I UNPLUGGED my TV aerial (again) and tuned in loads of Italian channels (Rai 1, Rai 2, Rai 3, Rai Scuola, Rai Storia ...etc) plus a couple of good ones in German (ZDF and Das Erste), TV5 Monde FBS and TV5 Monde Europe in French... plus over 120 channels in Arabic. So I'm doing courses in Italian and Arabic just so's I can understand my own TV set's polyglot babblings ...
أنا أتكلم العربية قليلا
Yes I've been learning a bit of a mysterious Semitic language! (Arabic.)
In my attempts to acquire some of the native lingo, I've been following quite a few Moroccan soap operas in the night. Perhaps the term "following" is a little optimistic. I watch the dubbed shows, gazing at things like street signs, cars, architecture and countryside etc to try and figure out which country these programmes originated in. Quite a lot seem to come from Pakistan (Asian features and manic-episode-style Arabic script) and Turkey (weird-taste interior décor and the Latin alphabet, eg Turkish police cars =labelled POLIS).
So I've been banging away at the Arabic, a little every day. I "mastered" (in the sense that a two-year old child "masters" it) the script in three days, but in the 3-weeks+ since,my command of it doesn't seem to have drastically improved since... also they don't commit as much of their words to paper as we do (most short vowels are left out) ~ so Arabic is a bit like trying to learn to write a foreign tongue via txtmsg-speak.
Arabic words are very difficult to remember. But once I know them I can recognize them straight away in conversation eg when they're babbling away on Al Aoula TV, which is my new favourite channel, I can pick out expressions such as mumtaz and mumkin with ease. Which was never the case when I did basic Chinese (a lot of Chinese words sound the same, and it's not just the tones...)
Moroccan TV has a lot of early-morning programming in French, which is great for an insomniac like me. I've been to Morocco... surely the boat-trip from Spain has to be the most drastic journey on earth... Europe to Africa... it's like voyaging into another dimension...
In 2011 the Moroccan government gave legal recognition to the mysterious Berber language of the snowy hashish mountains and shimmering camel-trotting deserts, which is written in its own ancient runes... How cool is that! Here's a Moroccan roadsign in Arabic, Tasselhaït and French... don't you think it's cool...?
The Italian's coming on really fast. Faccio un diario segreto in italiano. Lo trovo piuttosto semplice perche la grammatica italiana corre in parallelo con la francese. Per esempio, se vorrei dire che qualcosa accada a Milano, userei la stessa parola "a" come in francese: "à"... Does that make any sense to you? It does to me now! (I'm not claiming to have any command over grammar whatsoever, I just kind of dunk it here and there, like a corgi's nose at a Royal Tea Party... So I'd really like to go back to Morocco. + Italy. So these foreign idioms are going to come in extremely useful one day not too long away... O well I must rush. Spero che tutti sono bene... أتمنى لجميع بشكل جيد.
I WATCHED Margaret Thatcher's funeral live across the news channels. Interestingly CNBC didn't carry it, neither did Russia Today ~ but CCTV, the Chinese news channel had some pretty good commentary. In the end I switched off BBC World in favour of France 24 in English where the studio guests made some very insightful comments. (I did try the French version, which you can get on Hotbird but they were babbling on about Reagan's White House more than her so I switched over...)
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
For
we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.
I wish I could read like that to a group of international VIPs and a television audience numbering tens or hundreds of millions and remain so composed.
So typical of me to make some ridiculous statement and not explain it. "I love a good death" doesn't mean I'm glad Mrs Thatcher is dead, but that I like it the TV and press tributes to her life. I'm still very undecided about what to think about the woman. I was seven years old when she got into power, so during my teenage years for as far back as I could remember there had been Mrs Thatcher and the Queen and it felt like it was going to be that way for always.
I do think Margaret Thatcher was a great politician ~ but more important than this she was a truly great stateswoman who defended British interests abroad. Many foreigners, who didn't have to live with the effects of her domestic policies, looked on her with admiration. She was so obviously superior to her international counterparts (especially Ronald Reagan). She DID "get Britain working" ~ but also forced millions into long-term unemployment. She started hacking into the welfare state. Suddenly you had to pay for eyetests, dentistry and prescriptions (although you pay a flat-rate prescription charge (currently £7.20 ($10.99) ~ not the retail price of the drugs)). Then there was the vastly unpopular poll tax, replaced by the even more unfair council tax (the poll tax to fund local goverment was levied per person; with the council tax you are "jointly and severally liable" meaning if you share an address with fly-by-night types you are liable to get hammered for their council tax as well!)
There are many good politicians and great ones who make lousy statesmen (and women). Example: former (Labour) health secretary Patricia Hewitt, who was so obviously oily and slippery and yet totally rivetting to watch. I remember the time the BBC were interviewing her when her only response to a sticky question was how insulted hardworking doctors would be to hear such an impertinent enquiry. I thought she made a cheap shot there and I wasn't the only one to be totally unimpressed by her interview performance (which was usually fascinatingly flawless) or her lousy performance in high office.
Then of course there's Tony Blair. Amazingly charismatic at the beginning of his reign. And still able to be (apparently) disarmingly frank at the end of it. He gave every impression of being George Bush's lapdog and leading Britain into a war with Iraq that nobody I knew (and hardly anyone across the country) actually wanted. Or a war in Afghanistan that nobody understood. As of 2010 we were supposed to have lavished £20,000,000,000 ($30,492,453,118) on these escapades. And now the government's complaining it's running out of money!
