belgianwaffle

Reading etc.

A possible explanation for the low numbers in Danish classes


Posted in: Reading etc.

A lot of people speak English as a second language.  As a consequence, native English speakers are tolerant of error and capable of understanding an extraordinarily wide range of accents.  This is less true for people whose languages are not spoken by as many non-native speakers.

An American who has worked in Denmark recently reported to me the following conversation.

Dane: My mother was a migrant, you know.

American: Really?

Dane: Oh yes, she came from Germany though she lived here almost all her adult life.

American: I see.

Dane: She never learnt to speak Danish.

American (surprised): She didn’t?  But how did she manage her day to day life? Schools, shopping, socialising?

Dane (surprised): Oh she could write Danish and speak it but she always had an accent.

People, those are high standards.

Waking the Celtic Tiger


Posted in: Ireland, Reading etc.

It’s all a bit hysterical here at the moment.   You can’t turn on the radio without somebody telling you that we are all DOOMED!

I asked Mr. Waffle (fount of all knowledge, as you know) what happened to the soft landing we were promised and he tells me that “it turns out that the fundamentals weren’t sound after all”.  That’s alright then.

I had lunch during the week with a very pessimistic friend.  He has just remortgaged his beautiful house so that he can make it even more beautiful (extension, underfloor heating, walls taken apart to put in insulation – couldn’t he just have put on another jumper, seriously?).  He is worried about what will happen should Ireland go bankrupt.  What will happen to his beautiful house?  He gloomily prophesied that Mr. Waffle would have to go back to Brussels and send remittances to keep us all afloat.

I had a friend for the Princess round.  She is a little German girl (if you were German, would you put your child in an Irish language school?).  Her parents came too.  We talked about the economy (what can I say, it is all pervasive).  They were recruited from Germany for the boom.  Ah, I joked, you should move to Poland now; apparently, Poland is the new Ireland.  “Actually, our company is moving to Poland,” they said.  He has taken redundancy and they are moving back to Berlin as soon as he finds a job there. And how, we ask ourselves, is their daughter going to keep up her Irish?

Dell had a big plant in Limerick and they are moving to Poland.  My cousin will lose his job.  The Irish Times had a big feature on workers in Lodz and how they are taking the news.  I must say they seemed very realistic about it all.  Dell will probably move somewhere else in ten years.  They are leaving Ireland now, later they will leave Poland.  In some way, I think we fooled ourselves about foreign direct investment.  The Americans love Ireland we said to ourselves and we all speak English, their companies will stay forever.  I suppose if they were that indifferent to cost and related considerations, they could just have stayed at home.  Anyhow, I don’t see the Poles saying “there’s a big Polish community in Chicago, they’re bound to stay here because of their traditional links with Poland”.  Meanwhile, a man made redundant by Dell was showing extreme stoicism to the Irish Times “Nobody will starve to death”.  I suppose not.

It’s funny because it doesn’t feel like a recession to me, not like the 1980s.  My sister and I went to dinner on Wednesday night.  It was raining.  I had booked a table for two.  When I went in, the restaurant was empty.  Aha, I thought, the recession strikes.  Fifteen minutes later, the place was heaving.  In the early 90s we had “jobless growth”.  We kept getting told that things were getting better but unemployment was not falling and it didn’t seem like things were getting better.  Now we have jobless growth in reverse.

I listen a bit to Radio 4 and there the talk is also of recession but in a much more relaxed manner – has Gordon Brown’s spokesman rung in the middle of any show to ask them to stop creating panic – I think not (probably too busy analysing poll data).  I read an article somewhere that said that poor people who get richer lack the “inter-generational security” of the middle classes.  Ireland lacks the inter-generational security of the middle classes.  We’ve only been rich for ten years and we just have the national pension fund to call on when times get tough.

I have started reading an Irish economics website.  I’m not sure why since it only depresses me.  However, there was recently some much needed relief from the storm clouds that the website likes to whip up (collective noun for economists anyone – a correction of economists, a downturn of economists, a recession of economists, a depression of economists?). A contributor called Jim O’Leary was marking papers and generously gave us the following gem from one of the next generation of economists:

From the frontiers of knowledge (yes, it’s grading time again): “Fiscal contraction was first noticed in the 1960s by a man by the name of Fiscal and it was him who derived the short, medium and long run effects of it and how they would occur and the reasons for it…”  

Thank you, Jim, for drawing this to the nation’s attention when we needed it most.

