a nice long chat with a very very close friend.
It is really good to be loved and to offer love is fantastc.
It was in circulation in the middle of last year and is a spoof! Pity, I could admire the audacity of somebody who genuinely got away with it.
now why didn't i think of that one...!
Mind you I would love the shower... We have kept our water flowing EXCEPT that somewhere the pipe that feeds our massive boiler is definitely frozen after the branch from the rest of the supply. So although the boiler is full, our rayburn boiling water and our solar actually heating more because it all comes through the boiler we have no hot water! The tricky bit is that all the possible pipes that might be are lagged well and protected so to get to them by removing everything would risk freezing the lot! Dogs are making floors disgusting, children contributing and so we have resigned to piggery for a while longer! Hot chocolate, yes on tap almost!
I have to go with the majority here a good, long, walk, well and truly wrapped up, at the moment of course! Hot chocolate afterwards is a must, however in this cold weather I am afraid a shower does not always follow, in our home the water may be boiling but the bathroom is most definitely not! Sadly today I am clearing my head by giving the said home a good old clean up, the state of euphoria as I survey it with no mess form the wood burning stoves,no dirty floors from snow that has melted from the dog's paws, no rubbish waiting to go outside because I cannot be bothered to put on all the boots, gloves, etc. just to go to the rubbish bin will last all of half an hour I reckon, before it looks like I don't ever clean anything again! Then out with the dog to raise my spirits and take in the calm beauty of the woods and fields in their present guise.
Yes Andrew, we are terribly boring in our ivory towers... until we let our hair down then we can teach others a thing or two - like boozing, naughty substance use, affairs and all the things that make juicy newspaper headlines!
and people say academics and academia are boring...!
Yes, sometimes it is worth keeping those things. This guy is BIG in US Iberian studies, his Spanish and Portuguese go from the quality of the 'royal courts' of the past to Bolivian peasantry and I gather his French is comparable. He had a year in Cambridge and spent several months more or less living at my place (I was between 'partners') and we virtually drank the village pub dry (those were the days) several times over. So it is inevitable that my poor OH will meet him after he does a conference in Spain next summer and if the house is still standing... But I am curious to hear him go for the Oc!
Thanks for sharing that with me Brian, brilliantly put in a couple of paragraphs what others wouldn't have managed in a couple of "academic" books! My knowledge is small having just scratched the surface, my OH and her brother and sisters all understand the aveyronnais occitan no problem its only my mother and father in laws' generation that speak it all the time between themselves. My OH's grandmother only spoke in occitan but they're from a remote, what was very remote in her day, part of the aveyron! Perhaps when I finaly get round to it i'll have to have a go at spanish and occitan at the same time to compare!
Just to (perhaps) finish this distraction from the topic...
Here are some extracts from an e-mail from an American friend who I consulted on Oc. He is a researcher in Iberian studies. Anyway, he wrote:
Occitan, not a language my friend, more like the detritus of the Latin that was never cultivated by the Romans. The probable problem was that they withdrew just about as quickly as they invaded thereabouts so that the Iberian tribes fought the Frankish tribes and closer to Italy the Germanic tribes fought the Romans until the Huns and other moved in to deal with them once and for all. So there we had Latin mixed up with all kind of languages and a small island of what has become Basque and dominant Franks with at least 20 variations of Vulgar Latin mixed with their own languages. The people across the south of France have roughly 108 distinct idioms of Occitan today, possibly even more if there are local dialects of the small subgroups. Mix that up with modern French and remember how many kingdoms and republics they have had who tried to eliminate it and you get the general idea. Now the French are trying to allow the Occitan people to learn and use it again but have taken one version from roughly Tarn and Tarn-et-Garonne and are marketing that as Occitan. That excludes around 82 of the other idioms. They did the same with Euskara so that French and Spanish Basques do not communicate as well as they should, and anyway all Euskaran areas have dialects and distinct idioms too. The French messed with that too. Occitan is a beautiful Iberian idiom though and I suspect it will fight its way back, and all 108 versions at that with the government’s preferred version consigned to the trash can in a few decades, except for those who use it normally.
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It has given me the taste for getting to know Oc better, well the local one anyway!
Just thought this might warm us all up! What a nerve eh?
Brilliant - I'd never seen that before!! Shaun was watching and now knows the names of 30 new countries.
Me well apart from a very large G & T and sitting in the sun reading a book and watching the world go by I jump of the side of a boat with 2 or sometimes 3 diving bottles strapped to me sink to the bottom on one of my favourite wreck sites,and sit there for a few minutes let all my cares and woes wash away then go on a good rumage to see what i can find...marvelous
yes can't deny that example but the occitan spoken here is way off that and a bit weird, when my nephew started learning it at school, mother and father in law told him they were teaching him a load of rubbish because they couldn't understand a word he was saying and to say what he wanted to say was ..... rather a shame when the whole idea is to keep the local patois going and so he can talk to his grand parents in occitan - same situation with the écoles diwan in brittany but I think we've been there already! una clède in occitan in the aveyron is a gate, in the lozère una clède is what we call a sécadou for example...!
It's fine - but why not start a thread to discuss all these linguistic quirks! They are interesting - but they have no place on a thread which is aimed at "How to Cheer up". Start an independent thread and do your whole linguistic/academic thing there! Then those who want to delve into the finer aspects of regional pronunciation can - and those who don't won't find themselves wondering what the hell happened to the "Cheer me up" thread!! :-)))
So - don't stop - just do it somewhere else! (Now I sound like my mother!!! :-()
'si, pede algun espanol' or 'si, puede algunas español' are so close that I am falling into traps by not anticipating the more French bits...
Bloody academics - he says looking squarely in the mirror!
yes it's a definite language lines thing, sometimes I can't move between the lines and block on a concept that I'm used to dealing with in one language and not in the other. I've spoken to english family in french for a while then asked them while they're looking at me in such a strange way...! I need more spanish to be able to understand occitan, it's okay on the tele but spoken here is too difficult for me and doesn't reseemble either language!
Hi there. This is absolutely NOT for people who don't like watching naked rock starts cavorting and being silly in the shower but this would certainly cheer up most foo fighters fans if you are one. PLEASE do not click on the link though if you don't like to watch naked men baing daft in the shower because you will feel obliged to tell me you don't like it and should never have shared the link and I'll be obliged to say that you were very thoroughly warned. But to cheer up any low feeling Foo fans... http://hotbuns.foofighters.com/.
PS Don't worry you don't see anything really bad!!!
sorry Lucy, I think Brian and I are known for this...!