A further gallimaufry of silly liffery (A to L)

[All the words defined below started out life as East Anglian placenames]



bardeswell
Using archaic language in the belief that it is amusing, eg, “Canst tell me the hour, stout yeoman?” Personally I wouldn’t give such a person the time of day.

barney
The man standing at the bar who doesn’t laugh when you tell an Irish joke. The thing to do is to tell it again, only more slowly for his benefit.

beeston
Honey

beeston regis
Royal honey

beetley adj
Descriptive of legs that have delicate traceries of veins reminiscent of contour maps of the Andean Cordillera.

bintree
The person in a supermarket who puts their shopping cart crosswise in the aisle, thereby blocking it, and who then engages a shelf stacker in deep conversation.

bittering
Complaining that the party you voted into power have turned out to be “just as bad as the other lot”.

blackwater
A synonym for instant coffee.

blofield heath
The blasted place where people meet to make love.

booton
Advising a referee that he is in the wrong profession

brisley
A Tom Cruise lookalike. Shave him and he might look quite presentable.

burgh stubbs
Lavatorial evidcnce that you need to change your lifestyle

cangate
Inserting lots of do-able items in a “to-do” list to give yourself the illusion that you really ARE clearing up the clutter in your life.

carston
The stranger who obligingly waves you back into a parking space, thereby enabling you to put a dent both in your car and in the one behind you.

castle rising
Unwarranted excitement during a game of chess

clipping green
Topiary, the kind that produces lopsided peacocks.

colby (TM)
A motel trouser press which allows you to add a parallel crease to your pants.

corpusty
The agonising of a fat man as to whether he should wear his belly above or below his belt.

crostwight
An angry linnet

drabblegale
A fluffy blouse designed to conceal the paucity of the bosom.

dumpling green
An apple-cheeked buxom country wench with a smile marred only by plaque and missing teeth.

elm
A hatred of all things Dutch

friday bridge
A weekend that starts on Thursday

fring
The snapping noise made when you pull a bra-strap. Boys love it, girls hate it.

grimston warren
Killing rabbits for fun.

guestwick
“Gli ospiti sono come i pesci, dopo tre giorni incominciano a puzzare” (Guests are like fish: after three days they begin to smell). A guestwick is a ploy to persuade them it is time to leave, eg, by burning the house down.

guist adj, pron /gaist/
The sort of spectre that haunts houses in Surrey

gunthorpe
The scrotal frisson that men experience when Clint Eastwood squares up to a villain.

hengrave
Forgetting the first name of your boss’s wife at a reception. Calling her “my dear” only compounds the error.

herringswell
A rash or excrescence arising from the wearing of a fishmonger’s jockstrap.

high kelling
Putting the porn on the top shelf to keep it out of the reach of short vicars.

hindolveston
A safari-style jerkin with numerous pockets. No matter how long you own a hindolveston, you will never finally decide what to put in which pockets.

honing
Excessive polishing of wineglasses to expiate the overindulgence of the night before.

horning
Trying to provide a sophiscated reply to the question “How do you like your steak, sir?”

horningtoft
Failing to impress the waiter: “medium to well-done” is for wimps; “saignant” is for showoffs.

lamas
Trying to reconcile the gambolling image in the Spring with the chops on your plate a couple of months later.

letheringsett
A failure to win your man by whipping the shit out of him.

leziate (schoolgirl slang)
A gym mistress.

little hautbois
A French piccolo

Austringer

An austringer is usually defined in dictionaries as "a keeper of goshawks". Austringers are to hawks what falconers are to falcons, but it seems a mighty pretentious word. Why not just "hawker"? I suspect it was the name that hawkers gave to themselves to boost their image, seeing that hawkers were considered inferior to falconers, you know, in the same way that ratcatchers became "rodent operatives" and our polytechnics became universities...
Anyway, all this is an excuse to let you know that I am (re)reading T H White's classic "The Goshawk". If you have read Helen MacDonald's "Falcon" (and if you haven't, you should), you will have some notion of the almost mystical relationship that binds falconer to falcon, and of the extraordinary patience and determination required to achieve that relationship.
Well, from T H White's account, it seems that training a falcon is a walk in the park compared to training a goshawk. On the way, T H White - like Helen MacDonald - has many insightful things to say about the human condition, which is why I recommend both books to all of you, not just to specialist birders, falconers, or, for that matter, the austringers among you.

