Meet the Parrotlet

DESCRIBED as "a big bird in a little birdie's body", parrotlets (pronounced "parolet") are so new to the pet trade their full lifespan is not even known! The same size and price as a budgie: in the UK they sell for around £35 ($56.89) though in the USA they regularly fetch prices up to $280 (£172.78). The blue ones are particularly charming...

MY SUPPORT WORKER came round yesterday. I didn't feel he was amazingly helpful. he kept asking my plans for 2013; but I have no concrete plans, only hopes: I hope to get better. Last year he gave me a prospectus for Birkbeck College, which offers a double-honours degree part-time in German and Japanese. But my attention-span is all over the place: sometimes fine but sometimes like that morning I couldn't remember what I'd thought and what I'd actually said, so I had no idea whether I was repeating myself! My head was babbling so. I got more and more agitated as the day wore on. So I have decided to sort out my chi ~ you know, my energy balance. I know of a long-established and very reputable Chinese medicine centre in Niel's Yard, Covent Garden so I'm going there.

I would imagine Chinese therapies could do a lot to improve one's powers of focus. That's if mine really do need improving: I mean, aren't the genuises of academia famously scatterbrained?

I tried calming myself with television but the programming was atrocious. All I remember was a photo-shoot on old Dallas featuring an old-age pensioner lingerie model with massive bazookas arguing with Clayton and Miss Ellie over a murder. I was wishing for in-depth documentaries on chirpy parrots on some channel somewhere, but of course no luck. I tried and tried to think on higher things like feathery chirping parrotlets and not negative ones, but without parrots to look at, I was fighting a losing battle.

I went out and got terrible stomach-ache diarrhoea, so I bumbled back again, where my bad spirits magically evaporated. I went to bed at seven where finally I got my wish: as I lay down my weary head a wondrous dream enveloped me of lovebirds, parrotlets and lorikeets all chirping cheerily away...! How amazing!


TALKING PARROTLET



7 WELL-BEHAVED BIRDIES ON ONE PERCH
Aren't these cute!
The parrotlet is the little blue one.



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Inspired~!!!

I FEEL INSPIRED to do a certain thing. No way am I writing my plans in advance. All I have ever done in times past is not act on them... So I'm not going to jinx this project by mentioning any more than I'm mentioning right now...

I'm still hacking away at the German. It's coming along OK. I even tried to write a German blog post last night, but was continually hampered by an inadequate command of the grammar. German grammar is the most difficult of any language I have ever tried. If you're thinking Asian languages must be harder because they're more exotic, you're totally wrong. Japanese is far easier than German. Or French, for that matter. For one thing, you don't have to remember whether every single noun in the language is a boy or a girl... or in German a he, she or it. A few verbs are a bit irregular, but you never have to learn whole pages of of them. And in no Asian language I have tried did I ever come across the type of information that can only be expressed properly in tabular form ~ inflexions ~ and German is full of them. Inflexional languages are fiendishly difficult ~ Latin being a prime example.

Somehow die Deutsche Sprache is becoming more and more familiar to me. Ever since the connection to my English satellite box broke down I have been deluged by German from the time I get up in the morning to when I sleep at night. I've started testing myself on the reams of vocabulary I've written down but there's too much to remember. But somehow the words I have learned have come in very useful indeed ~ not that you'd think they necessarily were. Eg der Angriff (attack) and die Belagerung (seige) have come up time and time again on documentaries. Language is a small world: twice last night key-words were spoken on the telly at the exact moment I was looking them up for my notebook. When I can finally speak German fluently in the year 2049 I'll let you know. On my blog "Gledwood Volume 329"!!


Link: the German Language ~ bad for your mental health!