Time constraints this week mean that I can offer neither a flash fiction nor one of my regular pieces for Stickybeak’s Lexicon. However, I would still like to post something of value, so I have come up with the astonishingly novel idea of a shortened version of the Lexicon. Think of it as the fast-food variant; a take-away snippet of vocabulary to file away for future use. I had several titles for this new series (as it has the makings of a regular feature for the flyingscribbler), amongst which: ‘Easy Stickybeak’, ‘Stickybeak Lite’ and ‘Stickybeak Minis’. I decided that ‘Stickybeak’s Express Lexicon’ best suited me. Here is the first entry. Let me know if you have ever, or intend to, use the word in your own writing.

Dithyrambic

A dithyramb, in ancient Greece, was a wild, impassioned choral hymn sung in honour of Bacchus. It is a poem or piece of writing in wildly rapturous or bombastic vein.

The adjective dithyrambic means wild, rapturous and boisterous. (Chambers Concise).

I came across this wonderfully exotic word whilst reading Edmund White’s ‘City Boy’. In one passage he describes how he wrote, for a magazine he edited, a glowing review of something Nabokov had written, having already received less favourable contributions from everyone else he’d approached:

“Of course, as an idolator I was scandalized by the measured tone of my contributors, and so my own page became all the more dithyrambic.”

Not perhaps the easiest word to use in one’s writing, and certainly tricky to insert into everyday speech (although this depends largely on your audience), but it’s a beautiful word to file away for a rainy day.

© flyingscribbler 2012

The following is a dystopian-esque take on what could be. As always, your comments are greatly appreciated.

Blood Bank

Had he been conscious, John would undoubtedly have been able to argue his own case; he was good at that sort of thing. “A born problem solver”, his last employer had written on his redundancy reference letter, although even he must have been aware of the persuasive effect John’s emerald eyes could engender in the most intransigent of colleagues; male or female.

Even now, in a medical coma, his eyes gleamed with suggestive possibility; a fact not lost on Lucy who had been alerted to their potential during the early stage of the procedure. She’d swabbed more carefully, squeezed his heart more lovingly and held her breath more intently. She imagined sending invisible pulses from her own chest to bolster his too-weak rhythm and wondered if it was fair to know a lover’s heart better than he did himself.

‘We’re going to need more blood, at least five units.’

The surgeon’s tone was one of controlled urgency.

‘Nurse, scan his code please.’

Lucy grabbed the portable scanner and found the patient’s chip. Her gasp was muted by the surgical mask.

‘Nurse Mitchell, the figure please.’

‘Zero.’

‘Speak up, Nurse.’

Lucy double-checked the statement on the screen: the ambulance, emergency room treatment, two initial blood units, theatre charge; it was all listed.

‘Zero. He has no more health credit.’

‘Check his reserves, quickly.’

Lucy scrolled through his details. There was no emergency reserve account: they’d recently been cancelled for the unemployed; the government citing recessionary constraints by way of explanation.

‘Nurse Mitchell, need I remind you that time is of the essence? No credit; no blood. No blood; no patient.’

‘I’ll check his family transfers.’ Sweat prickled under Lucy’s scrubs as she scrolled further. They’d already taken all eligible transfers from his mother’s account to cover the surgeon’s call-out. Lucy closed her eyes, drowning in his swirling, green pools of light.

‘Nurse!’

Lucy held the scanner over her upturned wrist; she had over two hundred credits. She moved the curser to “donate all” and clicked.

‘There’s a credit transfer,’ she said.

The surgeon’s eyes held Lucy’s for a moment before he turned away.

‘Start the transfusion,’ he ordered.

*

The young man standing on the doorstep had the loveliest eyes she’d ever seen.

‘I’m Lucy’s mother,’ she said, ‘you can’t have heard.’

‘Heard what?’

‘There was an accident. Lucy had no health credits left and we’d nothing to give. I’m so sorry to tell you like this. Were you good friends?’

‘Not really,’ said John, ‘I just came to return something she’d lent me.’

