I couldn't possibly fit it in before a week Tuesday, guv, and that's pushing it"), the cash for the repair was in the account before you'd have had time to say "hang on, where's me cheque book, has the cat eaten it?".  Mental.

It's never been quite the same, though.  It keeps telling me it wants coffee.  Specifically Java.  But then, I suppose we all fancy a coffee after a night on the prosecco and spirits, don't we?

I know I do.

The Twattiness of the Short Distance Runner (me)

It seems that spring is when I'm moved to blog.  I'm not even going to insult you by pretending that I'll blog more frequently this year, or big myself up by pretending you've been desperate for another one in the last year and six days, so no apology either.

I did do a big thing, yesterday, though.

I Did Jogging!

I know.  Not a jogger, I.

However, whenever I have a week or so off from teaching Zumba, even if I don't go bonkers on Easter eggs (I can take 'em or leave 'em - thank god there isn't a worldwide cheese festival where people give each other whole Stiltons and Bries.  I'd fucking DIE), I seem to put on a good half a stone, which on my smaller-than-you'd-think-cos-I-usually-wear-heels frame is a whole chunk of lard.

Plus, if people are coming to you and paying you to help them get fit, you ought to make an effort to look the part.  Not drinking Belgium's stock of rosé over the Easter break may have helped with this extra tonnage.  Also not filling my Dad's fridge with more filet Américain (it's raw beef - I don't know why it's called filet Américain.  I don't think you can get it in America.  It's similar to steak tartare, though) than a woman should be allowed to eat in a month, and then accidentally having a forkful every time I filled the bottomless glass of rosé from the box in the fridge may have made some contribution, too.

However, whatever the reason, I got back from my long weekend feeling like a proper little Bunter, and resolved to Do Something About It.  Usually, it's a quick gain/quick loss, and I'm happy to let the extra half stone trickle off over the ensuing two weeks.  I don't know why this wasn't the case this time.  I'm getting old.  It's harder to shift extra pounds and I just wanted it off quickly, so I thought I'd give this running malarkey a bash.

Anyone who has ever discussed running with me will know my views on it.

In brief, most people who start running do so with no idea what they're doing.  They just grab a pair of trainers and hit the tarmac.  The trainers are probably also well past their run-by date.

Everyone thinks they can run.  Our bodies are designed to do it, right?  I mean, it's just running, right?  Wrong.  More people injure themselves running than almost any other sport, because they just go and do it.  They also stretch before they've warmed up, causing little tiny tears in cold, stiff muscles, and don't stretch afterwards.  And they whack all their impact through their heels, because their trainers allow them to do that, whereas our bodies are not actually designed to run like this.

Look, if you're hating me right now, don't.  If you know what you're doing and you enjoy it, keep at it.  I raise my hat at you.  If you're following a sensible programme, wearing good trainers and non-chaffing trousers, like a bit of barefoot running technique and have a sports bra which stops you from taking your own eye out crossing roads - go for it.  Plus, you know, swings and roundabouts, horses for courses, freedom of etceteras.

Yeah, I don't know what possessed me to give it a go, either.  But yesterday morning, off I set, with Sev in tow, for a gentle jog.  I figured I'd manage about three minutes and collapse in a heap, like I always did at school but I had forgotten that a) I smoked about 40 a day at school and b) my cardio-vascular fitness is a lot better than when I was a teenager, thanks to four years of teaching Zumba.  Although you'd think five-times-a-week ballet as a teenager would have helped, but it seems that was more endurance than... anyway - I digress.

To my somewhat smug pleasure, I managed four miles without pause, and, while sweaty at the end of it, wasn't unduly out of breath.  I wasn't very fast, but then that wasn't my aim.  And to my surprise, I quite enjoyed it - I certainly got a massive sense of achievement out of it.  I could have gone further, but I'd done a 'there and back' type walk, and run out of route.

This morning, I set out to jog again.  I managed half the distance of yesterday and pulled up with a small nagging ache in my sacroiliac area, which I suspect may be called something like Jogger's Arse.

I'd probably run though this if I didn't fear that I'd make it worse and put myself out of teaching altogether, for the foreseeable future, and we'd all die in penury on the streets.  I don't know if running through it would make it worse or better, and I will never know because that's IT!  I'm not running any more.  I was right.  It's not for me.

And it turns out I'm exactly the kind of git I always swore I wouldn't be.  TOTALLY inexperienced, hitting the tarmac, injured within 24 hours.

Twat.

SMOG PANIC & la poussière du Sahara

I'm thoroughly enjoying all the panic about the smog, I must admit. 

Such fun to peel back the layers of the hysterical reporting and find admissions in the small print that it's actually 'smog-like', not smog.  Hm, yes - they admit, eventually - it is more of a natural weather phenomenon than the actual pollution, per se, as which they are billing it.  If I were it, I'd sue for misrepresentation.  And libel.

And isn't it helpful of them to warn us that breathing in dust particles may cause harm to people with respiratory difficulties, too - we'd never have worked that one out.

