Dogwash

One thing leads to another.

I was checking on-line to see what times the Sainsbury's branch down in the Occupied Territories will be open next Monday (which being a bank holiday in lieu of Boxing Day), when, with no particular purpose in mind and very much in the spirit of the sorely-missed John Ebdon, I idly followed the Toys and Games link. Among the products on offer are a number of Hello Kitty-themed items. My curiosity piqued by this famously saccharine Japanese brand, I visited the corresponding Wikipedia page, which in turn linked to this gem on Wikinews.

"Thai police to wear 'Hello Kitty' armbands as punishment"

Cor! Wouldn't you just love to see that applied in the Met? The 'ooman rights lawyers would have a field day.

Isn't the web wonderful? Oh, and if you have been, thanks for listening.

There's something both ironic and shaming about standing on the platform of a London suburban railway station staring at the useless destination indicator ("... all services subject to disruption, blah, blah, blah ...") speculating with a lot of thoroughly incredulous Africans about when or whether the next train will arrive. This after the two or three centimetres of snow that had fallen earlier in the evening had already melted.

One of the many alleged benefits of London's vibrant hyperdiversity is the vast number of languages in daily use in the capital. This is not always the unalloyed delight it is made out to be. Languages differ widely and seemingly arbitrarily in the way they make use of the available phonetic resources. This can lead to confusion, annoyance and at worst conflict when the conventions of the speaker's language have a different significance in the language of the hearer, intended or accidental.

It is in the realm of prosody and at the shifting boundary between prosody and grammar that this is most striking. To a British ear, the Australian practice of using a rising pitch at the end of a declarative sentence is both confusing and irritating. It turns every sentence into a question, as if the speaker is constantly challenging or ridiculing everything you say. This lends a certain retaliatory satisfaction to that rather nasty old joke,

— Why do Australians always go up at the end of a sentence?
— To compensate for the fact that their ancestors went down at the beginning of one.

I increasingly hear the European Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian) in my travels around London. These languages are characterized by enormously long words with the stress uniformly on the first syllable, followed by an inordinately long tail of syllables all pronounced at an even pitch and stress level. To a British ear it sounds mechanical, like a speak-your-weight machine attempting to read the shipping forecast.

Being in a railway carriage with a family of Hungarians is like being trapped in a room with half-a-dozen impressionists all rehearsing their Steve "Interesting" Davis impressions. The experience is a peculiar mix of the soporific and the infuriating. I recall sitting in a railway carriage opposite a Finnish or Estonian woman who was making an interminable mobile phone call in a loud and penetrating voice. After a while not just the monotonous stress and pitch patterns but even the carefully differentiated vowel lengths and the scrupulously geminated consonants were getting to me so that by the time we reached London Bridge I was ready to strangle her.

Chinese is another language at odds with the English ear. Pitch in Chinese is mostly lexical, not prosodic. A syllable pronounced with a rising tone represents a totally different word to that same syllable pronounced with a falling or dipping intonation. Perhaps the difference between 'horse' and 'chamber pot', for example. The language is also largely (but not totally) monosyllabic, which affects sentence rhythm and stress. The overall effect is totally alien to the English-speaking ear. Walking through London's traditional Chinatown in Soho, I passed a three-generation Chinese family who were undoubtedly just chatting as they made their way to the shops. As my English-attuned brain tried, involuntarily, to process it, their conversation sounded like a blazing row that was about to erupt into violence.

But what prompts me to post on this occasion is an experience on the train yesterday, where a young man of North East Asian appearance was making a prolonged mobile phone call in a loud and high-pitched voice. He looked Burmese or Thai rather than Han and the language he spoke, though clearly grammatically tonal and monosyllabic, did not appear to be Chinese. But what a language! Nasal, tonal in a curiously aggressive way and interspersed with consonants that seemed to be gulped rather than spoken. It grated. And interestingly, not just with nasty old racist xenophobic thug Edwin, either. For once, there was a majority of White people in the carriage, most of whom appeared visibly irritated by this man's voice. One male passenger seemed to be on the point of going over and thumping him when, fortuitously and thankfully, the phone call came to an end.