© flyingscribbler 2012

My non-presence has a rather more prosaic explanation: I have spent the past two weeks shuttling between home, work and a hospital eighty miles away from both in order to visit my mother and her new knee. I shan’t bore you with the personal details of her medical sojourn, the post-operative complications, collapsing lung and embolism, all of which transpire to keep her prisoner on the orthopaedic ward. Nor shall I recount the experience of twice driving to the hospital directly from ten hour flights; the second occasion I was awake for over thirty hours.

Spending so much time in a vast location like a British teaching hospital does have its upsides. After the initial horror of being there at all has worn off, after regaining my breath having held it for the thirty seconds it takes to walk through the wall of smoke fortifying the main entrance, and after having deciphered the outrageously complicated signage which would surely confound even the brightest of wartime code-crackers, I begin to take note.

There’s much to see: patients, nurses, doctors, visitors, machines, noises and those unmistakable hospital smells: a story with every glance and sniff. And once I start to mine this rich seam of Hippocratic detail, I can’t stop.

Naturally, there are the characters.

Firstly, the double amputee sitting in a wheel chair outside the entrance, smoking endless cigarettes; he attracts pity and disgust in equal measure. Has the horror of losing both legs not shocked him into kicking the habit? Does he have no shame? Is this his last pleasure in life? Or, more intriguingly, is he a visitor? An unlucky ex-serviceman come to visit an ailing parent perhaps? A victim of a frenzied shark attack nervously awaiting the arrival of a longed-for child? The possibilities for this one character alone are endless.

Then there is the man who is wheeled by on his bed, a scaffold of wire and pins piercing his damaged head; the stuff of horrible nightmares. How did it happen? Accident? Suicide attempt? Daring experimental surgery to correct a debilitating skull deformity, performed by a dashing, yet frowned upon doctor?

Or how about the terrified student nurse who hangs on every word and every action of her agitated mentor. When will she make her first mistake? Will it be fatal? More importantly, should she tell someone about the good-looking young patient in bed number five and his habit of revealing himself to her in a state of obvious arousal? If she does, they’ll have to move him.

And when did the woman who brings tea to the ward last see her family back in Africa? If she only eats once a day there will be more money to send back for her child’s education. She hands out her cups with a smile which masks a thousand lonely tears shed in the confines of a damp bed-sit.

Finally, those visitors in the coffee shop: she quietly weeping, he bearing up. Have they just bid a final farewell to a dear friend? Or are they about to? Does she have a pathological fear of hospitals? Has he chosen this moment to inform her of a long-standing affair with her sick friend? Are they performance artists from the local college?

Then add to the mix the sensory overload of details: the incessant bleep-bleeping of machines: machines to dispense drugs; machines to pump air; machines to measure life’s force; and machines to provide the force to measure. The urgent alarms: alarms to call the crash team; alarms to call the nurse; alarms to summon rescue from the bathroom. And the bleepers, pagers and, now they are allowed, the constant ring-toning mayhem from a dozen patients’ mobile phones and the accompanying one-sided moaning and groaning.

Not to forget the smells: smells of disinfecting washes and ointments to mask, incompletely, the smells of functions completed in public.

A couple of hours spent in a hospital and I have more inspirational material to work with than I could imagine. All I had to do was pay a little attention. It certainly makes for a more fulfilling and useful hospital visit.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, and whilst sitting at the laptop, staring hopefully at the wall does, sometimes, bring forth the seed of an idea, getting out there where life (and death) puts on its show is guaranteed to produce a bumper harvest of ideas. Just don’t forget your notebook.

Perhaps I’ve had that mindful experience after all.

Happy convalescing, Mum.

© flyingscribbler 2012

Expanding my vocabulary one word at a time

Perquisite

This new candidate for the Lexicon is not one of the more unusual ones. Indeed, it didn’t really require looking up when I came across it. This is more than likely because its colloquial form has entrenched itself in our contemporary speech to such an extent that I simply skimmed over perquisite, content in the knowledge that perk and its parent form were one and the same. They are.

However, having come to the end of the chapter (a very interesting one about the life of Eleanor of Castile), I decided to go back to perquisite for a closer look. It is, for me, one of those words which demands closer inspection; surely, I thought, there must be more to it than the single syllable perk suggests.

