Tag: Non Fiction

In a word: Pear

Now, how did such a simple word that described a piece of fruit become so tangled?

The English language of course.

It throws up many a variation of the same sounding word, just to confuse us.

Just think, there is also pair, and pare.

But a pear, that’s a piece of fruit.

And if you’re not careful things can go pear shaped very quickly.

Then there’s pair, which means there’s two of something the same, such as a pair of socks

Except in my house it’s more than likely that pair of socks are an odd pair.

Then there’s pare, which is to take the outer layer off such as an orange.

It can also mean to cut down, as in staff after restructuring an organisation.

Past conversations with my cat – 99

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This is Chester.

Not everything is fine in la-la-land, as he now calls it.

Not happy that I didn’t tell him about the second week of child invasion.

He should consider himself lucky that the school week started on Tuesday, and only one was staying home to do schoolwork.

The other has been able to return to the classroom.

One less tormentor, I heard him mutter as he slinked past the room where the homeschooler was working.

But a more sinister problem had arisen.

He’s stopped eating his food.  I first thought this was part of a two-week standoff, where he cuts his nose off to spite his face.

This is not the first time we’ve been through this.

So, just to see if it is a fit of pique, I get him his absolute favorite food.  Fresh Atlantic Salmon cut into small pieces just the way he likes it.

Yes, the aroma reaches him in his hiding spot, along with the call-out that I’d bought him salmon, but when he goes to the bowl, he takes a sniff, or two, then wanders away.

He doesn’t even look at me.

Very, very unusual.

I will be keeping an eye on this.

 

In a word: Port

So, I wonder if it’s true, any port in a storm, except perhaps Marsailles

Or, if you are a lothario type sailor, you would have a girl in every port.

Yes, the most common definition of a port is a place where ships dock.

And, while talking of ships we don’t call the sides left and right, we call them port and starboard.  Just in case you didn’t know, port is the left side of the ship when facing forward.

And of course, ships have portholes, ie windows, traditionally round and rather small.

 

It could be an alcoholic drink, imbibed mostly after dinner with coffee and cigars, though no one seems to smoke cigars any more.

There is still coffee, for now.  No doubt sometime in the future someone will link it to death and dying, and it will fall out of favour, like sugar, weedkillers and asbestos.

The best port seems to come from Portugal, strange about that.

 

You can port a program (app in phone speak) from one platform to another, which basically means from Android to Apple IOS, but not without a reasonable amount of work.

It can also be an outlet plug on a computer that accepts cables from other devices (USB) and many years ago, a printer port, and a serial port.

 

In certain places in the world a port is a child’s schoolbag, a definition I was not aware of until we moved to a different state.

I’m still having a problem with it 30 years on.

Is this TV gold?

I have been watching television for a long, long time, and a lot of it has come from either the US or from Britain.

I have Cable TV by satellite, an interesting contradiction in terms, and it has a channel that shows all of these old series, such as,

Bonanza, yes back on the old Ponderosa, with the Cartwright’s. I was astonished to see Lorne Greene pop up in another series, much later, in outer space, called Battlestar Galactica, a poor man’s Star Wars. It was 14 years of westerns.

This if course was accompanied by Rawhide, with a very young Clint Eastwood. As we all know, he went onto bigger and better things.

The Munster’s, yes, a rather creepy bunch of kooky people, the only sane one was the daughter. Herman, though, he was a barrel of laughs. I’m not sure what Yvonne DeCarlo thought of it, coming down from a movie career to television.

The Addams family, another bunch of kooky people who were quite funny, and of course my favourites were Lurch and Thing. Not too sure about Uncle Fester and Cousin Itt though. And moonbaking? Really?

Hogan’s Heroes, and the Stalag 13 crew was another of those strange but intriguing shows that showed a lighter side to what must have been a really grim situation. I’m sure a POW camp wasn’t this much fun.

Gilligan’s Island, a rather interesting bunch of castaways whom I’m sure could have got back home without much trouble, but who close to stay on their island. Jim Baccus, the voice behind Mr Magoo made this interesting, along with the skipper.

Bewitched, with Elizabeth Montgomery, and another old movie star Agnes Moorhead, but it was the changing of Darren that had me doing a double take, and it sort of went off cue when they introduced a baby, Tabitha. Bad Samantha was a treat.

My Favorite Martian with Ray Walston, another actor that descended from the movies made this a little more interesting than it really was. Still there were enough laughs in it to keep the interest going.

Mr Ed, the talking horse. Yes, special effects were working overtime with this one, but really, a talking horse?