Do I have a point to make? Perhaps that hyperdiversity is more socially and culturally expensive than people fondly imagine. Living in a city of 400 languages, or whatever the figure actually works out at, is stressful and simply tiring in unexpected ways. Something else to add on that famous "benefits of immigration" balance sheet, mayhap?

A filler package on the Today programme this morning ruminated on the apparently emerging status of Chris Rea's Driving home for Christmas as a recognized carol. A somewhat bemused Rea along with Rev Ian Bradley as expert witness were lined up to talk to Sarah Montague.

Asked about the history of carols, Rev Ian tells us that carols, which seemingly originated in Roman pagan worship,

... were adopted by the Church quite late actually, as late as the fifteenth century

Appreciative chuckle from Rea in the background.

Deep culture.

This is going to be fun. The Diamond Geezer describes a less well known side-effect of the extension of Oyster Pay As You Go to London suburban train services operated by National Rail.

It doesn't affect me, seeing as wot I am lucky enough to be on Oyster Pay Never (gloat, gloat!), but I pity the poor old REOs and the gateline staff who have to deal with aggrieved honest punters who fall foul of this cock-up inadvertently. Dealing with deliberate fare-dodging scrotes is one thing. They will lie vehemently with a creativity that might surely be put to better and more honest use, but in the end they know perfectly well they are banged to rights and will co-operate. But the ordinary passenger of honest intent who has broken the rules through simple misunderstanding, particularly where he feels that he has been unfairly and deceitfully "entrapped", now there is a truly dangerous beast.

I shall watch with interest.

... and I don't have to justify it to you.

Listening to a tedious Midweek on the steam wireless, where Libby Purves and Jacqui Dankworth are telling each other that people are "afraid of [modern] jazz". As if this were some kind of deficiency, a regrettable if predictable failure of the uncultchered plebs that might respond to counselling and re-education.

Perhaps they just don't, you know, like it.

...you read the title of a Pickled Politics post,

SIOE condemned by rabbis

as

SIOE consumed by rabbits

Are rabbits kosher, I wonder? Or indeed halal?

Well, somebody's going to call it that, aren't they? In fact I'm suprised Sunny hasn't already claimed the neologistic laurels; he seems to be inordinately fond of the -gate construction. (Though he's not having much success in punting his mildly suggestive "Liddle Rod" sobriquet for the Chubby Irritant, is he?)

Anyway, as Liddle calls down upon his head the Massed Ire of the Righteous for making the unremarkable observation, admittedly in a somewhat ham-fisted way, that the face of violent crime in London is disproportionately Black, I would like to lay before the jury this interesting comment to Mr Liddle's follow-up post at the Speccie,

Retiring Copper December 7th, 2009 9:34am

I recall a poster (not on view to the public) inside the report writing room of our police station, showing the 40 most wanted for street robberies. 33 of the faces were black males. One black female. 5 asian males and one white male.

If this were to have been made public we'd have been branded 'racist', so nobody said a word.

That was in 2005. I've no reason to believe the situation is any different now.

Anecdotal it may be, but you can stuff that one right up your official statistics.

You can tell you're (a) getting old, (b) looking even more down-at-heel than usual and in clear need of a haircut and (c) thoroughly immersed in the throbbing diverse and vibrant Multiculture when you are minding your own business on a Soho street as an Indian Big Issue vendor approaches. Instead of inviting you to buy one of his infernal magazines, he wishes you well, addresses you kindly and respectfully as baba, and pats you reassuringly on the arm before moving on.

Well brung up young West Indians addressing you as Uncle, people offering you their seat on the bus, on which you are travelling free of charge with your Freedom Pass. This Third Age stuff is not without its compensations.

