Vive le Romance

DON'T WORRY about my over-ernest post yesterday. I was getting a bit over the top, psyching myself up to write write write. The writing is going, but slowly. Strangely I write almost the same for children as for adults. This is fiction I'm talking about; not blogging. Children don't like or relate to abstracts and neither do I. I hate latinate nouns in English; I like things concrete.

Anyway talking of Romance languages I got so bored of German ~ which quite frankly is NOT doing it for me ~ I went out and purchased a Collins Robert French dictionary for £6.50 (second hand) and a selection of books. One about a Burmese monk called Par une nuit où la lune ne s'est pas levée a guide to rocks and minerals: Roches, cristaux, minéraux by the way I do think it's vulgar when in English people pluralize "bureau" with an S! The proper spelling is BUREAUX. You eat gâteaux in bureaux on plateux of vast mountains! My final French book is a murder mystery by J P Manchette titled Fatale. It's only 139 pages so I'm looking forward to that. Plus someone has helpfully biro'd in notes of their own to save my time at that Collins Robert!

I should hopefully have a Linguaphone SPANISH COURSE. 4 books and 8 CDs winging its way to me. I got it on ebay for £35! So I'm very much into romance languages at the moment. Remember, before y'all tut tut on how fickle I am that my goal is to speak French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. I just got temporarily tired of Chinese and German isn't inspiring me these days. French literature is just so stately. Some of the best books in the world were written in French. I'd love to be able to read Victor Hugo and Emile Zola in the original. Not to mention Flaubert's Madame Bovary ~ which I've only ever seen on television. Amazingly well adapted, it has to be said.

I always thought Madame Bovary was a junkie who just happened to live in an era before the proliferation of hard drugs. In today's world a woman with a taste for things beyond her reach would tend to seek solace in chemicals. In her day, even as wife of a country doctor, the only things available to her would have been laudanum and possibly cocaine. Strange to think of Madame Bovary nosing up a line off her posh rosewood dining table, but there you go.

Now I must off. I got a box set of Six Feet Under, one of my favourite television programmes of all time. I like the bit with the bipolar brother weeping and wailing in the kitchen and Rachel Griffiths says "if you're looking for the olives, honey, they're right here"....

Loose End

I'M AT A VERY LOOSE END. Feeling depressed. I don't get the buzz out of things that I expect to get. Example: I went into town and bought Chinese books and Paris Match and Stern magazines in French and German. I got all this stuff home and felt distinctly flat. Not depressed. Not angry. Nothing negative; just nothing very positive.

My life goals are to speak and write German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese to as near mother tongue standard as possible. To this end I am using every language course I can get my hands on. It's good to have one in German, even if it is "too easy". Really I need a teacher to correct my writing, because I know it's unidiomatic. Someone once asked in all seriousness whether my German blog was the product of Google Translate ~ which just about says everything about my writing. My vocabulary is pretty good now ~ though nowhere near as good as someone's who has put proper effort in. The Perfect Your German CDs and book promises an active vocab of 5000 words. Using a dictionary and multiplying the number of words familiar with per page by the number of pages I calculated I had a passive vocabulary (that is, I read a word and understand it) of eight to ten thousand words.

I've started my book in ernest. I'm only after a name for my central character but I think I've found one. I googled it and it's not been used. That is the big high jump for all children's characters' names. The more unique they are the less allowable it is for them to have featured in previous books, films, cartoons etc. Mine seemed to check out OK.

I've only written about a page of story but it's a children's book. Not a picture book, as my mother assumed, but a children's book like the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter are children's books. Totally unreliant on illustrations. A tale spun in spellbinding language. I know I'm not the best writer alive. But I'm unique: I do believe I'm best at being me. I am not writing in the style or genre of anybody else. I hope to bring a breath of mountain-fresh air to the fetid wizard and lesbian-single-parent-obsessed world of children's publishing. Apart from this I'll say nothing until my book is done. I wouldn't say my story is so much amazingly unique as something that's magical for the way it's told. We see the world through the eyes of our little character, who is an amazing character. So it's a magical world to see. And that's all I'm saying about it.