Back to Margaret Thatcher: one of her greatest and most controversial legecies was that she allowed millions of people to buy their council houses and flats. Which I think would be a brilliant idea ~ if only local authorities had been required to replace all accommodation sold with new housing stock. Now we're in a situation where demand massively outstrips supply for public housing. The new Conservative-Liberal coalition are introducing a £14 ($21.34) a week "bedroom tax" where parents of grown-up children will be forced to pay extra for the now-empty bedroom. Which will undoubtedly cause a massive population cascade from 2 and 3-bed properties into single-bedroom flats. Leaving almost nothing left for vulnerable single people who would otherwise be in emergency accommodation. Or just sleeping on the streets. (Or in squats, like I used to do.) I was in temporary accommodation for about eight years before I finally got housed (and how that happened I have no idea. There was a process called "bidding", which I was told happened automatically, though you could somehow express an interest in particular properties. Anyway I got one I really like so I'm happy.
Other news about me: I'm still learning Spanish. Amazingly. I watch a Spanish-language Iranian TV channel on Hotbird called Hispan-TV. They do some quite good (overdubbed) dramas. I also get direct feeds from South America, eg Argentian president Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner's address to the nation. If I were in power I'd refuse interviews and do presidential-style videos too.
After the Spanish Linguaphone has been done and dusted (I'm still only on lesson 18 of 30) I would like to pick up some Italian too. But I'm terrified of getting the two languages mixed up. Just about every Spanish verb form (and there are loads of very complicated ones) seems to have its parallel in Italian (essentially the same thing, just spelled differently) and I know that if I don't really force Spanish grammar to seep into my very bones and my soul I'm just going to get hopelessly confused and not actually speak anything at all. While I only get four TV channels in Spanish, I get over 150 in Italian, including Rai 1, 2 i 3 i QVC Italia etc. Which means ample opportunity to practise. In my experience, apart from the close study of grammar, the major predictor of success in foreign language acquisition is PRACTICE. If you don't use it you'll lose it. So when I'm not tuned into Ethopian folk music all night I let them babble Spanish at me while I sleep. Somehow my befuddled brains dub this over into strangely mangled English. Which means I can't speak Spanish very well (because nothing like that happens with German or French telly). You see why I wanted Hotbird now? 1300 TV channels cannot be wrong!
Well I've gotta go. Binky is languishing in the mental hospital. For the FIFTH time in less than 12 months. And I have to bring cigarettes, scented candles, hair mousse etc etc etc etc etc before she flips her lid...
SO IN SUMMARY. YES MARGARET THATCHER WAS WONDERFUL (APART FROM MOST OF HER POLITCIES...)
VIDEO: Amanda Thatcher's reading at her grandmother's funeral...
(by the way, Amanda is only 19; "we are a grandmother" was her older brother Michael...)
FINALLY I got my Turkish TV turned off and HOTBIRD is coming through loud and clear. After retuning my satbox I found I had 1300 new channels. Minus the encrypted ones there are still about 700. I spent ages pruning these down to about 220. 150 of these are in Italian. But I get a load in German, English and French too. There are some really bizarre things on that satellite. Like a Buddhist channel in with Thai priests reading endless tracts in Pali. Thai gameshows (on another channel). Italian señoritas jiggling their bare mammaries at midday. There was a really manic woman on yesterday at about 1pm vigorously fanning her private parts while taking calls on two separate phones. I try and escape but she's on five consecutive channels! I'm sure that woman was mentally ill or on drugs (or both).
Oh talking about drugged-out mentally ill sex workers, I met my old housemate LAUNDRETTA at the bus stop. Smashed out of her brains on vodka. She has a massive scar across her forehead where she crashed her car during a drunken psychotic episode. She said she's now been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (quelle surprise) and some kind of psychosis. She's on 750mg quetiapine (Seroquel). I'm only on 300. I told her about my manic episode when the dryers were all talking to me down the laundrette and she laughed and laughed at that. I don't know what she's doing now but she's not doing well. Poor lass.
I'm doing really well at my Spanish. I'm nearly a third of the way through the Linguaphone course. They don't seem to know Linguaphone in America but it's basically four books and nine CDs and you learn a vocabulary of 2000 words+. To draw a comparison, Pimsleur only teaches you a few hundred words. I've been watching the news in Spanish and with Spanish subtitles can just about follow what they're going on about. I've got so far into this Spanish I started worrying about what I'd do once the course ran out. So I've already invested in Italian. I want to learn both, but am avoiding all those Italian TV channels, which will only confuse me. I've been reading ¡Hola!magazine with the aid of my trusty Collins Gem dictionary. I'm not feeling too depressed these days... (famous last words, I know!)
So I've been banging away at the Arabic, a little every day. I "mastered" (in the sense that a two-year old child "masters" it) the script in three days, but in the 3-weeks+ since,my command of it doesn't seem to have drastically improved since... also they don't commit as much of their words to paper as we do (most short vowels are left out) ~ so Arabic is a bit like trying to learn to write a foreign tongue via txtmsg-speak..jpg)
Arabic words are very difficult to remember. But once I know them I can recognize them straight away in conversation eg when they're babbling away on Al Aoula TV, which is my new favourite channel, I can pick out expressions such as mumtaz and mumkin with ease. Which was never the case when I did basic Chinese (a lot of Chinese words sound the same, and it's not just the tones...)