Land of (equal) opportunity


Posted in: Ireland, Reading etc.

Equal pay was forced upon Ireland by the EU (how can you not love it?) on accession in 1973.  Despite the then Government’s fighting a dastardly rear action to protect unequal pay for equal work, the EU won the day.  The Government, resigned to its fate, decided to appoint a number of equality officers to ensure that the principle was observed.  However, as you can imagine, it took a while for the new arrangements to be implemented and for some time there were transitional arrangements in place.

The outcome of this was that when the equality officer posts were advertised, they were advertised on the transitional scales with lower pay rates for women than for men.

[Insert relevant cliche here – perhaps “you couldn’t make it up”]

Films


Posted in: Reading etc., Siblings

My sister goes to see a lot of films and her return to Ireland has meant that I too am going to a lot more films.  Here’s a pretty unsuccessful batch

Waltz with Bashir – Ari Folman

The best of the bunch.  I saw it in the Kino in Cork and was able to take a snack bar and a cup of tea into the auditorium which alone would have justified the price of admission.    The last film I saw in Hebrew was Kadosh, true, that was a long time ago but that experience has kept me away from Israeli films for a while.  This was really very good, if somewhat disturbing.  It’s an animated film about a former  Israeli soldier’s experience at the Sabra and Shatila massacre.  I went with my younger sister and her friend and I was astounded that neither of them had ever heard of Sabra and Shatila.

The film did get me thinking again about the state of Israel.  It is the most extraordinary thing.  If you made it up, no one would believe you.  A state founded largely by central and eastern European intellectuals; people who had been in hiding; in camps; fleeing for their lives; people whose relatives had been killed in vast numbers.   They go to a patrt of the Middle East where the climate is a bit different  from say, Odessa; revive Hebrew (very guttural language and that is the least of its challenges); win wars against their Arab neighbours; and go about building and protecting their state with a stubborn single mindedness. You cannot but gasp at the improbability of it.

The tale of Depereaux – Sam Fell and Rob Stevenhagen.

This is an animated story of a mouse who rescues a Princess.  I didn’t think much of it myself but I wasn’t the one to be pleased.  The Princess and Daniel found it middling but Michael found it absolutely terrifying and watched it sitting on my lap while  sobbing in fear and peering through my fingers at the scary cat.  At the same time he refused to leave.  He is still traumatised.  Not recommended.

Twilight – Catherine Hardwicke

Now that my sister is back, I don’t have to drag my unfortunate husband to this kind of film.  There aren’t so many people in their 30s who are in the market for teenage vampire flicks.    I must say that I quite enjoyed it and am now toying with the idea of trying the books.  Does anyone have views on the books?

The Spirit – Frank Miller

This is a beautifully shot film with a hilariously over the top performance by Samuel L. Jackson.  It mixes real people and animation very cleverly.  It is therefore a pity that the plot is atrocious and the dialogue worse.   After about 10 minutes I begged my sister to abandon ship and a stream of wiser people left the cinema.  We stayed to the bitter end.  It was, undoubtedly one of the worst films I have ever seen.  Wikipedia quotes Robert Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times on the film, “There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material”.  Mr. Ebert is spot on.

The Walworth Farce


Posted in: Reading etc.

We went to see this last week.  I think that much more of this culture stuff could kill me.  Mr. Waffle maintains that I remained stony faced because of the Cork accents (not bad at all) but I would suggest it was because of the deeply disturbing themes explored in the play.  OK, it may have had its comic moments also.  Not for me but clever.  Remained resolutely seated as the rest of the audience rose to their feet; regretted that we had seats in the front row, though.

Reading


Posted in: Reading etc.

For most of my time in recent months, I have been recovering from the move.  I have therefore been rereading as this is all I felt strong enough for – Georgette Heyer, Father Brown, Myles na gCopaleen and Saki.  However, recently, I have begun to recover (hurrah) and have tried the selection below.  I am curious – what do you reread when life is becoming slightly overwhelming?