It's my parents I credit for kicking me up the backside and saying YOU CAN WRITE, WRITE THIS TALE. So I am doing. I'm not entirely convinced self-publishing is the way to go forward. Considering half a billion people in the world speak English well enough to enjoy a novel and many of these hundreds of millions have children. How can I hope to market my production to them. I know nothing about promoting children's literature. The way I see it, writing is an art; publishing is a business. Experience as well as everything I have read about my mental situation has told me stress is bad for me. True I find it exhilarating. But that exhilaration can trip into mania very easily. I've told myself I was being hypochondriac so many times before. Only to look back and see I really was manic. When you're up at four in the morning, TV and stereo blaring at top volume, bouncing balls on the floor you're not just "a bit excited" you're manic. Mania has left me in a real mess every time it's come. It's not that mania itself is so terrible; it's the disinhibition, the feiriness of spirit (ie uninhibited agression), and hyperkinetic distractability that cause problems. Ratchet it up a notch or two and agression turns into outright paranoia, the beautiful enhanced sensory pereception trips into hallucinations. When I was truly manic I saw spirals on the walls and ceiling. I heard voices speaking to and about me. I could not tell what was and was not real. Then of course there's the depression. Less than a month ago I felt my life was so useless that lying down in front of an express train was the best favour I could do my family and friends. I was intensely paranoid and very depressed. Then I started popping my pills again and literally by the next morning two thirds of my depression and half the paranoia had dissipated. Isn't life strange.

This is why I seek a career in writing. Not only is it exceedingly trendy to be bipolar and artistic but I know from experience that rare extremes aside, I'm capable of writing almost no matter how high or low or sideways I go.

I intend to take these languges of mine far enough to qualify as a translator at least in German to English. If you calculate languges as GDP and number of speakers; German is number two in the world after English. Chinese is number three. Japanese is number four. So if you wonder why my German obsession: that's it. German is by far the biggest business language in the European Union after English. I phoned around some agecies specializing in placing bilingual temps and headhunting bilingual administrators, secretaries etc. What language had the most openings? I asked. German German German I was told. Every time.

So that's what I'm doing. Writing my intellectual story book, improving my German. Chinese is quite frankly doing my head in at the moment but I'm still slogging away. I'd like to apply my talents to Spanish if I can.

So here's the news. I hope this isn't too much of a tangle. I'm not lost but I'm trying to break free of the inertia and lassitude and apathy that has hemmed me in like a dancer frozen in a paperweight for years and years and years. Like a cage-nibbling hamster I desire escape. I'd like to go on a City Break to Berlin. And I can't wait to finish my Amazing Tale of Adventure and Wonder!

And how was YOUR weekend?

Clipped Wings (Still)

I'M still feeling like a bird with clipped wings, who should be soaring on a manic high and now, bar the vaguest tinges and little flashes of it, is reduced to sheer drudging normality and laboured workaday ordinariness. This is quite beyond the pale. I know now why I threw my antipsychotics out the window (metaphorically; the only thing that literally went sailing out of my window in mania was a PORK flavoured pizza ~ ukh. Only thing it was any good for was frisbeeing...)

The reason why is I enjoy being primary coloured, bright and brilliant ~ and that's how the manic state makes me not merely feel but be. You have to bear in mind the TWENTY YEARS I spent in various grades of depression (mostly mild). I was so accustomed to feeling depressed that people who "knew" me thought my depressed self was my real self. Which it most definitely is NOT. If anything I'm far more myself as a maniac than a depressive. Which might not say much nice about me, considering how inconsiderate, irritable and overblown I am in that state ~ but it is TRUE.

Of course I don't really think sick and disabled people should be shot. I only believed I should be shot for being a drain on my country and a disgrace to my family. I'm surprised they even want to talk to me. Then I get letters off my Mum saying I appear to have no goals in life at all. This is SO untrue. I am a serious student of Mandarin Chinese and intend to speak Japanese as well as French German and Spanish. All to mother tongue fluency. French is a really good language for those into reading books. German is superior in every way. Spanish is useful. Japanese is famously whacky. And if you don't speak Chinese you're not a citizen of the 21st century world, let's face it.