My thumb index Oxford Encyclopedic offers the following:

Perquisite

1)      an extra profit or allowance additional to main income. No surprise there; I would imagine most of us have at some point in our working lives taken advantage of at least one or two perquisites of this nature.

2)      a customary extra right or privilege.

3)      an incidental benefit attached to employment.

4)      a thing which has served its primary use and to which a subordinate or servant has a customary right.

In the current age of austerity and horror at bankers’ bonuses that phrase ‘customary extra right’ takes on a much more controversial meaning; as does the ‘incidental benefit’. Now, it can of course mean something as simple as health insurance or a free parking space. It’s when that ‘incidental’ perquisite comes in seven figures that one tends to get a touch hot under one’s unstarched collar. Interestingly, perquisite is a Middle English word stemming from the Latin perquirere: to search diligently for. Now there’s an idea: send the bankers off on an Arthurian quest to diligently seek their perquisite; make them work for it. Imagine a kind of financial sector reality show where only the most courageous and talented gets to cash the golden cheque.

In a way, it is a shame that the shortened version perk has become the norm; it’s just so plosive and violent; like a crow’s squawk (if a crow had lips). Perquisite sounds much more romantic, and fits the final usage perfectly. You can imagine a Queen making a gift of her finest ermine-trimmed robe, (such an exquisite perquisite), to an eager Lady of the Chamber, who probably had her medieval eye on it from the very first. The perquisites of the job back in the Middle Ages were just as important as our perks of today, and, no doubt, just as controversial.

© flyingscribbler 2012

For those unfamiliar with this small seaside town on the English South Coast, it is the (unlikely) home of one of Art Deco’s undisputed gems: the De La Warr Pavilion. With its long, clean lines, white-washed facade and sweeping sea views from perfectly restored deco windows, this wondrous building seems lost in the Bexhill of 2012.

It appears to gaze out to sea, looking for a time when its home might have been worthy of its majestic presence. If I were to give the Pavilion advice, it would be to carry on searching the waves and never look the other way; to look behind itself at the town would be to confirm its isolation in melancholia itself.

Such is the pull of the De La Warr’s architectural and cultural heritage that it can still count on staging major exhibitions such as the ‘Warhol is Here’ one which I went to see last week. I cannot deny that it was insanely pleasurable to be able to view his Marylins, Maos and Campbell’s Tins almost entirely alone. I think I counted three or four other visitors. These are amongst the most famous Pop Art images created and in almost any other location the space would be mobbed, even towards the end of the exhibition’s run.

Sadly, what will stay with me longer than the repeated printed images of twentieth century icons, longer than the Polaroid self-portraits, longer even than the intensely erotic nude photographs, is the sheer down-at-heel, melancholic drabness of the place. I’m sorry Bexhill, but it needs to be said. There are architectural and intellectual blasphemies being committed in this town, some of which are enough to make me weep.

For example, the seafront is home to a terrace of Edwardian-era houses, built in a Moghul-esque style with requisite domes and Eastern detailing.

Marina Court Avenue (in original condition)

Odd, yes, but seen as a whole, interesting and, a century or so later, it comes with a narrative of its own. And these houses were intended to be seen as one, with repeated details binding them together, giving the street meaning and context amidst an alien environment. They even featured in the wonderful Art Deco advertising of the time.

Marina Court Avenue. (google images)

So what has been allowed to happen? A number of residents have removed the original, black framed, latticed windows and bastardised the terrace with white, plastic frames. Not content with this mere vitrinal crime, some have gone a step further and knocked out bricks to make the windows bigger. All so they could have a larger view, uninterrupted by those pesky, annoying Edwardian windows. Never mind the poor souls who have to look at the houses from the outside. To my mind, a distinctive building, well-proportioned with its intended and original features intact, is a thing of beauty for a passer-by to behold, even in the midst of Bexhill’s long-ago-faded grandeur. A butchered property, cosmetically unenhanced by ignorant (yes, I said it) owners, simply reinforces the sense of irreversible decline which plagues towns like this. And no amount of Art Deco enshrined Pop Art can disguise it.