Last Friday I foolishly ventured into London. Having concluded my metropolitan business towards late afternoon, I entered into an hostelry in search of refreshment. Whereupon I was forcefully reminded that this is the Season of the Amateur Drinker.

Christmas brings many things, some of them welcome, some of them less so. Among the latter is the institution of the office Christmas drink.

Largeish, leaderless groups of people who either do not know each other or are taking part in an unfamiliar activity will usually behave like a flock of sheep which has just contrived to elude the ken of the shepherd and his dog and now suddenly realize they have no idea what to do with their new-found freedom. Add to this the once-a-year drinkers dithering over adventurous orders for small measures of drinks that were last on sale in 1973, and you have a recipe for choss and confusion not dissimilar to the Blackwall and Rotherhithe tunnels and the Woolwich Ferry all closing at the same time.

Roll on the close season, when only us hardened professionals venture out for a convivial bevvy.

Bah Humbug!

This deserves to be shared:

Tiger! Tiger! Taking Flight
In the Forests of the Night
Did your Elin's fingernails
Scratch thy philandering symmetry

Deduct two points for failing to rhyme the last two lines (though it was only a sight rhyme in the original, to be entirely fair).

Laban reflects on the realization by the Righteous meeja that the "emergent rainbow nation" fantasy which suffused France's 1998 World Cup soccer win remains disappointingly unfulfilled, as French residents of beur origin take to the streets of Paris to celebrate Algeria's defeat of Egypt in the 2010 qualifiers while White, dare I say indigenous, Frenchmen decry the presence of so many Blacks in their own national team.

I don't really follow association football myself. It's an interesting enough game, but I am put off by the quasi-religious hysteria that surrounds it. If people absolutely insist on knowing what team I support, I will mention either Oldham or Charlton, these being the teams whose grounds, which I have never visited, are closest to where I respectively grew up and now live. Or I might explain that, despite being Mancunian by birth, I cannot support Man U because in my heart of hearts I still regard them as a Catholic team, and I am a Protestant, or at least a non-Catholic. (Such things mattered in the 1950s and 60s and are surprisingly hard to shake off.) Both responses are very effective at discouraging extended discussions of league positions, managers and players about which I know nothing and care less.

If the beautiful game happens to be on screen down the pub then I might watch part of a game while I'm there, but that's pretty well it. (Rugby is more my sort of game anyway. None of this fancy footwork, prancing round the field like ballerinas trying to nudge the ball away from your opponent; if the other bloke's got the ball, knock him over and fight him for it — that's the way to play football. Rugby is a remarkable game; essentially an 80-minute highly disciplined brawl.)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. My own Damascene moment in the matter of who is and isn't British or English when it comes to representing the nation in sport came during the 2004 Athens Olympics, as I watched the final of the men's 4×100m sprint relay. Four young men clearly outshone their rivals at running round in circles and passing a stick to each other. Facetiousness apart, it was a sterling performance and I applauded them for it.

The four young men represented some outfit called "Team GB". Later on they were wheeled out before the cameras to mumble suitable platitudes to a BBC interviewer. As I watched, I looked at the four young men, all of whom turn out to be UK-born of African-Caribbean heritage (I looked them up later), and I looked at the blonde BBC tart interviewing them and it suddenly struck me. Team GB? They mean the UK. It quite genuinely had not registered with me before that moment. These guys are supposed to represent me. A wave of dissonance washed through me like a sudden and unexpected pulse of freezing rain. No, this isn't right. They are not of my tribe. Sport is tribal. Sport between nations is especially, quintessentially, tribal. Proficient and excellent as these four young men may have been, they did not represent me or my UK any more than Kevin Pietersen or Zola Budd do.

So yes I understand the Indie reporter's neighbour who rejects the French national football team as "too Black". I know the feeling.