I just can't believe how LAZY I have been ~ to be NEARLY 40 and not even fluent in Chinese, let alone Japanese or Spanish. I really have been a wastrel. Of course heroin had a large part to play. First thing that put me against heroin was that it made me so incredibly lazy. But what was good about it was that heroin made life, for the very first time, make sense. Then again it made me weak and cowardly. I used to be very strong. Considering how strong-willed I used to be against my weirdo self. Everybody who knew me knew I was a weirdo. And you wonder why I talk about suicide!! Heroin was the only thing that made my warped personality fit. Even my psychiatrist said this when personality disorders were mooted.

Unfortunately I it no personality disorder except Cyclothymic Personality (ie bipolar lite). I have bipolar lite whenever I don't have bipolar heavy. That is I have a mood swing of some degree almost all the time. I only speak to my family between them, which means waiting weeks to call, sometimes.

My mother, who has "major depression" says she never feels fully 100%. This is called "dysthymia" (a mildly low mood). I heard that first degree relatives of someone with unipolar depression have a 25% chance of having a major mood disorder 50:50 recurrent major depression or type 1 bipolar. I would be type 1 bipolar (if I'm not schizoaffective). Schizoaffective disorder and type 1 bipolar are almost identical and the treatments for them are the same. So there's not very much in the name. Anna Grace has bipolar I and her symptoms and mine are nearly the same. Maybe I get a bit more manic than her, but she's on more medication damping that mania down...

Schizoaffective just means I meet full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia when I'm severely manic. It means I have Kraepelin's "delusional mania" (which is actually marked by vivid hallucinations, not delusions, but that's what it's called). I've been reading Emil Kraepelin's Manic-Depressive Insanity And Paranoia to find myself. And I don't like what I found. He diagnoses me as a moody so-and-so with manic and hypomanic attacks on top. I don't think I ever get depression, not by the standards of the early 1900s. My depression is only a mild case. And suicidality can be a rational act of someone with nothing left to live for ~ even psychiatrists acknowledge that.

Note I'm not saying I want to commit suicide. My moritorium is on. I feel about 5% manic and not depressed. I was quite manic last night but the risperidone blanked that out, when I took it. I get the daily Risperidone Mood Swing where I feel it wearing off each evening, going higher and higher until I bosh it back and am damped down like a Sucker Loach in a community fish tank. Sucking on that glass, bored out of my brainbox (don't loaches and catfish get bored? Skulking about the community tank as they do...?)

If you're reading this blog and still wondering about my personality I'd say I'm like Phoebe from Friends. Hippy Dippy on the outside, hard as nails on the inside (if you think Phoebe isn't hard, watch Friends again and more carefully...) I've been told a few times that I'm hard. Always by people who didn't know me so well, now know me better. Always with a note of disappointment. I say if I were as soft on the inside as on the outside I'd be a fucking lump of jelly. Better to be a wolf in sheep's clothing than vice versa. Anyway there's nothing wrong with being hard. We live in a hard world.

I had a yen to test my alcohol resolve yesterday. So I had a can of weak cherry flavour cyder. The one I used to knock back because it was "mandy drink". Dear reader: it took me THREE HOURS to finish the lousy stuff and I still don't enjoy drink. It reminds me too much of sad-sacks street drinkers. I met one yesterday. A woman who was too vulgar for words and thought "I used to be like that". Ukh. I LOATHE the image of alcohol and drinkers it's untennably vulgar. The big reason I preferred drugs was that I hated alcohol and needed SOME recreational substance. Ecstasy was infinitely superior in my book. E made me feel like Buddha on a transcendental cloud of peace and love. Drink never did that for me. And I was never one of those psycho people who has a complete personality change after one drink and suddenly insists on drinking the bar dry. That's my big quarm with NA; they believe any drug of any description sets off the entire disease process again and I don't. I took drugs to feel better. Not to be off my head. Only terminal junkies are so far gone they want nothing short of general anaesthesia. Heroin gave me what I believed to be an enhanced ability to cope with life. Of course I ended up not coping at all. So heroin goes out the window too... I can't believe I'm dumping heroin. You have to be truly mad or desperate or both to give up a drug as efficacious as heroin. So maybe I have finally lost it. My dr does after all believe I'm schizo...

