Time And Tide

Moments In Time

Being a football fanatic, I tend to listen to post-match interviews and have become fixated on the use of the word “moment” by foreign players and coaches. Teams are said to be in a good or bad moment and the same is often said of periods during a match. If a player says he is in a good moment, what he means is that he is in form at the time. If a team is said to be in a bad moment, what it means is that the team has been off form for some time. I have the awful premonition that this use of the word moment going to become standard English if the practice is not stopped; and “moment” is in no way the appropriate word in these cases.

So how does it come about? I think it is because the word “time” is used for all manner of aspects of time in English but not in other languages (e.g. French and Spanish). The obvious translation of time into French is “temps” but can be correctly translated as such only very infrequently; the word more often takes it's other meaning, weather. If you are in time for a meeting you are “à l'heure”; if this is a good time to do something it is a “bon moment” (Aha!); and if you are having a good time then time doesn't figure at all; “vous vous amusez bien”.

So it's easy to see why foreigners struggling with their English speak in this way but will someone please stop it. There is no time like the present and stopping this misuse will not be a moment too soon.

The Weather

I make no excuses for returning to the topic of the weather; after all, it is in the news almost everywhere. Whether (sic) it is a consequence of climate change or just an arbitrary blip I have no idea and really don't care much. Here we have so far had a winter that has been milder but much wetter than usual. It has been what is known here as English weather and so of course yours truly is getting the blame for it. The Ouveze as it runs by my house is at the moment channel-wide, fast flowing and turbulent. If it rises another couple of feet, which wouldn't take much more rain, it will spread out over the wider river bed which is 3-4 times the width of the channel. It did that for a few hours two weeks ago. There's no immediate danger to anyone but I have never before seen it this high for such an extended period. The potential danger here is not a consequence of saturated land but rock. Rock is a bit difficult to saturate but sheds water quite as easily as saturated land.

Maintenance of the river course is not brilliant but probably adequate for all likely eventualities. The same clearly cannot be said of what is happening in England. I caught Clark, the UK government minister, saying on TV's Question Time that you cannot be fully prepared for events that happen once in a hundred years and screamed at the TV when nobody challenged him. Of course what he said is strictly true but flooding on the Somerset plain is not a once in a 100 years event; it happens regularly, just not as severely as now. If ever there was a warning that has to be it but nobody chose to take notice. It always annoys me, perhaps to an unreasonable extent, when a panel of people supposed to challenge one another pass up an easy chance.

Another problem for England, rather than France, seems to be maintenance of infrastructure more generally. There is an inherent conflict between it and democracy. Infrastructure can usually be ignored for 15-20 years without anyone noticing and governments' focus is on much shorter time-frames, basically on the length of their remit to rule. In any five-year term, there will always be many items far more pressing (and potentially vote-catching) than maintenance of infrastructure. Nevertheless, maintained it must be and for some reason I don't fully understand France seems to do better at this than England. A contributing factor, I am sure, is the greater devolution of budget in France. If areas at risk of flooding have a budget to fix the problem they will fix it.

Scottish Nationalism

This is another problem grabbing the headlines in the UK. People I know with their ear to the ground in Scotland reckon that the referendum will reject separation from the UK. Old enmities may die hard but shifts in population are probably what will decide this issue. I think the Scottish Nationalists have missed a trick. They should have demanded a referendum in the rest of the UK as to whether it wanted the Scots; then they might have got the result they want.