AND (second paragraph starting with and - if it was good enough for Steinbeck...) I love the fact that they all report it as if it's some strange new phenomenon. 

The whole thing is utterly fabulous and an example of the journalists of this fine nation in their usual fine fettle, frothing at the mouth and whipping the general public into a frenzy of fear.  Dust off your old bird 'flu masks, ladies and gents - your lives could depend on it.  Or not.

When I was growing up in Belgium, we gleefully awaited the arrival of "la poussière du Sahara" - the brick red dust which would coat everyone's cars to some degree or another more years than not. 

We were all somewhat awe-struck by this exotic, magical desert sand which was transported hundreds of miles across sea and land, high high high in the sky, and deposited, as light as feathers, on cars, windows, streets - anything which stayed still for long enough.  In years when it didn't happen, we'd feel as swizzed as the years when it didn't snow at Christmas. 

And yet (third time) here we all are, on the other side of a channel narrow enough to actually swim (although not for me - I'm more of a floating around on a lilo kind of bird), having a total panic attack about the whole wonderful thing.  Which, although rare in this country, has happened here before, on numerous occasions. 

Unfortunately, "Slightly Unusual But Entirely Explicable Weather Situation" doesn't make a great headline.

Here's what happens next.

When it rains, the raindrops will gather up the sand and dust on their way to the earth, and the dust will no longer be hanging around, ruining the atmosphere, like a drunken uncle at a wedding.  Well, I hear drunken uncles at weddings are unpopular - personally, they're usually my favourite guests.

The papers will then herald the overnight disappearance of the terrifying return-to-the-pea-soupers-of-yesteryear smog as Most Mysterious.  Sigh. 

Meanwhile, whatever shall we do?  If only we lived in a country where it rains occasionally!  If only this were famously the most showery month of the whole year on our temperate, sceptred isle!  Oh... hang on...

xxx

2014, eh?! Kuh! Who'd-a thought...

New Year, New You!  Resolutions!  Bigger (or smaller)!  Better!  Shinier!  Happier!  Healthier!  Wealthier!  BETTTTTTERRRRR!!!

Ah, bollocks, to it.

I'm a big believer in drawing a line under behaviour which you want to change, and I can see that the closing of a year is a good time to do so, but it's also entirely arbitrary.  Most of us are skint and knackered from Christmas, and from spending too many of our waking hours in the dark, instead of hibernating like pigs.  I mean, cows.  I mean BEARS!  Sheesh!

We've barely drawn breath (and should still, if we listened to our bodies, be spending about 16 hours a day in our caves) and we start telling ourselves we have to stop eating or drinking this or that, start cleaning or tidying the other (not THE other - hopefully that's ... okay, I'm walking away from this bracket before it gets filthy), kick highly addictive bad habits, make new healthy habits - you get the idea.

If you have a New Year's Resolution, I salute you.  I applaud you.  And I wish you well in keeping it. Genuinely - that's not some kind of sarky "oh yeah, like, good luck, loser!" kind of wish.  I really do wish you well.

If, however, you fall at the third or fourth hurdle (look, even I am trusting you to get beyond the first couple, okay?), don't beat yourself up.  Don't give up doing what you started doing.  Or start doing what you gave up doing.  Just acknowledge that it's a hard time of year to make changes.

Energy levels are depleted.  Stores of Vitamin D are low (on which subject, I beg of you that if we ever get any sunshine this year, you allow yourselves and your loved ones at least half an hour a day of sun on your skin with no sunscreen.  Please.  Just for me.  Call it a resolution - one which is easy to keep).  Those of us who enjoy the odd drinkie to get us through the evening are probably a little more reliant on it than usual, having got our bodies WELL used to it over the festive season.  We've stretched our stomachs so they think they need more food.  We've eaten more sweet things than we usually would, and now our insatiable bods are craving sugar.  We've lounged around watching telly and allowing our brains to turn to mush when we'd normally be getting up and getting dressed and getting the kids to school and getting to work and tidying the house and doing the admin and going to exercise classes and being a taxi service and eating a healthy amount of healthy food and ALL THE OTHER MILLIONS of day to day tasks.

My resolution - such as it is, and it's not a real one, because I don't make them - is to get up and get dressed and get the kids to school and do some work and tidy the house and do the admin and go to exercise classes and be a taxi service and eat a healthy amount of healthy food throughout January as effectively as I did in December.  Which is not always very.  But it's MORE effective than it has been for the last three weeks.  Once I've got back into the swing of things, which won't take long, I'll rejoice in making a lot of other small changes.  But meanwhile, I'm not going to doom myself to failure by making a load of unrealistic resolutions which just end up making me feel bad about myself.

So there.

I will also find time to make a list of things which I really, genuinely would like to improve about myself, my environment and my behaviour.  Believe me, it will be a long list.  I will then figure out how to make this happen.  And then, and only then, I will figure out when the time is right my frame of mind is good enough to tackle these things.

Meanwhile, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow - who the fuck knows?

Happy New Year, my friends.