David’s posterous

where spelling and pastry collide!

We had a spectacular Hallowe'en. Not too much candy (though certainly a surfeit), but a lot of costume-watching. Cowboys are in!

from 000 to 1.

I am reading the book by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters called _Sense and sensibility and sea monsters_. It features phrases like 'a gentleman, clad in a diving costume and helmet, and carrying a harpoon gun, ran to her assistance.'

I think highly of it. I am not used to books filled with so many tentacles or quite so much romantic adventure. But, in equal doses, they fit together like line and fid, like a cockle's two shells, like rum and lime-water.

I was corporately gifted with a large prism that sits upon my office windowsill, just for autumn afternoons.

Imagine the discussion that took place, somewhere outside Göteborg, a
few decades ago:

"So, Arne, once the war is over, what do you think you will do?"

"Maybe go into banking. You know, reconstruction financing, that sort
of thing. How about you, Ingvar?"

"Oh, I have this idea. I will start a large chain of furniture stores."

"A furniture store? Ingvar, you can't even pound a nail with a hammer
without needing medical attention."

"Oh yes, a furniture store. Only we will sell more than furniture. We will also sell
small household items. But it will be very inexpensive, because we
will not assemble any of the furniture. That will be the job of the
people who are buying the furniture."

"Ah. You want to sell just pieces of furniture. So no medical attention?

"For me, no. Perhaps for the buyer, but that is their responsibility.
Also, this furniture store will be in many different countries, but
all of the pieces of furniture will have Swedish names."

"In Swedish? Like the armchair will be called fåtölj?"

"Well, perhaps not always the name of the thing in Swedish. But the
names will be very Swedish, with lots of those funny letters from the
end of our alphabet."

"You mean like v? And å and ö? Ingvar, foreigners can't even put them
in the correct order, let alone pronounce them."

"Yes, many of those letters. And the furniture store will have a
single path through it, so that even if the customer wants a
footstool, he will need to walk past and look at throwrugs on the way."
 
"A single path?"

"Yes. And this company will be Dutch."

"Not Swedish?"

"No, not Swedish. Dutch. Or perhaps Belgian. But I think Dutch. There
might not be a Belgium then. But I think there will be a Holland, so
it can be Dutch."

"Ingvar, do you really think the Germans will let the Dutch have their
own Holland?"

"Oh yes, windmills and puppet states are very good for tourism. And
also, it will be very good for furniture sales."

"So you are going to have a worldwide chain of Dutch furniture-parts
stores, where all the products are labelled in Swedish and must be
assembled at home, and where all the customers stand in a single queue
through the entire shop."

"Yes. And one more thing."

"Yes, Ingvar?"

"Swedish meatballs. We will also sell Swedish meatballs."

"Ingvar, you are a loon."

"Thank you, Arne."

I recently joined a new gym. It offers spanking new pools both inside and out-. The basketball court shines with that new-basketball-court sheen. The well-appointed locker-rooms smell like soap and aftershave rather than like locker-rooms.

But the thing that drew me most strongly was the bilingual signage. Two languages, three orthographies. It rarely gets better than that.

When I hear the word 'logistics', I usually think of airline departure times, dinner reservations, and missing basketball tip-off times.

But I really should think of plumbing fixtures, toothbrushes, and shoes. Shouldn't I?

It's so much more fun and yo-ho-stevedore that way.