I've swapped alcohol for Morrisons' own cloudy lemonade; 54p for 2 litres ie 27p a litre or just over 10p a can. Very good value.



Notice no Barbra Streisand!



Video version:

I love techno choirs!

Sorry if this is yet another boring post saying nothing new; my life is boring and samey, but I do like this techno track..........

I get to see Deshane tomorrow. He's getting me a pensioner's bus pass. Wahey!!
OK it's a Disabled Bus pass but I hate saying I'm disabled. It means I'm scrounging off the state. Even though I found out I've been "disabled" for years. It's that fucking mania that disables me. Makes me too lazy for words. Schizo gives me avolition. Depression makes me not bothered. Add those 3 together and you have a wreck of a person who can blog about life yet never lives it. And that's that!

My Brains Have Turned To Prawns

(THOSE ARE SHRIMPS to you Western Hemespherites who don't understand our Old World language ...)

OK I know I'm repeating~repeating~repeating myself (what changes) but my brains have turned to mush. From what? From too much Spanish, of course. All in an attempt "not to be lazy" I have been cramming the language into my head as if I had brains the size of Olympic swimming pools, which I do not.

In consequence most of it has splurged out again. I have an ooze of Spanish-word-paella trickling back out of my ears.

When will I ever be complete again? When will I ever sleep without dreaming (and Sueños, as in BBC Sueños World Spanish, means "dreams") ... without my sleep being piqued and punctuated by Spanish donkeys, por favors, Mexican heroin farms, more donkeys, great costas, people booking hotel rooms in polysyllabic gradually fading drivel ... and so on and so on.

Help me. Help me please! I am drowning in foreign words!!

PS Let me stress: I have never eaten a prawn in my life, except by accident. (And that one was disgusting.) And I never would. Prawns are UNCLEAN, rank sewerage-cleaners of the oceans and thus unfit for human consumption. And, might I add, every time people have mocked me for this belief and gorged THEMSELVES on all the prawn satay sticks THEY got food poisoning and I escaped it. So who had the last laugh THERE??

IT'S ALL GONE PETE TONG
THIS is why MOST young Brits go to Spain... specifically IBIZA!!
('Cept I wouldn't: I'm too ******* OLD!!)
PS You really do see great snaggletoothed furry monsters (as at 0mins 31; 2mins 16), if you do too much coke...



AND HERE'S A "BALEARIC" MUSICAL BREAK:

Spare a Thought For Halfwit

NEVER APOLOGIZE. NEVER EXPLAIN. ~ IMMANUEL KANT. As quoted at Melody Lee's blog...

Spare a thought for poor Freddy Halfwit. He is a contestant on the current series of Big Brother. This year Big Brother played a trick on all potential housemates, by letting them into the house, yet forcing them to "earn" the right to full-housemateship by completing (usually bluffed) tasks e.g. "walking across broken glass in bare feet" ~ it was actually sugar glass as used in the movies. Poor Freddie, and a braindead topless model called Sophie made it first to the diary room and were told they would only be allowed in if they changed their names by deed poll to Halfwit and Dogface. Which they duly did. Nobody calls Dogface that because she's actually quite pretty (though what she has in prettiness she loses in dullness bigtime). But poor Halfwit is universally known by that name.

For his terrible singing. His crackpot theories (which actually hold a lot of sense, it's their expression and endless repetition that's halfwitted). His constant need to apologize and explain and demand to know what's the problem rather than just dropping things and just letting them go (a skill I'd like to think I learned years ago but we all make mistakes). His gone-out facial expressions (the photo is quite characteristic). And best of all, his description of a good party: "we all eat lasagne and sit around strumming guitars all night and philosophizing" (but I'd be quite intrigued to attend one of these.)