The Beverly Hillbillies, I could never get into this. I doubt anyone finding oil on their property these days would get rich and moved to Beverly Hills. Perhaps a quiet ranch in Montana?

Get Smart, who could forget the cone of silence, or the phone in a shoe. How the producers would have loved mobile phones back then.

And my all time favourite, Mission Impossible. Those early episodes were the best, especially with Martin Landau, who later turned up in Space 1999.

There’s more, but we’ll get to them later.

In a word: Steal

You know how it goes, somebody breaks into your house and they steal the family jewels, which means, they’ve taken something that’s not theirs.

Baseballers will be well familiar with the term steal a base because that sneaky second base runner is trying to get to third, before the pitcher fires in a curveball.

But then there’s that same thief trying to rob you is stealing his way downstairs.

You come across a bargain, that is the seller doesn’t quite know what they’ve got and assumed it’s junk, that’s a steal.

On stage, one actor can steal the limelight from another.  if a film, an actor with a lesser part, can, if their good enough, steal the scene.

And if you’re lucky enough, you might steal a kiss, or just get slapped.

Then there’s the government, using a certain event to change the laws, and it might just steal your liberty.

This is not to be confused with the word steel, which means something else entirely, like a very malleable metal that’s low in carbon.

Or like most of our heroes, they have nerves of steel, or if they are like us, they need to steel themselves with a suitable fortification, rum is my choice.

But for me, I like the phrase, he had a steely look on his face and it was hard to tell if that was good or bad.

Where would I like to be today?

Long after you have been on a holiday and forgotten about it, basically those places you visited are just a distant memory.  And, the likelihood of getting back there is getting more remote by the day.
Let’s face it unless something calamitous happens to remind you, and generally not in a good way, they just become place names on a map.  For most of us, living a hectic life where there’s little time to think of anything else but the job, looking after the family, and rest, that generally sums up your day.
Perhaps, in the ensuing days, the only reminder that you actually had a holiday is the last of the washing.
So, what you need are little reminders that you actually went.  This might take the form of postcards or fridge magnets, but these tend to get lost among the everyday collections of bills and children’s paintings, drawings, and certificates.
And, there’s only so much you can stick on the fridge door.

But, there is another way.

If you stay in hotels as most of us do, they always, or nearly always, provide you with several very important items that can give us a little reminder of where we been and the associated memories, whether good or bad, but hopefully good.

The first is a writing pad and pen.  You don’t get much paper on that pad so it’s only good for writing down plot points, if you’re a writer like me, particularly if you’re in an overseas location.

The second is the toiletries, like hair shampoo and conditioner, along with other items, like soap and bath gel.  These invariably have the hotel name and sometimes location on them, but often the hotel name is all that is needed.

Of course, some hotels are different, like the Hilton, because every Hilton has the same pen and the same toiletries, so with these hotels, you’re going to have to have a good memory, or as I do, take the pad.  It has the hotel’s address.

With other hotels, like the Bruneschelli in Florence, or the Savoir in Venice, they have their name on both.

Some people will use the toiletries and therefore will not have a keepsake reminder, or they may not see the use in taking the pen or the pad that comes with the room, but I suggest you do.

Then, when you least expect it, there will be that little reminder of where you go been and hopefully, it will bring back good memories, and that, for me, is on the shower.

Like today.
I’m in Florence.
Well, for the duration of the shower, that is.

So the good news is…

All I have is the common cold.

The result came back negative, which is good. Like I said yesterday, it borders on impossible to get it when community transmission of COVID is zero. All of our COVID cases come from overseas travellers returning home, and in quarantine.

And, all the cases that came in a second wave in Victoria, and to a lesser extent New South Wales, were caused by a botched quarantine system where the people charged with keeping people in quarantine were letting them out to roam the streets, and mixing with them.

Of course, that’s been fixed now with members of the armed defence forces taking over, in a move that should have been done from the start. I doubt whether these obdurate returning people who knew before they left what would happen when they returned will run the gamut of armed soldiers.

I know what I would do if they tried.

But, the news is good, and plans for my funeral can go back on hold, and I will take the opportunity to rest more over the next few days.

Then it’s back to the renovations…

It’s funny what goes through your mind…

And odd too that we might think it ‘funny’, but the English language is littered with a great many ironic, and sometimes daft expressions.

But, I am beginning to understand what it’s like waiting for a result to a test that you don’t really want to know.

I imagine sitting in the doctor’s office after a phone call to say the results are in, you’re sitting there patiently waiting, and then he comes in, sits down, always with the poker face so you have no idea what he’s thinking, or about to say.