“When will there be Good News?” by Kate Atkinson

I think that Kate Atkinson is a wonderful writer.  I have read all her books and I have yet to be disappointed.  She has great plots, interesting characters and she writes so beautifully and insightfully that I sometimes sigh wistfully at her brilliance.  When will there be another new Kate Atkinson book?

“Ni d’Adam, ni d’Eve” by Amelie Nothomb

This is the third Amelie Nothomb book I have read and it is far less enjoyable than the other two.  It has its moments, I must concede and it can by quite funny but not funny enough to offset her vague musings on Japan.  She is, incidentally, quite clearly, nutty as a fruit cake.  This both adds to her work (funny) and detracts from it (no, no, too mad).  Still she is very Belgian and that must be worth something.

“This Year it Will be Different” by Maeve Binchy

A collection of short stories, some of them quite ancient.  All about Christmas and all about men having affairs.  Reading them all one after another does make me wonder a little about Maeve’s personal life.  Perhaps she only married late because her heart was broken by a philandering bastard.

“Heat” by Bill Buford

Mr. Waffle recommended this.  It’s about a man’s attempt to master (and I do mean master) Italian cooking while his very patient wife supports him.  It has its moments.  He comments that “seafood with butter – or any other dairy ingredient – verges on culinary blasphemy”.  I know this to be true because once, in a not at all fancy restaurant in Italy, I asked for parmesan to go on seafood pasta and there was some whispering in the back and then not one but two waiters came up to tell me that I just couldn’t have parmesan with seafood.

“Où on va papa?” by Jean-Louis Fournier

This is a book written by a man who had two handicapped children.  I found it very disturbing, very good and entirely compelling.  In public discourse, parents don’t seem to be allowed to say that having a handicapped child is very, very hard and a huge disappointment.  This man has no such hesitations.  This book is, I think, supposed to be funny and there is a certain amount of black humour but overwhelmingly, it is sad.  There is an aching sense of loss, of what might have been, of what his boys’ lives would have been like had they not been “different”.  It is a brilliant book.

“Mothering” by Rudolph Schaffer

I picked this up in my mother-in-law the psychologist’s house.  It dates from the 1970s so all the information may not be entirely up to date. I nearly gave up early on when we had two pages on the infant’s sucking reflex followed by another couple on sleep patterns.

However, I quite enjoyed this bit later on:

“With increasing occupational and social outlets for women a wife need no longer disappear into the confines of the home on marriage, with nothing to do except have and care for children…Having children should be only for those who want children and will actively enjoy children”.

I’m not sure that actively enjoying necessarily follows from wanting, however, I am touched by his vision of the brave new world that the proper use of contraception will entail.

I was lured into reading the book by seeing the author’s description of the Ik tribe in Northern Uganda but this is something of a sensationalist moment compared to the remainder of the text.  He says:
“The Ik had formerly been a nomadic tribe of hunters and gatherers….[but] confined to a limited barren area…[on the brink of starvation]…[there] came a virtual disintegration of their social organization: the family as an institution almost ceased to exist, and in the wake of the struggle to remain alive there followed an utterly selfish attitude to life that displace all positive emotions like love, affection and tenderness….Children were regarded as useless appendages who were turned out of the parents’ hut when they reached the age of three years, compelled from then on to make their own way without help or guidance from any adult and certainly without any parental love or affection.  Consequently one rarely saw a parent with a child except accidentally or incidentally; when a child hurt himself by falling into the fire the only reaction was amusement; if a predator came and carried off a baby the mother was merely gald at no longer having to care for it.  One never saw a parent feed a child over the age of three – on the contrary, such children were regarded as competitors from whom food had to be hidden; if consequently one died of starvation that merely meant one mouth the fewer.”
Not only is it sensationalist but it may not even be true.  Wikipedia has some serious reservation about Mr. Turnbull’s research on the Ik, on which the paragraph above is based.

Oh well, I see Mr. Schaffer had a new edition out in 1984 so doubtless he fixed it up then.