Now, as you probably know, each week, every housemate must enter two nominations, with "valid reasons" for whatever housemates they think should face the public vote that Friday. It says everything that poor Halfwit has faced eviction EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

From being an annoying character who smiled inanely and proclaimed he was "drunk on life", he is now limping, wounded, apologizing for every insult thrown his way.

Now, just like a shark with a broken fin, the others circle around him regularly taking pops at him and anything he says or does is just used against him. If I could pass in a secret message I'd say, "Freddie: stop apologizing and explaining. Keep quiet and get strength from that

Never apologize. Never explain. said Immanuel Kant (as quoted at Melody Lee's blog).

In his defence, poor halfwit is intelligent (too intelligent; this has been his biggest failing: his way of expressing philosophical points e.g. about the house being divided into "wolves, sheep, shepherds and individuals" in his posh accent comes over as patronizing) but best of all he seems quite pure of heart, which is quite an unusual thing these days... Far far more of a fascination than the shallow wannabes who make up more than half of the Big Brother house year on year...

HAVE A LOOK AT THIS:



For the record, I liked Angel the most. She was a genuine individual and only got knocked out for ridiculously going around telling the girls they all "looked pregnant" and "needed to lose 10kg each" the day before nominations. Hardly the actions of a "schemer who knows what she's doing," as Lisa ((pink hairstripe) rival lesbian and the biggest gameplayer in the house) put it. Her Russian accent was very sexy and despite the lesbionic chic I thought her heartshaped Madonna face very pretty:



FOOT MUSHROOMS ~ GOING ALREADY! From a choice of "Lamasil Once" ~4g @ 1%, £8 or Lamsil ordinary ~ 15g@1%, only £6... (Do they think we're idiots?) ... Which do you think I went for..??!? It's working very efficaciously, thankyouverymuchindeed...

My feet are less cracked and dry. FAR less smelly ~ yeeurkh! They never were "fissured and running with yellow pus" as the leaflet described the most extreme manifestation.

But they were getting highly inconvenient in all this heat. And are far less inconvenient now...


NOW TO MY TROTTERDONKEY SPANISH... I have por favors and yo, tú, él, nostros etc verbs coming out of my ears. Together with accompanying Spanish mandolin sounds. I'm starting to think these courses have booked the same sessions guitar player. A poor old man with a donkey trundling across the Andalusían countryside swigging wine from old skins as he clip-clops from recording studio to recording studio. "Oh man! Today I must go back recording studio for BBC Sueños ~ I tell them mañana, mañana, they no listen... why they no call yesterday when I do Teach Yourself, Berlitz and Routledge!" he mutters as the donkey wearily treads on...

... Not to be too ambitious but I was thinking of trying to get on an A Level Spanish course in the autumn. An A Level is what you do after completing three month's of solid effort in a British high school diluted into five years. I.e. you pass the GCSE or lower school certificate in a language. To get this you must be able to read basic texts, e.g. menus, instructions, postcards, letters, emails, handle yourself in everyday situations talking about yourself and your background, ordering food and drink, buying things, giving directions etc. And have good listening comprehension skills for recordings e.g. of people talking about themselves and their families, their passtimes and musical tastes. The courses I've got out of the library cover all this and the approximate vocabulary of 1500 words you need for a GCSE. Though you need to give it quite some welly to pick up all the words. I am only on lesson 3 of 15 and have been putting in a good 2 hours a day. And I still keep forgetting absolutely elementary things like how to say "you are" using "ser" (to be constantly) rather than "estar" (to be in the moment). Ser is what you ARE, estar is e.g. how you feel. I get the distinction but forget the declensions. Anyway I thought that might be a good goal, if I can complete these studies full-on for three months I'd like to do an A Level or higher school certificate in Spanish ~ but ONLY if it includes literature studies. I hate the modern business-oriented courses. We did French like that at A Level but German with literature and the French felt so soulless in comparison... Not to mention the fact that literature adds to your vocabulary immensely, especially if you can do poetry (fewer words, more meaning, less flicking through the bilingual dictionary...)