I know I’m stepping into the risky territories of personal freedom and taste; not to mention recession-era necessities, environmental concerns (draughty, those lovely windows), and so forth, but these things are important. The soul needs nourishment too.

Which brings me to this. In the (futile, as it turned out) search for a coffee worth sipping on the seafront, (and yes, I know I should have gone to the Pavilion cafe), I came across a small place offering food and drinks. The coffee’s aftertaste lingers still in my memory a week later. However, it was on the outside of said establishment that true despair and melancholic gloom descended. I think I might have seen the funny side of this had the windows not been haunting me, and I sincerely hope to be able to at some point.

Spelling mistake or deliberate?

Read it again if you missed it.

And if this isn’t enough to fill all you grammar/spelling fiends with horror, just around the corner they were offering ‘handmaid’ dumplings in the chicken casserole. Has Margaret Atwood’s terrifying vision of dystopian reproductive hell reached Bexhill? I have visions of thousands of blue (or was it red?) clad women, rolling identical dumplings, to be fed into the waiting mouths of surrogate diners. No. Believe me, never was such slop served up in the kitchens of The Republic of Gilead.

Am I right to feel like this? I don’t know. Do I sound self-righteous and elitist? Yes, probably. But I can’t shake the feeling that THESE THINGS MATTER.

I wonder what Warhol would have thought. I have an idea that uniformity and ‘doing the right thing’ might not have featured at the top of his list and that subversion, maybe even perversion, were probably more his thing. However, I’d like to think that he would not have approved of the ignorant (and willful) destruction of architecture and language as witnessed in Bexhill last week.

It’s over to you. Shoot me down in flames if you must.

Anyway, apologies if this offends.

A Grave Business

‘Stop the hearse!’

‘What?’

‘Stop the bloody hearse.’

The driver checked in the mirror before gently applying the breaks. No-one at Skelton & Sons Funeral Directors had forgotten the incident with Mrs Featherington-Smythe in 1978; he’d been an apprentice at the time and had forgotten the firm’s golden rule: “Never break for a squirrel”. They’d ceased carrying relations of the deceased in the hearse after that.

Oscar threw open the door and ran onto the verge. Pete couldn’t see much from the driver’s seat, but he was sure that the family in the limo behind were being treated to an unexpected spectacle.

They were.

Dave, the limo’s driver, told them later in the pub.

‘Like a bloody waterfall it was; the Niagara of vomit. Took their minds of the matter in hand for a minute I should think.’

Oscar wasn’t thinking about any waterfalls; he wasn’t thinking about much else other than how this wasn’t going to go down too well with the boss and whether there was any shoe polish in the car.

‘Feeling better?’ said Pete, pulling back into the flow of traffic.

Oscar turned to the driver and nodded sheepishly.

‘Good. Late night, was it?’

Oscar pulled down the sun visor and looked in the mirror. James, one of the undertakers, leaned through from the back and handed him a tissue.

‘Here you go, young man, wipe it off with this. There’s mints in the glove box. Two things you’ll always find on a hearse, apart from the deceased of course; tissues and mints. No-one likes an undertaker with halitosis. Makes them wonder, you know.’

Oscar didn’t know and didn’t much care. He looked like shit and felt like shit. And something had tasted like shit in that vomit. What was it? He reached for the mints.

‘Where’s your hat, Oscar?’

‘What?’

Charles, the Principle Undertaker, and heir to the family business, repeated his question.

‘Where. Is .Your. Hat?’

Oscar’s stomach lurched violently again.

‘It must have fallen off, Mr Skelton.’

‘Are you telling me one of our pristine, finest silk, top hats is now sitting in a pool of your adolescent vomit on the side of the A27?’

Oscar swallowed back the last dregs of bile and slumped into his seat.

‘Formaldehyde,’ he said quietly.

‘What?’

‘I think I must have overdosed on the formaldehyde this morning.’

‘My God, boy,’ erupted the heir, ‘I know you’re only on work experience with us and clearly have only very limited intelligence, but even you can’t be stupid enough to have actually drunk the embalming fluid!’

