Incidentally, you did find something new out in your first trimester, and that is that it is impossible to sing while pregnant.
Unfortunately, you discovered this by collapsing in the middle of the winter concert of your choir.
Interesting programme. You have now added two new singing languages to your repertoire: French and Russian.
French, the conductor spent [...]
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Posted in Alonso, Britain, F1, Fernando Alonso, Formula 1, Formula One, Hamilton, James Allen, Language, Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, Patriotism, Russia, Russian, The Rest of the World, War on August 5, 2007 | 6 Comments »
As a fan of formula one, your years in Russia were a bit frustrating.
It’s true that the races were generally available on one of the terrestrial channels, although it always seemed to take a few races for a deal for the TV rights to be struck. Missing the opening of the season every year and [...]
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You should have been reading about the barbarian hordes rampaging across Britain in the 500s. You should have been preparing lessons - this week’s topic is ’love’. You should at least have been scrubbing the bathroom.
Instead you decided to cook a Moroccan feast. It’s from your new cookbook. Arabesque by Claudia Roden. You’ve been staring longingly (and [...]
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Posted in Britain, Communication, Culture, Culture Shock, ESC, Eurovision, Eurovision 2007, Eurovision Song Contest, Flags, Language, Lasha Tumbai, Morality, Music, Patriotism, Russia, TV, The Rest of the World, Ukraine on May 13, 2007 | 12 Comments »
You adore the Eurovision Song Contest and you say this totally without the kind of qualifiers that Brits usually add at this point. Such as ‘it’s so tragiclly kitsch’.
In fact, you are rather bemused by the fact that the British persist in regarding the thing as a monumental joke and yet follow programmes like Pop Idol with [...]
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Posted in Architecture, Books, Britain, Culture Shock, Drink, Music, Public Transport, Russia, Sergei Lukyanenko, Sightseeing, The Rest of the World on April 23, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Having discovered that you had slightly misinterpreted the setting of the book by a Spanish author - with large chunks of it set in Spain simply because Spain is the centre of the universe, as opposed to somewhere suitably Continentally decedent for odd Art to take place - it got you thinking about the other series [...]
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You can be very boring on the topic of grammar. And punctuation. Particularly commas. The rules are comforting, even if you do treat them as something of an abstract concept when it actually becomes time to apply them.
You are considerably more interested in how we actually use language, though. And the routines we follow and [...]
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Today, ladies, it is International Women’s Day, a phrase with all the semantic meaning of the Americans’ World Baseball Series. It’s big in the Former Soviet Union though.
You are rather fond of it as it means flowers and a card without either having to get up early and make pancakes or go to the effort of producing [...]
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A chap called Hobgoblin, who you came to via Charlotte and Aphra Behn’s postings on the topic, has requested movingly and persuasively that people blog about what it means to support the troops. This seems like an admirable project, even if it didn’t run headlong into your latest train of thought, so here goes.
It’s not something you feel you [...]
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So there you are about to recommend a book in a thread as a result of Midnight Jester’s very thoughtful and sensible post on the nature of responsibility in war. Suddenly you realise that you have done this so frequently over the last few years that rather than wear out the keyboard and encourage people to read it one at [...]
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It’s the Easter concert term at your choir, and you are having a Mary fest. The lynch-pin of this is Dvorak’s Stabat Mater.
The blurb to your copy of the score says that during the period he was writing it no less than three of his children died. I think this is supposed to lend poignancy to what is, after [...]
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