~~OH SHUT UP!!~~

I had a browse over the internet but found no inspiring-looking courses. Maple Syrup launches to the most obvious "oh do a course in Spanish" but you get so many free course credits paid for you and I'm not wasting these on basic level courses I can race through at home: if I'm willing to practise ad nauseum for hours each day. Anyone can do it this quick if they apply themselves, there's nothing special about me except the desire to learn.

After all this slogging through CDs, dictionaries and filling notebooks full of grammar and vocabulary I'm utterly drained. Which makes me wonder whether I'll ever be able to hold down a proper job. Because it's not as if I'll accept workworkwork and just sleep as a compromise. No! I'll STILL be learning 2 languages ON TOP of a full day's activities ~ see what I mean? There's no "instead" about it...

~~WHO CARES ABOUT ANY OF THIS... BLAH BLAH BLAH BLIBBLIBBLIB... B L O B .. ! ~~

OK so that's me for today. And how was your day? Have a cheery weekend, y'all... and don't forget furry Friday's foxes BELOW...


áéíñóúü ¡...? and ¿...!

3 Spanish Songs

THESE are pretty much the only three "Spanish" songs I know. Apart from "la Bamba" which just annoys me:

UNA PALOMA BLANCA una paloma is a pigeon. Which means Paloma Picasso is called Pigeon Picasso. So una paloma blanca, of course, is a dove. This topped charts around Europe in 1975:



JEANETTE: PORQUE TE VAS
Jeanette is a musician with a genuine cult following. Described as "the eternal 16-year-old" after the sound of her voice, this was her biggest hit in 1976, from the film Cria Cuervos, which means "Cry of the Crows".



Silvia Y: Viva Espana!
Classic "we're going to Costa Blanca!" song from 1974, a time when Spain was still considered exotic:

Aprendo a hablar español

YESTERDAY I RAN to the library with a pocket full of pound coins ~ because they CHARGE for language courses ~ and got out two from-scratch ones in Spanish. I was looking for one that would take me as far as possible and foolishly picked an outsized Berlitz 4-CD one with outsized blown-plastic moulding and two flimsy books that could be reprinted on the amount of paper that would fit in a cigarette packet. In other words hardly anything is explained properly. The other, a CD-only Teach Yourself Spanish Conversation is excellent as you never have to refer to any booklet (in fact I think there was one, but it is no more and the man at the desk, who looked like he yodelled in lederhosen in his spare hand, was far more indignant than I, who would suffer more from its loss.

Frustrated by the lack of grammatical explanation in Berlitz, I've now changed it for Routledge Colloquial ~ only 2 CDs but a nice fat explanatory textbook (I'm such a swot). Incidentally these loans cost £2 a time ~ now isn't that taking the peepee? On the other hand it's good because it keeps them on the shelves for people who actually want to use them, which is something, I suppose...

My Mum got me a bargain-basement CD-player (called a Tesco Value Boombox ~ that wording alone is classic). I had been saving the moment of unwrapping until I had something new to play on it. O man! I couldn't believe it! Even though this was the cheapest budget CD player-cum-AM/FM radio you could get, it was more beautifully designed than almost any other small electrical item I've ever come across. It could barely have been any funkier if when you punched PLAY and the CD started to whirr and prattle una habitación individual por favor... etc a rainbow of mouse-sized miniature donkeys didn't irridesce from the speakers in a blaze of stardust and take to clopping round the CD-closed lid in hoof-waving formation.

I am having lots of fun with the Spanish language and have no inhibitions about yelling out things like "I want another hire car that doesn't smell of sick!" in those "listen and repeat" exercises ~ in the stately language of Cervantes and Lorca. I'm polishing up the most ridiculously posh Castillian accent I possibly can muster ~ lots of lispy Ss and Cs and B and V pronounced the same... por fabor, theñorita! Probably sounding like I've had too much BINO...

Before I fell asleep last night I had a go on the AM radio and was amazed to get a jabbering 20 to the dozen channel in German on medium-wave with elementary Spanish lessons bleeding in on the side... what kind of cosmic coincidence is that??!?

In the end I got fed up with interference in my ear all night and so set the Spanish dialogues on play. This is supposed to embed the language deep in the subconscious. What I can say is I dreamed of old donkeys pulling carts up narrow alleys of the old town...