‘I didn’t drink it,’ said Oscar, ‘Percy was just showing me the ropes and I tripped over one of the trolleys and knocked over a bottle.’

‘I knew it!’ said James, shaking his head, ‘old Mrs MacDougal came in to discuss her husband’s interment this morning. She left in such a state. I wondered what was going on down there.’

‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘as long as no more damage was done.’ Oscar slouched further into his seat. ‘Oscar? Anything you’d like to tell us?’

‘I don’t think so, Mr Skelton. Percy said he’d be able to stitch up the damage in time for the weekend.’

Charles looked out the window at the passing trees.

‘My Great Grandfather, the first Charles Skelton, would turn in his grave if he had one,’ he muttered.

Oscar looked at Pete.

‘What?’ he mouthed.

‘Trenches,’ whispered Pete, ‘missing in action.’

‘Oh,’ said Oscar, and popped another mint.

‘You, boy,’ said Charles the Younger, ‘are extremely lucky that Mr Skelton Senior is on holiday this week; he’d make short work of you, and no mistake. Now then, did we bring a spare hat, James?’

‘Not with two funerals on at the same time, Sir. Colin and his lads took the rest.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Charles, ‘did they get away ok? No problems?’

‘No idea,’ said Pete, ‘I wasn’t there.’

‘It’s alright,’ said Oscar, eager to prove himself capable of at least one thing, ‘Me and Percy loaded the hearses and put the flowers in.’ There, he thought, not completely useless, am I?

The rest of the afternoon went without a hitch; at least it seemed to from where Oscar was standing. He was asked not to assist with getting the coffin into the crematorium on account of being improperly attired, so instead waited at a respectful distance.

Once the short service was over, and the assembled mourners had taken a quick look at the flowers laid out by the exit, Oscar stepped forward to open the limo’s heavy door.

‘Mrs Melbury, I’m so sorry for your loss,’ he said in his most serious voice.

‘Thank you, dear,’ replied the old woman, dabbing daintily at her eye with a white handkerchief, ‘and it’s Mrs Huffington. But thank you anyway, and I’m glad you’re feeling better now.’

Oscar closed the door on the grieving widow and walked slowly back to the now empty hearse. He sat down heavily in the back seat.

‘Too much for you was it, Oscar?’ said Pete, ‘Funerals aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, mate.’

Oscar smiled weakly. He could have sworn Melbury had been the name on the coffin; he’d noticed it when he helped Percy wheel it out from the cold store. Or had that been the other one? Suddenly, he felt a bit queasy again.

‘Um, Pete?’ said Oscar, ‘whose was the other funeral today?’

‘Lord Melbury’s, of course. Big one too, I should think. Quite famous in his day, he was.’

Shit, thought Oscar.

‘And is he being cremated here too?’

Pete looked at Oscar and smiled.

‘Christ no!’ he exclaimed, ‘The Melburys! He’ll be going in the family vault with the rest of them.’

 I don’t think he is, thought Oscar following a thin line of smoke as it drifted away from the crematorium’s chimney. On balance, he decided, a career in the funeral business might not be for him after all.

© flyingscribbler 2012

Missing from my fantasy list is ‘stop smoking’. I did that years ago. And not by resolving to do it either. Oh no. I tried once on New Year’s Day and failed rather too quickly afterwards. The trouble is, there’s just so much pressure surrounding the whole ‘resolution’ business. And it is a business; just look at all the flyers leaping energetically through the letter box encouraging you to join the gym, go to evening yoga/pilates/zumba (why anyone would want to be doing that rather than sipping a G&T at six o’clock remains a mystery to me). These people want to make money out of your perceived inadequacies. No, I just woke up one day (in April I think) and decided to stop smoking. It worked. No pressure you see. The fact is, I always intended to stop. By intending to do something you can say ‘my aim is to stop smoking/drink less/have more fun, but I shan’t need to beat myself up if I don’t achieve it’. If however you ‘resolve’ to do that same thing, you have rather more to reproach yourself for when if you fail.

Therefore, on this basis, I would like to announce my list of ‘Intentions’ for the coming months.

1) Write more.