More chats with Sophie

Grandpa, do you love Grandma?
Of course!
Then why don't you live together?
I've lost the key to the front door.
Why don't you just knock, and Grandma will let you in?
She might be sleeping.
Grandpa, sometimes I just don't understand you.
Neither do I, dearest.

Grandpa, why do mommies and daddies sleep together?
It saves on laundry bills, dear.
So why don't you sleep with Grandma?
There's not enough room for me AND Grandma AND my teddy bear.
But you don't have a teddy bear...
OMG, so that's who he's sleeping with!

Grandpa, I'm learning German!
Good for you! Do you like it?
Sicher, ich lerne gern deutsch.
Really, Sophie? Das haette ich nicht gewuesst....
Grandpa, why do you have to go and spoil everything?

Would you like to hear a German poem, Sophie dear?
No.
Good, here it is:
Wär' ich ein Vögelein,
Bald wollt' ich bei dir sein,
Scheut' Falk' und Habicht nicht,
Flög' schnell zu dir.
Schöss' mich ein Jäger tot,
Fiel' ich in deinen Schoß,
Sähst du mich traurig an,
Gern stürb' ich dann!
Shall we go and eat ice cream, Grandpa?
Good idea. Bugger Goethe*.

*The poem is in fact by Helmina von Chézy, but who's ever heard of her?

How to catch elephants

[This post is for Sophie but grown-ups are allowed to read it as long as they remain silent and respectful]




Equipment needed
1 blackboard and easel
1 piece of chalk
1 violin
1 telescope
1 pair of tweezers
1 pot with lid

Method
Set up blackboard and easel in a clearing in the jungle
Take the piece of chalk and write on the blackboard 2 + 2 = 5
Conceal yourself nearby, pick up the violin and start to play

How it works
Elephants are very musical, so any passing elephant will be attracted into the clearing by the sound of violin music.
Elephants are very intelligent, so when it sees what is written on the blackboard, it will stop in its tracks, trying to work out why someone should write 2 + 2 = 5 when every elephant, and most children, know that 2 + 2 = 4 (at least in this universe).

Catching the elephant
This is the easy bit. Put down the violin, look at the elephant through the wrong end of the telescope, which will make it very tiny. Using the tweezers, pick it up carefully and put it in the pot. Important: don't forget to screw the lid tightly, otherwise the elephant might escape.

(What you do with the elephant after you've caught it is up to you, but don't take it into the kitchen or you will have mighty big footprints in the margarine).

BTO Open Day

Saturday, 5 August 2006. Gorgeous weather for the BTO Open Day at the Nunnery in Thetford. I arrived early, walked round the grounds and admired four Egyptian Geese (Alopochen aegyptiaca), but not much else, although I am always struck by how beautiful the grounds are at the Nunnery. You really must pay it a visit one day. As to the foxgeese (alopex = fox, chen = goose), I am all in favour of colourful introductions, ceteris paribus, and am not sniffy about Mandarin Duck either (v.i)

The events at the BTO Open Day were not quite exciting enough to cause me to send out a come-hither message, although the toasted sandwiches were damned good. The new Chris Mead Library is very impressive, lots of tempting books in a delicious new building. Well, not to be grudging, there were also excellent displays of the BTO's work, censusing, surveys, nest recording, etc.