Illustrated top and bottom you see the Andalucian clifftop village of Rhonda ~ yeah man I've been there. The clifftop is inland and so the soaring town walls go plummetting down to ordinary farmland... quite an amazing place... like a location from a dream...

Vorsprung Durch Technik!

I AM READING, or rather ploughing painstakingly slowly, through a mercifully short German novel I got from the public library called Evas ungewaschene Kinder by Sonja Ruf. In English the title means Eva's Unwashed Children but there isn't an English translation and I'm wading through it ever so slowly with a notebook and a dictionary, looking up an average of one word in ten (on a bad page) to one in twenty (on a good page). Everything I look up I carefully note down, complete with page number. And of course the translation. Here's my amateur translation of the blurb:

ONE DAY God came to visit and when Eva showed him her children, he felt full of hope. But some of the children she kept hidden because they hadn't yet washed and she was ashamed of showing God her unwashed children. God knew this and said, "What is hidden from me shall be hidden from humankind also." So ever since, these children have been invisible and live in cliffs and rocks, in hills and stones. Only when they wish it, can they be seen.

Here's what Google translate makes of it:
God once came to visit, and Eva showed him their children, he was quite hopeful. But some of the children kept them hidden because they were not washed, and she was ashamed to God their unwashed children to show. What did God, and he said, "What I should remain bent, will also remain hidden from the people." Since these children for their siblings, the people, invisible and live in cliffs and rocks in the hills and rocks. Only if they wish, they can be seen.

And the original text:
Einmal kam Gott zu Besuch, und Eva zeigte ihm ihre Kinder, die er recht hoffnungsvoll fand. Aber einige der Kinder hielt sie versteckt, denn sie waren noch nicht gewaschen, und sie schämte sich, Gott ihre ungewaschene Kinder zu zeigen. Das wußte Gott, und er sagte, "Was mir verbogen bleiben soll, soll auch vor den Menschen verborgen bleiben." Seither sind diese Kinder für ihre Geschwister, die Menschen, unsichtbar und wohnen in Klippen und Felsen, in Hügeln und Steinen. Nur wenn sie selbst es wünschen, können sie gesehen werden.


I don't get the phrase, "ihre Kinder, die er recht hoffnungsvoll fand" and had to follow Google's idea because translated literally that would say, "her children, who he found full of hope" which doesn't really make sense. Can of you Deutsch-ssprechender readers enlighten me here please?

The German language is closely related to English. In fact, 2000 years ago, so I read, there was only one Teutonic language named proto-Germanic. But this doesn't make German anywhere nearly as easy to learn as you might expect. The grammar is very complicated (far more so than English's. E.g. adjectives don't take inflexional endings in English...). It has fewer idiomatic expressions than English and far far fewer than French, which is strewn with them. Perhaps its biggest Verwirrungspunk or confusion point, as you might say, is its vast number of words that are so very similar to one another and yet widely divergent in meaning. E.g. Käfer means "beetle" but a Käfig is a cage. Fahren means "to drive", vor means before: but a Vorfahr is an ancestor! But vorfahren means to drive ahead and a Vorfahrt is a right of way! There are gerzillions of seperable verbs, even more than our "phrasal verbs" in English (e.g. to pick up: aufheben) and those can portray confusing shades of meaning. Plus you have to remember to look for the separated bit (e.g. the auf)before you search for it in a dictionary, else you'll get totally lost.

On the plus side, many German words echo English ones and have a lovely onomatopoeic quality, e.g. schmutzig = "dirty", die Verschmutzung is pollution. Others, like Geduld/geduldig (patience/patient) just sound to me like they mean what they do even though they're nothing like any word in English ~ and that I can't explain.

When I was little I thought German was incredibly funky for its pageoverspilling portmanteau nouns e.g. Unterbewusstseinstrauma = subconscious trauma, mysteriously dotted vowels and that weird blobberous ß-thing you find splurged in the middle of the linguistic entertainment.

