by I was half-way up the stairs to our office on Wednesday morning when I remembered it was desk move day. The move was a two-hour operation involving physically moving desks. It was effectively a team-building event, and as always happens, the teamy people took over. I ended up in a fairly prominent position with far more foot traffic than before and far less privacy. Luckily I won’t be in that position very long. I have a cousin in Auckland whose workplace enforces daily desk moves. You’re not allowed to sit at the same workstation two days running. That sounds bloody terrifying.
In last Monday’s English lesson we focused on the letter F, or rather the f sound. I explained, with accompanying words and pictures, that the f sound can be written as f, ff, ph or gh. I think I said that ph is always pronounced f, hoping that he wouldn’t be wandering haphazardly through Clapham any time soon, or getting anything upholstered. That would be quite an upheaval. As for the gh combo, I tried to emphasise that f is far from the only pronunciation, without actually mentioning the numerous (and infamous) other possibilities. I think I failed badly. He first attempted to pronounce laugh something like “large”. When I then said the word correctly, he responded with “laffjjj”, and likewise “coffjjj” for cough. I think I got there in the end. Tomorrow I’ll concentrate on final consonant blends; he has a habit of omitting final sounds in speech. As I was driving home from the lesson, the guy who runs the marimba workshop happened to be giving a radio interview. I had two lessons with him. He was talking about an African instrument called an mbira. I thought it was interesting that we have to say an mbira rather than a mbira.
I haven’t mentioned Brexit for a while. Theresa May will be OK, I hope. She looks a safe pair of hands at least. The other contenders all seemed dangerous in their own ways. Still, May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary is questionable to put it mildly. My biggest concern is a lack of effective opposition to the government. Labour are deeply divided. There is now a gaping hole in British politics which a new positive progressive party (like Podemos in Spain) should be able to fill, but alas the electoral system makes the emergence of a new party extremely difficult. Perhaps the best news for me is that Article 50 is now unlikely to be triggered before Christmas, but I wouldn’t assume anything in the current environment. I was reading an article about the Erasmus scheme, the EU student exchange programme that I took advantage of in 2000-01 when I studied in Lyon. Brexit puts UK access to the scheme in doubt beyond 2017. Yet another opportunity potentially lost.
I don’t want to write about Donald Trump because it’s too depressing and too scary. So much fear and hatred. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Trump a 42% chance of becoming president, and those guys know what they’re talking about. That 42% includes a 6% possibility that Trump wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote. We could be looking at a horrifyingly supercharged version of 2000.
I’ve now booked four of my five trains from the UK to Romania. They will hopefully get me as far as Budapest (quite an adventure in itself), and when I’m there I should be able to get a remarkably inexpensive train to Timișoara.
