One of the reasons our water heater stopped working was that water was coming down the chimney and soaking the electrics and electronics. We've had lots of torrential rain recently and, the other evening, at around half past midnight the chimney began to drip again. I shimmied up onto the roof and covered the chimney with a plastic bag. The chimney has a hat like cover but it doesn't seem able to keep out the rain when it comes down in bucket-loads. The next morning I was back on the roof to cobble together a wider brimmed hat. I described the repair as Heath Robinson to someone on Twitter. For those of you who don't know William Heath Robinson (1872 – 1944) was an English cartoonist, illustrator and artist, best known for drawings of whimsically elaborate machines to achieve simple objectives.
Heath Robinson is a part of my linguistic armoury just like crikey, whoops a daisy and wide boy. Old fashioned words. I've been away from the UK for a while now and Spain is a country where there is a tendency to call a spade a spade. Nobody here seems to wince at calling someone with one arm a manco or someone with one eye tuerto and the immigration office is called that - well it's called extranjería actually but the point is good. Being out of the UK means that words get to me long after they have become common street currency. When I first heard Brexit I thought it was a stupid term. A smokescreen of a word. Social distancing and self isolation strike me as just as ponderous. When I lived in the UK though I was happy enough to accept linguistic changes of the same style without a murmur. In fact, in general I have no problems with the newer forms of English. Most of them are simply US usage and they reflect the importance of the USA as the powerhouse of the English language. I still notice two times instead of twice, more noisy instead of noisier and forms like "I'll get a beer" and "I'm good, thanks" but they don't particularly jar. Often I think the new forms are well conceived. A Briton was complaining to me about the noun, a big ask. I quite like it myself. Descriptive, easy to use and I'm not aware of any simpler alternative. The older forms are still available anyway. They may give me coffee in a cardboard cup with a lid but nobody has ever tried to force me to drink through the little hole so far.
It's odd though because with being home so much recently I've seen quite a lot of "box sets" on "streaming platforms" and I find that I often don't understand what is being said even though they are speaking English. I still have problems understanding Spanish as well and sometimes the two languages bump into each other so that I find that I can't think of the English for the Spanish word, which I understand, just as I often don't know the Spanish for an English word.
Listening to this afternoon's speech by our President, Pedro Sanchez, on the tele caused me almost no problems at all with understanding. He speaks slowly to sound Presidential; lots of we're a great nation, pulling together, steadfast behind the heroic health workers etc. I suppose it's the speech writers and autocue machines really rather than him. You'd think the US Government would buy one for Donald Trump so he didn't sound like an incompetent clown but they haven't so he does. Pedro told us that he will be taking the extension of the estado de alarma, (lockdown to you), to parliament for another fortnight's extension.
I heard yesterday that a newspaper survey found that 54% of Spaniards thought that Central Government was doing a poor job. Once upon a time I used to organise sporting and cultural events for young people. I grew to hate disco dance. Over the years I was attacked several times, usually verbally but sometimes physically, because irate mothers held me responsible for the the way some experts had judged the dance performance of their daughter or her team. I'm sure the Spanish Government has made lots and lots of errors in it's handling of the corona virus pandemic but I suppose it would have been the same civil servants and the same experts advising the Government whatever political hue it was. I've also noticed that there is a great similarity between the moans about the handling of the crisis whether that's aimed at Pedro's Socialists or Boris's Conservatives. I don't know but I suppose that re-arranging a country in a couple of weeks is nearly as difficult as dealing with disco dance mothers!
I'm a bit worried that the new two week extension will toughen up the rules about wearing masks in the street. We don't have a mask. Amazon offers several but delivery dates are into June by which times the cats could well have run out of food and eaten us. But, at the moment, all is well in Culebrón and, in a rather surreal way, quite pleasant.
Keep safe!, stay well! or ¡cuidaos!
