Clearing Up And Language

Clearing Up
Today had a lot going for it. Firstly, although the weather was at times overcast it was warm until late in the evening; and I love the warm evenings that we should have from now on until September. Partly as a result of that I played boules for a solid three hours, with mixed success although I was playing consistently well, which was all that really mattered to me.

Secondly, I finished the work in my bedroom, albeit there is still some re-arranging and cleaning to do. However, considering that I first started scraping paint off beams back in last autumn, that is something of a milestone. The cleaning will be a considerable job but not a complicated one. Much more complicated will be persuading myself to get rid of old clothes. I really need to be ruthless on this and am not sure I can be. I've already discovered four sets of clothes for “dirty” jobs and have decided to get rid of two of them; arguably I need only one but..........Then there is the question of what I need here as against my UK wardrobe. I haven't enough presentable shorts and have too much warm/winter clothing. I'll sort that out somehow (?).

Finishing the bedroom has meant finding something to do with my old wardrobe, a self-assembly piece of furniture that was unstable and which I have come to hate. I bought it three years ago, cheaply, to replace a kind of striped tent, of the sort you might find at Henley regatta, which served as a wardrobe for my predecessor. I hated that too, which is why I bought the replacement and now a new wardrobe. Fortunately I met Serge this evening, who's trying to do up a large old house in the village on no money and he wants to take it. It's a much preferable solution to taking it to the local tip.

Thirdly, on the food front, I've now made some apricot jam (the markets are full of apricots) and bottled some cherries in alcohol. That should be it on the preserves front, unless I decide to make more chili jam or pickled shallots, until the figs come along in late summer (more jam). Jam was never important to me in England but but is generally “de rigeur” here for breakfast and I also like to buy unflavoured yoghourts into which I put a dollop of jam. I need a few more cherries to use up the remaining fruit alcohol but that will take only a few minutes.

Fourthly, the warm evening meant that today's pizza get-together, which for a change was mussels and chips, lasted until 10.45pm, an elongated session of chat and jokes with some 40 of us all together. It's one of the things I really look forward to in the summer here, with all of us outside the cafe watching the darkness draw in around us.

A Word A Day
Friend Steve put me on to a website that provides a word a day, it's derivation and usage, and which I have found consistently entertaining, the more enjoyable in that it is free. It can be found at wsmith@wordsmith.org. Surprisingly for me (with my prejudices) it is an American site, proving that there are still Americans who read and take an interest in language. It occasionally produces some unexpected insights, as well as general interest. It has a theme per week and this week's theme is the use of nouns as verbs, a practice I generally dislike when good alternatives already exist. The word today was “friend”, for which the verb to befriend already exists; but to friend someone is apparently being increasingly used on Internet chat-rooms. Instinctively I don't like that. But apparently the verb to befriend is the upstart newcomer, to friend as a verb having been used in English some three centuries earlier than to befriend (13th to 16th centuries). So much for my prejudices.