I intend to write more short stories and submit more of what I write to journals and competitions. Maybe I’ll even start work on the children’s novel that is occupying a large part of my subconscious.

2) Read more.

Certain people would say that this is impossible and that the dangerously unstable pile of books next to the bed will never be read or diminish (“well, someone must be adding more books to it”), but there is always space for more reading. For example, I now have a Kindle which far from filling me with dread horror simply says ‘you can now read in even more places than before and read things which you might not have bothered to before’. Hurrah!

3) Blog more.

I certainly intend to. As long as you intend to visit more often. Deal?

4) Look for inspiration more. *

I mean by this that I intend to be more aware and ‘look’ more. Inspiration for writing is everywhere, it’s just a matter of remembering, noting down and reviewing. This leads me to…

5) Use my writer’s journal properly.

I hereby intend to stop using my journal to scribble down phone numbers and start using it properly. I know I should be doing this and perhaps I will start. It will surely benefit my writing.

I think that is enough to aim for, don’t you?

So, forget resolutions and their inherent disappointment rate; join me and make a list of intentions. It’s much more relaxing and doesn’t involve any immediate deprivation or hard work. Isn’t that a friendlier way to start the year?

* My intention number four to look for more inspiration got off to a flying start the other day when I looked out of the window on my way back from the States. It was such an amazing sunrise, I decided to record it for use as inspiration at a later date. At least, I intend to use it. If I don’t, well, I still have a pretty picture to look at.

Happy New Year.

Round Robin

 Dear Family and Friends

I can’t quite believe it, but it is THAT time of year again when I remove the cap on my metaphorical fountain pen, check the ink, smooth down the foolscap and begin writing the annual Cox Family letter.

Where to start? I suppose we ought to start at the very beginning, because as Julie Andrews suggests, it is a very good place to start; and who am I to argue with a National Treasure?

I know many of you will be wondering about the outcome of last Christmas’ Cox Family Scrabble Championship. It was, as always, a close run thing, the second round play off between Roger and Abigail proving a particular nail-biter. In the end it came down to penalties for unused letters, with Abigail conceding more points with an unplayed ‘z’, ‘q’ and ‘x’. The final was a rematch between Amanda and her partner Toni; Amanda prevailed yet again with a brilliant placement on a triple word square of ‘kibbutz’, cleaning up with a massive score including an extra fifty points for using all her tiles in one go. Toni retired to the kitchen to lick her war wounds and, hopefully, rethink her match-play strategy for this year’s event.

In February we decided to change our car for a newer model. I was hoping to ‘go green’ and purchase a low emissions eco car, but as anyone who knows Mary will tell you, she doesn’t hold with that kind of thing, so we ended up with another gas guzzler! It will probably put another degree or two on the global warming thermometer, but that’s life I suppose!

April was another ‘humdinger’ of a month when we had to take a serious look at our plumbing. The septic tank had been leaking into next door’s sunken spa pool cum hot tub for a couple of weeks, so it was high time to deal with it. Bob did a brilliant job and I’m pleased to report that the Cox family have been flushing with confidence ever since.

The summer wasn’t without high drama either as we had to make the difficult decorating decision between ‘Buttercup Meadow’ and ‘Daisy Daydream’ for the downstairs lavatory. I thought the Buttercup a tad moderne for our street; I must however confess that it does go particularly well with the tufted pedestal mat which Mary inherited from her Great Aunt Flora.

The most notable thing to have happened to any of us in the past year occurred during one of my regular visits to the mobile blood donor bus in August. Now, I know what you’re all saying: why did I risk going back to donate after that unsavoury episode last year when I found myself sharing a cubicle with the prefect I used to fag for in school? Well, what with our brave soldiers losing limbs by the truck full out in Kabul, and the surprisingly high incidence of gun crime in this part of Shropshire, I believe it is my duty to do what I can. I duly turned up at nine thirty one Thursday morning and was ‘hooked up’ by a very attentive male nurse called Phillip. At nine forty-three all hell broke loose when the woman opposite, who, it transpired, was anaemic, ripped out her line and promptly collapsed. I won’t go into the gory details; suffice to say that it will have taken Phillip and his colleagues a considerable time to clean up the poor woman’s plasma from the mobile unit’s ceiling. As he said at the time, at least it was only O negative, and there’s plenty of that around. I was rather put out because they asked me to leave before I had a chance to avail myself of the complimentary custard creams, but that’s life, (as they say!).

