nineveh_uk

For the second time in my life I am doing homework making up German sentences in the conditional tense about how I want to study polar bears. Well, it saves imagining new scenarios, and I thought that "If I were a vampire, I would suck blood" might not be the best choice, even though it is one I can actually do without having to look up any words or how to decline the sodding articles.

It is, of course, impossible for me to think of the conditional without thinking of the Million Pound Radio Show pirates training day sketch.

My day has just been enormously improved by the second episode (alas, I missed the first) of Warhorses of Letters. It is hard to improve on the BBC's summary: "Napoleon and Wellington's horses exchange love letters against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars."

That was without a shadow of a doubt the worst episode of The Archers I have ever heard.

ETA: However Keith Flett's blog post on the subject (I didn't know he had one. Other than the Guardian letters page, of course) provided a little compensation.

The Ambridge Socialist

Special Royal Visit issue

Camilla:Ambridge Socialist Welcome Censored by BBC

A sizeable number of the socialists of Ambridge gathered outside Grey Gables from 6pm on Wednesday 16th February to protest at the visit of Royal Scrounger Camilla to the village. Sticks were optional but numbers carried them as a sign of solidarity with student protesters. The BBC coverage of the Duchess’s visit deliberately censored news of the protests following the usual Reithian principles.

I spent an hour on Saturday sewing, and listening to the Afternoon Play on Radio 4.It was the sort of thing that Radio 4 does so well and so badly. It wasn’t about the Bevin boys, or mining, or cultural change in north-east England. It was a very thing tale of a young upper-middle class chap who briefly found himself in an unexpected situation, got used to it, and then went on with the rest of his life. The whole setting was merely detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. Confirmation of this came towards the end in one of the modern sections in which the noble savage – sorry, miner’s – great-grandchild was called Kylie. Because whilst a bit of dignity might be afforded to workers in wartime, clearly their descendents are culture-less chavs. I must be fair, though – it had a pretty unpleasant attitude to our upper-middle class insurance broker, too, when you dug into it, and I won’t even start on its portrayal of women. So on the whole, I am glad I listened to it as a fascinating example of a particular brand of snobbery.

That said, for sheer “Was this written by someone on this planet”, nothing will ever beat “Working-class Harrogate girl goes to Trinity (Cantab) to read Classics, her tutor is a lesbian who tries to seduce her with Sappho, is rebuffed and then threatens that student isn’t really very good and will be lucky to scrape a Third, but heroine is saved by the nice Eton boy who helped carry her luggage on the first day.”

I am now 1/20 of the way through the Bible by page-count, not counting the Apocrypha (because they are in a separate volume, though I shall be reading them). Joseph and his coat turns out to have a few details that weren’t mentioned at school (though we were bang on about him being the sort of little brother anyone would want out of the way. The Chalet girls would have had something to say on the subject of tale-bearing for a start). First the not-evil nature of Reuben, second the brain-dead nature of Jacob and family (Joseph: Say that you are cattle herders. The Egyptians hate shepherds. Pharaoh: What do you lot do, then? Jacob and co: We’re shepherds.), and third that Joseph took advantage of a famine to pinch one-fifth of the nation’s land for Pharaoh (so presumably the people can now produce less food), then when everyone is starving, gives them corn first for money, then for their cattle, then for enslaving themselves. Whilst giving lots of land to his family. This is not the only instance at which I am murmuring to myself that I can really see why certain groups of right-wingers love Genesis. Meanwhile the Lord at the beginning of Exodus is behaving a lot like Terry Pratchett’s Om, and the KJV is continuing to have the slash problem of lots of unidentified hims and hes.

And now to be really controversial, Susan Boyle is a more than passable singer, but by no means a great one.