With COVID the death sentence comes as a phone call, and you get to sit in a room and wait. Here, once you get a test you go straight home and self quarantine until the result is known.

That won’t be until tomorrow.

Meanwhile the symptoms I have mirror that of a very bad cold. Runny nose, sore throat, aches and pains, very bad sinus that leads to a headache that ordinary paracetamol has no effect on.

Is it worse than yesterday, yes.

Am I having trouble breathing?

No, but sometimes it feels like I am. I know it’s the mind messing with me. Psychosomatic, I think the word is, that we will ourselves to believe something is true even if it isn’t.

Am I trying to convince myself I have COVID? Do I realise that in a state where there is either one or no new cases day in and day out, that it’s possible, not being in or near a hot spot that I could get it?

Improbably to impossible.

Yet here I sit thinking the worst, and not the best. Why is that?

Nevertheless, my mind then switches to the possibilities, that if it is my time, what is there left to do? A truck load of stuff. It’s too early to be checking out, that there’s a hundred and one things I have to get done.

OK, time for an attitude readjustment. In two days it will be my eldest granddaughters 17th birthday. To be honest, I don’t know where that 17 years went because the last time I think about it, she was 10 and we had taken her to London and Paris because I promised her I would.

Well, that’s it then, isn’t it. I don’t have COVID 19, I’ve just got a very bad cold. Down with the lemon drinks, the paracetamol for the aches and pains and stop mulling over death. Too soon, too much to do.

Let you know tomorrow what the result is.

In a word: Mark

A teacher will mark a test in order to give the student a mark out of 100.  Yes, to mark a test means to ascertain right and wrong answers and score it accordingly, and getting a mark out of 100 could determine a great many different outcomes at school.

Whereas a mark on your clothes could mean you’ve been playing with fire, rolled in the mud or if much older having a salacious affair with an unexplainable lipstick mark on your collar.

A mark is someone that a con man believes will be easily deceived.

A mark is a catch in certain types of football.

You can have an identifying mark on some item of property.

it’s literally the x marks the spot for someone who cannot write, i.e. make your mark

There can be a mark on a rope that indicates the depth of water.

And many, many more…

But not to be confused with marque, which could be the make or model of a particular type of car

Or marc with is the refuse of grapes after being pressed

 

Any other time…

I would not be worried, but…

We are being told, even when there is no major outbreak, or any new cases of COVID in the last few days, that we should get tested if we are showing even the slightest of symptoms.

I;ve got a runny nose.

I don’t have a scratchy throat.

I feel like I have a fever, but I’m not sure. You would think there’s be a thermometer in the house, since we often look after youngish children, but it isn’t where it was last, so I don’t know.

The COVID clinics that used to be open near us have all closed die to the lack of cases, so we don’t know where to go to get tested.

So, next point of call, call the doctor.

And, as if he is registering my panic, he calls me, but not in relation to COVID, but some blood tests, and a care plan, something we old people get once we’ve survived 65 years or more.

Something else to note, all of our medical care is free, doctors accept what is known as bulk billing, ie they accept what the governments pay them for visits. It’s not the same in other states, so this one is good.

We also get 5 free visits to either dietitians, physiotherapists, foot doctors, and the like, a year every year from now on.

Hospital, well, you need to have a secondary medical plan to pay all but $200 of your hospital stay no matter how long or which ward. Hospital care is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, so it’s a relief to know that the most I can pay in a year is $500, no matter how many times I go in, or stay.

But, the COVID test. The doctor says there’s a clinic at the local hospital, just down the road from us. Like everywhere in Australia, the tests are free, you just turn up and they test you.

Then you have to stay home until the result is delivered, usually within 24 hours. if you have it, well, I don’t know what happens next, perhaps men dressed in white suits arrive in an anonymous white van and take you away.

But we both have a symptom, and so we’re getting tested tomorrow. I’ll tell you then what happens in the clinic.

I think I can say quite safely I don’t have it, because I’m one of those in the critical category with a compromised immune system, and the reason why I have spent most of the last six months home, in hiding, and going out only when necessary. It’d be fate to get it on what is a one in 100 chance.

Still, if I do, my chances of survival are less that 20%, so, not that I do this very often, I will be saying a prayer, not just for me, but for everyone like me, because that bug we were told was no more than another strain of the flu, has killed 940,000 people worldwide, and it hasn’t finished yet, despite some very important people saying it will go away by itself.

It would be very bad luck after avoiding it for six months if…

No, lets not go there. Let’s be positive.