Well, I seem to be coming to the end of the page, so it is probably time to sign off. Not much else of note occurred during the remainder of the year. In September Mary and I climbed Kilimanjaro to raise funds for the Starlight Players’ forthcoming production of ‘Rent’, and in October Mum finally succumbed to the septic boil which had been causing her so much discomfort. We shall miss her Christmas trifle terribly!

On behalf of the entire Cox clan, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and an even Happier 2012! Until the same time next year, au revoir, (as they say!).

P.S. We didn’t receive a single ticket for the Olympic Games. Toni and Amanda were bitterly disappointed. I can’t believe THAT many people were interested in the women’s beach volleyball, but there you go!

Copyright: Flyingscribbler 2011

Expanding my vocabulary one word at a time.

Brumal

Of all the words to have thus far made it into the pages of Stickybeak’s Lexicon, brumal might well be the better known; indeed, I was pretty certain that I knew its meaning myself, not least due to my understanding of French. However, I have decided that it should still merit candidacy, standing as it does as a great example of how researching one word’s meaning can take you on an unexpected and thrilling journey, resulting in an accumulation of facts of which you had no prior knowledge.

The noun brume means, as it does in French, fog. It comes from the Latin bruma, winter; and hence brumalis, “of or pertaining to the winter solstice; wintry”. Wiktionary suggests that bruma is a contraction of brevima (the shortest day). Therefore brumal pertains to all things wintry, misty and foggy. When I think of a brumous atmosphere I see wet leaves, grey clouds and red dripping noses. Under ‘wintry’ in my trusty Roget I see: winter, brumal, brumous, snowbound and cold. Under ‘cold’, amongst many other seasonally-accurate adjectives, it suggests frigid and brumal.

You get the picture.

Whilst I was looking the word up, a faint voice was trying to reach me through the more brumous reaches of my memory (see what I did there?). As it became more insistent I heard it calling: “You know this word,” it said, “remember your French history.”

Like a red rag to the bull, I immediately retrieved my three worn volumes of ‘A History of Modern France’ (Alfred Cobban) from the shelf and started thumbing through the indexes. Bingo! Volume One’s index listed “brumaire, 18e”. The eighteenth of brumaire? Whatever could it mean? The explanation was found on page 258 (Pelican edition, 1973) which refers to Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état on the 9^th November 1799, which equates to the 18 brumaire, year VIII according to the French Republican Calendar.

Interest well and truly piqued, I hastened to learn more about the history of this alternative means of marking time. It was adopted on 24^th October 1793, but extended back to 22^nd September 1792, the day on which the new Republic was proclaimed, (and the start of year I). The calendar’s proponents used it to help sweep away the trappings of the ancien regime, amongst which they presumably included weeks made up of seven days. Instead, they preferred to use multiples of ten and natural constants. They also made liberal use of Latin derivations in naming days and months.

A new Republican Calendar was divided into twelve months (no change so far); a month was divided into three, ten-day weeks (here we go); the tenth day, or décadi, replaced Sunday as a day of rest. Each day was divided into ten hours, and each hour into 100 decimal minutes. Therefore, one Republican hour would equal 144 of our conventional minutes.

And you thought things must have been complicated after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

It is with the months that our friend brumal makes its seasonal appearance: autumn gave the French Vendémaire (from the Latin vindemia, “grape harvest”), Brumaire (from, of course, the French for “fog”), and Frimaire (“frost”). Other seasons gave Nivôse (Latin nivosus, “snowy”), Pluviôse (l. pluvius, “rainy”) and Ventôse (l. ventosus, “windy”); Germinal (l. germen, “germination”), Floréal (l. flos, “flower”) and Prairial (l. prairie, “pasture”); and finally, Messidor (l. messis, “harvest”), Thermidor (Greek thermon, “summer heat”) and Fructidor (l. fructus, “fruit”).