Mostly it was, as these things usually are, a good opportunity to meet old friends. I talked Barn Owls, Swifts and Orioles - of course - and also learned a lot about monitoring nest activity by means of cameras, thanks to a dynamic couple from Devon who deal in this stuff. Young and energetic, good guys, their brilliant company is called Eco-Watch. Lang may their lum reek..

I am always struck by the number of white-bearded old scrotes at these events, and have to remind myself that I am now one of them. Eheu fugaces!

The heat got to me by early afternoon, so I came home via the traffic jam on the A11 to a plate of chicken goujons with tartare sauce (crazy combination, but it was all I could find).

All this is really just an excuse to post pictures of Egyptian Goose and Mandarin Duck of course. There are only two species in the Aix genus: Mandarin (Aix galericulata) and the Carolina Wood Duck (Aix sponsa). The Mandarin is now under threat in its native China, so all the feral populations, resulting from escapes from collections, are now of conservation importance. But this is really just an excuse to post a picture of a Wood Duck as well. :-)

A funny thing happened on the way to the kibbutz

A few years back, I did a lecture tour in Israel: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem and Beersheba. Tough audiences. Great experience. I had three minders organising the tour, with Eric the one in charge. Eric and his wife and children met me at Tel Aviv airport and invited me to dinner that evening. I said thanks, but I am really tired, but ask me for tomorrow night and the answer is yes. Which is how I came to be having dinner in a Jewish home on Friday evening, the eve of the Sabbath. Thank goodness they felt able to have a gentile at their table for the Sabbath meal. Eric’s mother, Sonia, took pity on me and tried to guide me through the ceremonial. The children giggled at this goy’s clumsy attempt to follow the prayers and the rituals. I loved every moment of it, and just wished I had a tradition that went back four thousand years.
My minders were wonderful guys, looking after me and introducing me to filafel and Jewish culture, enabling me to visit kibbutzim and all the while arguing with each other about every damn thing,. All I had to do was ask a question “How far are we from the coast?” or “Why do you leave rusting tanks along the roadside?” and they would build a whole mivneh out of it in moments.
Because I had worked for many years with a Jewish man, a German scholar who delighted in teaching me Yiddish expressions, my speech was, and still is, larded with yiddish words and syntactical peculiarities, so it was not surprising that people in my audience frequently asked my minders “Is he Jewish?”
Anyway, I came home with a very positive impression of Israel and its people. So impressed that I arranged for my daughter, Sarah, then aged 18, to spend a summer on Sonia’s kibbutz in northern Israel. Sarah didn’t like the experience, soon left and did her own version of an aborigine’s Walkabout. She became very involved with the Palestinian community in the process.
When she came home, and we began to talk about Israel, it soon became clear that she and I were talking about two different countries. She couldn’t recognise the Israel that I described, and I had no grasp of the Israel that she had experienced. We didn’t fight, but the dialogue between us soon dried up as there seemed to be no common ground.
A funny thing indeed happened on the way to the kibbutz.

More movie quotes

1
All they talk about is fertiliser and women. I have never shared their enthusiasm for fertiliser. As to women, I became indifferent at the age of eighty-two.
2
From ten o’clock tomorrow morning, everyone under the age of sixteen will be over the age of sixteen
3
I don’t mind your using my men, but I do wish you had asked first, old boy.
4
It was nice to meet you. Surreal, but nice.
5
It’s a good day to die, Grandfather.
6
Ma non ti sei sbottonato i pantaloni?
7
The first thing we got to do in cleaning up this town is to take out all the laywers and shoot ‘em down like dogs.
8
What, please, is screwing?
It’s, oh, yes, it’s bumsen.
That would be the one German word you pronounce perfectly.
9
Would you mind marrying us first? It would mean so much to the lady.
10
You can eat it, but it tastes like shit.

A Amarcord
B Bananas
C Cabaret
D Crocodile Dundee
E Jesse James
F Little Big Man
G Notting Hill
H The African Queen
I The Magnificent Seven
J Zulu