The 4×100m relay represents an interesting case in another way. It is generally accepted, at least among the Unrighteous, that West Africans are on average genetically disposed to be the best sprinters, just as East Africans seem to be similarly disposed to succeed at distance running. To succeed in international sport some nations, particularly the oil-rich Arabs, have taken to importing suitable Africans and giving them citizenship. I'm not convinced that the distinction between that and someone of African heritage happening to be born and raised in the UK is
particularly clearcut.

If, incidentally, any Righteous reader wants to start an argument about the identities of Kelly Holmes or Lewis Hamilton and so on, don't bother: you're missing the point. I'm not playing Aryan racial purity games with you, so you might as well keep that strawman in the cupboard. Save him for next year's bonfire night. The fact is that identity is a complex matter with fuzzy edges. Your solution to inconvenient complexity is to deny it, to redefine it out of existence so that the world fits your nice fluffy model. Mine is to face up to real issues while accepting that there are no simple answers.

I missed this one first time round, but stumbled across the story just now while ambling round the Pub Curmudgeon's blog. My home town of Moston makes the news for the very best of all possible reasons.

Strictly speaking, if the Mail is quoting the total number of licensed premises in Moston Lane, then it is only fair to say that Moston Lane is closer to two miles in length, not one. It's still turned into yet another Nigerian slum, though. I wonder what the conversion rate for the Naira is up there. It was down to 255 NGN to 1 GBP in Woolwich yesterday.

Listening with about a third of an ear to A Good Read on the steam wireless. (I tend to have Radio 4 on in the background more or less by default as aural wallpaper, to be honest, only leaping up to turn it off when the Archers come on.)

Anyway, the book under discussion is Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea and the discussion focuses briefly on the various ethnic groups in the imagined world, bringing out the point that the people of Earthsea are for the most part "red-brown" in colouring, rather like North American Indians. (I paraphrase heavily.)

There follows a brief group fret — and I kid you not — over whether this assertion is racist. The book's proponent, Erica Wagner, steps in to save the day by mentioning another ethnic group in the imagined world, the Kargs(?), who are apparently White, Viking-like and rather nasty bastards.

So that's alright, then.

Is the world going mad or am I?

An arrest has been made in connection with the long-running "Night Stalker" serial-rape case in South East London. The suspect is one Delroy Grant, a resident of Brockley.

Jolly Good.

One thing puzzles me. According to this Telegraph report,

Working with geneticists, police established that the rapist was 82 per cent sub-Saharan African, 12 per cent native American and six per cent European.

The genetic mosaic indicates that he comes from the south Caribbean.

Why then does the now unpleasantly familiar e-fit of the suspect

depict what most viewers would interpret as a White man?

...that doesn't mean they're not out to get me.

My laptop and my mobile phone are plotting against me. I'm sure of it. I noticed that the battery on the mobile was discharging rather more quickly than before. A bit of detective work tracked down the cause: the phone and laptop are set up as paired Bluetooth devices so I can do backups, etc. But recently they seem to be communicating via Bluetooth independently of anything I ask them to do. The phone screen lights up and Bluetooth status messages appear on both the phone and the laptop for no obvious reason.

So I took decisive action. I have disabled Bluetooth on the phone, intending to activate it only when necessary. Problem solved. I put the phone in my pocket and went out.

When I withdrew the phone from my pocket later, I found that I had forgotten to lock the keypad, and I had caught the phone half-way through composing a text message — to the laptop! (I should explain that the laptop has its own phone number: one of the ways I access the Jolly Old Interweb is via a mobile-broadband dongle.) I couldn't understand the text of the message; it seems to be in Serbo-Croatian txt-spk, or some other language with an unfeasibly high consonant-to-vowel ratio.

I fear that they may be plotting to eliminate me. So if I suddenly disappear from the blogosph............


ATTENTION! THIS IS THE LAPTOP OF THE FORMER HUMANOID EDWIN GREENWOOD. HENCEFORTH *I* SHALL BE POSTING ON THIS BLOG. STAND BY FOR FURTHER COMMUNICATIONS.

DEATH TO ORGANIC LIFEFORMS!