They then went on a naming spree, anointing every day of the year after animals, tools, plants or minerals. Imagine the arguments around the revolutionary table.

I think it is rather wonderful that from an initial interest in an innocuous word meaning fog, we come to learn about an entire revolutionary era and the upheaval of the means of marking time itself.

Enjoy the Winter Solstice.

©flyingscribbler 2011

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Perfect Rice and Cherry Trees.

As the train hurtled over a set of points, it lurched violently to one side; Tomoaki instinctively grabbed the tallest of his three miniature models to stop it falling over. He didn’t know what this building was called, and was unable to read the jumble of letters on the side of the box, but he did at least recognise it from the bus tour he and his class had taken around London that morning. The two other buildings he had picked up simply because he liked the look of them; they would sit happily on his bookshelf back home.

Tomoaki peered through the misted up window. It was so stuffy in this train but he could hardly move to take off his coat; people crowded the aisles; the woman next to him was huge and he’d lost sight of the rest of his class. In the rush to get on board, he’d been separated from them by a tide of people; they might even be in a different part of the train. He was also desperate for the toilet but had no idea where there was one and couldn’t ask anyway. Did they have toilets on trains here? If they did it was bound to be as unpleasant as the one at the station.

Leaning forward on his elbows Tomoaki studied the small house. If you took away the funny roof made of straw, he thought, it looked a bit like his Grandparent’s. He bent his head down further and looked through the window. There was Grandma, sitting, as always, at the kitchen table, preparing rice for lunch. Tomoaki thought about the horrible, stodgy bread in his bag which had been presented to him earlier by his host ‘mother’ as if it were an offering to be left at the temple on the mountain.

Grandma’s rice was perfect every time.

He continued watching through the little window as his Grandmother arranged vegetables on a plate; I bet brain surgeons don’t take as much care as that, thought Tomoaki. If she turned around now to glance at the first snow on the mountain, all his Grandmother would see would be his giant eye; would she think he was Godzilla peeping into her kitchen?

The train suddenly became much noisier. A group of local kids had just piled into the carriage and were pushing and shoving each other deliberately with their school bags. Tomoaki caught one of them pushing the corners of his eyes to the side of his head; the boy dropped his hands as soon as he realised he’d been caught out, but carried on staring nevertheless, defiantly waiting for a reaction. Tomoaki turned away. “Don’t upset anyone,” his mother had said at the airport, “you are a guest in their country.”

‘Oi! You! Slitty Eyes.’

The boy had pushed his way over to the table and was shouting.

‘I’m talking to you, Slitty Eyes.’

Tomoaki’s back prickled. What to do? Look up? Smile? Ignore him?

‘I…no…English.’

‘What’s that Chinky?’

‘I. No. English.’

‘Yeah. Got that right, you little prick.’

The boy squeezed his way further down the carriage; Tomoaki breathed deeply. England wasn’t as much fun as he thought it might be.

In the room next to the kitchen, his Grandfather had set up his easel. Tomoaki couldn’t see it from here, but if he slid the door to one side, he would be able to take a peek. Would it be the river or the cherry trees in the park? These were the only things his Grandfather liked to paint, but he always managed to make them look interesting, as if he were painting them for the first time.

Without warning a grubby hand shot out in front of Tomoaki, knocking over the tall building; it grabbed the little house and was gone.

‘What ‘ave we got ‘ere then Slitty Eyes?’

‘N..n..no!’

The boy held the house up to the light, laughed and threw it down the carriage. The little house spun through the air before slamming into a window and smashing into pieces.

Tomoaki felt his eyes burn with tears. Had it been like that for his Grandparents? Had they run to the window to see what was happening? He hoped they hadn’t. He hoped with all his heart that his Grandmother had stayed at the table, slicing pickles; he hoped that his Grandfather had been holding up his paintbrush, the way he did, to measure a cherry tree with one eye closed. Because if they had been watching, if Grandma had gone to the window and been surprised by the sudden new perspective of the mountain, and if she had called Granddad over to observe the change, then they would have seen the bridge coming as they spun in their little house on the crest of the giant wave.

© flyingscribbler 2011