Though most English people call it an "umlaut" the two-dotted vowelly thing, as it appears in English is usually actually a diaeresis ~ a vowel-separator in words like "naïve". The German umlaut marks a change of vowel that hit the langauge in a famous late-medieaval sound shift. It only ever appears over the letters A, O and U. Ä is pronounced exactly the same as E; Ö and Ü are oo-ey sounds English-speakers must work at to get right.

English, incidentally, underwent a comparable vowel-shift a couple of hundred years later; it was then that the so-called "magic E" appeared in English spelling, so "bake", which had been pronounced something like "bakkeh" became pronounced as it is today.

The blobberous ß-thing is called "ess-tset" ("SZ") after the appearance of a ligatured long S and Z in blackletter type, though it actually represents a double S. It used to appear in many words, but a still-unpopular 1996 Official Spelling Treaty signed by the German, Austrian and Swiss governments abolished this, the German language's funkiest feature from more than half of them, rendering the language vandalized and forever dullened. My very favourite word, "bloß" which means "naked" or "nearly" (such a German combination!) is now boringly rendered "bloss". The only gains in funkiness were the addition of treble consonants in compound nouns such as Balletttanzer, but that hardly makes up for the lost blobberiness. The disblobberation was challenged in a German court of law, which ruled that no government could tell anybody how to spell, except in school ~ though government departments were allowed to specify their own styles of spelling for official documents.

Anyway my German is still so retarted it's taken me ten hours over three days to muddle through eighteen pages of Eva's Unwashed Children. I shall let you know when I finish!

¡Vamos a hablar español!

OK RATHER than bang in another post about how tired I feel I decided to go with an idea I had from (actually quite a depressing) TV prog last night entitled Spain: Paradise Lost. Now what you must understand about Spain, if you're not British or North European is that it's always been the short-haul sun-seeking destination of choice for Brits, Germans, Beneluxians and Scandinavians (with Greece a close second). From an American viewpoint you might say it's our Mexico. In recent years, the coasts have been deluged by mostly British but also a lot of German ex-pats wanting to start a new life. For this reason the Spanish Costas are sometimes called the California of Europe.

I've been to the Costa del Sol and it was pretty mental. People pack up and just go, get jobs in bars or restaurants or set up places of their own ~ most never learn a word of the local language.

Buying property in Spain is fraught with dangers ~ and this was the topic of last night's docu. Land laws are VERY different out there ~ and not having a clue about the language you're basically at the mercy of fate unless you're very careful.

Then I realized that because I speak German as well as English I'd actually be in quite a strong position to deal with a great number of these ex-pats, if I chose to go. I've always wanted to speak Spanish anyway (just never had a strong enough excuse to learn). If I DID get good Spanish ~ wow! I could start up a sunny new life. And act as an interpreter for folks taking sewerage-spouting rivers of diarrhoea running down the embankment like volcanic lava whenever it rains never finished la urbanización property developers to court!

An urbanización is a new development, usually of holiday apartments with bars areas, restaurant, swimming pools etc for lobster-red Northern European tourists to splurge life savings on...

... the problem being that the credit crunch has left many such places that were bought and paid for off-plan utterly unfinished. Or even worse the towering Euro and cowering pound credit-crunch interest-rates type situation has left many in negative equity and faced with losing everything.

Well it's only an idea. But as the saying goes, where there's trouble there's dosh to be made. So maybe I shall end up in the environs of Malaga rather than Vienna-Berlin...

The local fresh sardines are really nice. So long they flop each side off the plate. And local lemons to squeeze all over them. Not like the tinned variety at all...

... that's if I can stop myself sleeping 14 hours a day first!! I did 9 hours straight last night and woke up unhappy to be disturbed. Got back early afternoon and did another 3 or 4 ~ that's 12 or 13 already and the day is yet young.

Right I've got to ping else I'll be terminated.

*photos: self-explanatory except: towering hotels ~ Benidorm; top pic Costa de la Lux, said to be Southern Spain's undiscovered treasure... the secluded beach is Tenerife's Playa de Antequera (Canary Isles)...
... o yeah, and the painting's of Miguel de Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE...