THE TALE SPINNER
Vol. XVI, No. 41
October 9, 2010
IN THIS ISSUE:Vol. XVI, No. 41
October 9, 2010
Kate Brookfield concludes her story of their visit to the UK
Louise Kruithof writes about her dog, Brandy
Carol Hansen forwards an article by a disillusioned grammarian
The editor remembers her last dog, Fluff
Sites are suggested by Bruce Galway, Carol Hansen, and Pat Moore
Kate Brookfield describes their exploration of the Trossachs on their trip to
SCOTLAND
Before and after our family events, Michael and I spent a very pleasant time touring Scotland's Trossachs in Argylleshire. We needed a place to stay that was not too far from Glasgow airport. Michael found the Loch Goilhead Hotel on the internet and it proved to be an ideal location. After spending hours looking for a different place to stay before our return to Canada, we decided to go back to the same place.
On May 23rd we arrived at Glasgow airport at 5:00 a.m. We picked up the rental car and set off in glorious sunshine. In no time at all, we were out of the city and heading north-west along the side of Loch Lomond. It was rhododendron time in Scotland and they were blooming in great profusion in gardens and hedgerows of large estates. We stopped for breakfast at a quiet restaurant with a garden overlooking the loch. It is hard when you grow up in a country and then leave it and come back many years later, as prices seem to get stuck in your head from much earlier times. A slice of toast and butter with jam should not cost over two pounds ... but it does!
After a pleasant drive enjoying the open scenery with lochs and mountains and green green grass, we found our way to the Loch Goilhead hotel. As it names suggests, Goilhead is a small community at the tip of Loch Goil. The hotel overlooked the head of the Loch, with small fishing craft making the place look very picturesque and tranquil. The hotel was mainly the local bar and restaurant with about five rooms for guests. We had a room with a magnificent view overlooking the loch. This small hotel is "sister" to the Drimsynie House Hotel, a larger holiday and recreation centre just 10 minutes walk away. Because we were guests at the hotel, we were given free access to all the amenities at the grander place. This included free golf at the nine-hole course, use of the athletic centre, which included a pool and sauna, and a weight room with the option of having a personal trainer, pony trekking, or guided mountain walks. The price for three nights at our hotel was very reasonable without all these extras, so it more than made up for the expensive toast en route.
The nearest town, Inverary, is a small market town with all essential services, including a castle, of course. Castles in Scotland are ten a penny. A sign near Inverary told us where we could see the tallest tree in the UK. We followed the directions to a delightful garden, named Ardkinglas Woodland Gardens. We spent a good two hours exploring the gardens and saw the tallest trees in the UK. See photos in "Around Lochgoilhead" album: http://arunaurl.com/4093
The thing I notice most about Scotland is the friendly service in shops and even banks; the way passing strangers always have time to chat to strangers. Everything and everybody seem more relaxed and time is not that winged chariot that stops people communicating with one another. But we were recovering from jet lag and on holiday, so our attitudes might also have contributed to that feeling of content. I could imagine that when the place is covered in snow and ice, life might be a different. But is was spring, the newborn lambs were prancing about - also lots of sheep in Scotland - and the sun was shining.
As this is mainly a photo journal, my Picasa web albums tell a better story than all my words. There are several albums: Loch Goilhead, around Loch Goilhead, Loch Goilhead to Edinburgh, and Moffatt to Loch Goilhead. In the first three days there, we acclimatised to the time change, explored the general area, played golf each day, and I had a swim and a work-out and climbed the mountain behind the hotel....
After the family events, we returned to Loch Goilhead for our final three days in the UK. On our drive from Yorkshire, we travelled through Great Ayton in the Cleveland Hills between Yorkshire and Durham counties. Great Ayton is a small village at the foot of Roseberry Topping, the highest hill in the Cleveland Hills. To be classed as a mountain it has to be over 1000 feet and this is about 955 feet, so still a hill. Great Ayton is the birthplace of James Cook, famous explorer. His voyages all started from Whitby, and there is a miniature model of his first vessel, The Endeavour, at Whitby. The house where he was born was sold and taken to New Zealand, where it was reconstructed brick by brick. After dropping in on my sister for lunch and a quick visit and photo of my childhood home, we proceeded north and west.
We stopped for tea and cakes in a grungy border town in England which will remain anonymous, but we will remember it for the exorbitant cost of a pot of tea for two and two small slices of cake. But the cake was good!
We stayed the night in the Balmoral Hotel in Moffatt, Dumfriesshire. Moffatt is an ancient town steeped in history and famous for its toffee and Scottish wool shops. My husband’s parents retired to this part of Scotland, so it was very familiar territory for us. The next day was very wet!
Mike wanted to look for a rock outcrop nearby. For this purpose we ended up at Meggett Dam, created about 20 years ago to supply water for Edinburgh. It was cold, wet and windy, and nothing to see but moors. I am used to being left in isolated places while he goes off with his backpack and hammer to find goodness knows what. Fortunately, I always have a book with me to pass the time.
We stopped once again in Slotburn, Lanarkshire. This time, I did get out of the car and enjoyed a pleasant scramble by a stream. He was looking for a fossil fish bed, which he found, but there were no fossils left. There are a couple of photos in the Moffatt album showing the terrain.
We continued north-west driving along the Ayrshire coast. Mike was raised in Ayrshire, so we visited his home town and photographed his old home. The west coast of Scotland involves crossing many estuaries and loch inlets so we shortened our journey by taking a ferry from Greenock to Dunnoon. Eventually, we were back at Loch Goilhead hotel, where the staff greeted us like old friends.
In the following two days we did more touring about, including a day to Oban and another day to the infamous and isolated valley of Glencoe, site of the massacre of the MacDonalds by the Campbells in 1692 at the time of the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England. Actually, it was the Earl of Argyll's Foot regiment under the command of Captain Robert Campbell. It is wrong to think all the Campbell clan was involved in this massacre.
We arrived at closing time, so could not go on the cable car that takes you to the top of the steep sloped mountain. Nearby is Scotland’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, and again the tourist centre was closing up, so we were saved the astronomical prices for another ride in a cable car. Actually, Ben Nevis is not a very imposing mountain, compared with minor mountains in the Canadian Rockies. You could almost ride a bike up the slope.
On our last morning, Mike climbed the hill at the back of the hotel. I did it on our first day there. Views from the top looking down on the settlement and the Loch are also in the album. All too soon, we had to say goodbye to Loch Goilhead and drive back to Glasgow for our flight home.
Louise Kruithof tells us about her latest dog,
BRANDY
I would love to tell you about my newer dog.
We had a great dog with us for over 13 years. He was good natured, a good guardian, and of excellent behaviour. We missed him, so we looked around for a while and eventually settled on a good-looking, good-natured dog that had been abandoned, tied up in a leash-free park. We thought, "No problem; we will take care of her." It has been five long months, but she is finally starting to settle down and will eventually, we hope, also be a well-behaved dog.
So we left for camp, husband and son in one vehicle and dog and I in another. Two vehicles? Yes. Our son was coming back before us.
I grew up in a family of hunters and fishers and had always enjoyed a partridge or two in the fall. Our son, Marc, who is a very competent archer, brought along his bow and arrows and special attachments to catch small birds. When we stopped so he could get his permit to hunt, he gathered all kinds of information relevant to the hunting licensing and all the time periods during which one may hunt and with what. Bow and arrow hunting was permitted while we were up North and he started reading out loud the permit requirements and the clothing one must wear when hunting. It also addressed the presence of a dog accompanying the hunter. Did you know that the dog also needs a permit to go along? We did not, but since the dog was there, we informed her that she was not allowed to hunt because she did not have a permit. I made her a vestment in the regulation colour, i.e. hunter orange, from an old vest so she would at least meet that regulation and also warn other hunters that she is a dog and not a small deer. She has fawn-coloured fur and is about the size of a smaller deer.
One day, I set out with my son and his hunting gear to get supper in the form of a partridge. We saw one that quickly disappeared in the bush, but a few minutes later we saw another one which gave us a chance to see where it flew up into a tree. The sight on the bow had been disturbed so my son, who is usually very accurate with his arrows, missed the bird which then flew to some other unknown destination. We were both disappointed of course, but such is life!
Next day we were all working at something or other, our son helping my husband with putting up a new building (a work shed) and I cooking on my wood stove, when milady disappeared for a longish period of time. When we called her, she peeked at us for a few minutes and promptly went back to where she had come from. Marc went to see what she was doing, and wouldn't you know - she had caught a partridge and was chewing on it. Who is the hunter in this family! Because she had mangled it we did not think it wise to cook it for dinner. Instead we put it in a barrel for burning and it became ashes very quickly.
That night we had a serious talk with our lady hunter and told her that not having known about the requirement for a dog to have a permit for hunting, we had not purchased one for her, so she was not allowed to go hunting. She gave us one of her doggy looks that said, "What are you talking about?" and we all settled for reading before bedtime - great to do with the new electric lights.
The next day and we were again discussing taking a break for a few minutes from the building to go look for dinner. Just as we were ready to leave, we called the dog, and again she appeared from the same spot as the day before. Curiosity got the best of us and we went to look. Our huntress had another partridge, this one mangled very badly and about half eaten. Young ones don't listen so well these days, do they! That one also went into the fire and we did not manage to get our bird for dinner. We had another serious talk with her and she did not repeat. Maybe we got through to her about regulations!
Then again: two days later she was on the dock watching very intently six ducks lounging in the water about one hundred meters away from shore. After a good 10 minutes of watching, she got up, launched into the water, and started swimming towards the ducks. Once I stopped laughing, I called her back and she promptly returned to the dock. We played "fetch" for a while as a distraction from the ducks, which were totally unaware of this huntress aiming at them.
Next year, we will get her a permit and hopefully she will let us cook the bird before eating so we can share.
Carol Hansen forwards an article written by Gene Weingarten, a Pulitzer-prize-winning author:
GOODBYE, CRUEL WORDS: ENGLISH. IT'S DEAD TO ME
The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.
The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.
The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.
In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation.
On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal was "Alot," which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month.
The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."
Observers say, however, that no development contributed more dramatically to the death of the language than the sudden and startling ubiquity of the vomitous verbal construction "reach out to" as a synonym for "call on the phone," or "attempt to contact." A jargony phrase bloated with bogus compassion -- once the province only of 12-step programs and sensitivity training seminars -- "reach out to" is now commonplace in newspapers. In the last half-year, the New York Times alone has used it more than 20 times in a number of contextually indefensible ways, including to report that the Blagojevich jury had asked the judge a question.
It was not immediately clear to what degree the English language will be mourned, or if it will be mourned at all. In the United States, English has become increasingly irrelevant, particularly among young adults. Once the most popular major at the nation's leading colleges and universities, it now often trails more pragmatic disciplines, such as economics, politics, government, and, ironically, "communications," which increasingly involves learning to write mobile-device-friendly ads for products like Cheez Doodles.
Many people interviewed for this obituary appeared unmoved by the news, including Anthony Incognito of Crystal City, a typical man in the street.
"Between you and I," he said, "I could care less."
FROM THE EDITOR'S DESKTOP
Louise's story about her dog reminds me of the last dog I ever owned, a golden cocker named Fluff.
Fluff never knew she was a dog.
When she was very young, she was adopted by an elderly woman, who treated her like a person. Consequently, she thought she was a little old lady too, which led to some problems when she came to live with us.
When we first met Fluff, she was living in a home overrun by animal fugitives from indifference and cruelty, and she was not happy being confined with all those animals. The home belonged to a postman, who always carried treats for the dogs he met on his route, and with his wife, rescued animals from various situations. They got Fluff from the SPCA, where she had been sent by a welfare agency when her owner died. At the age of five, she was considered too old for adoption, and if it had not been for the intervention of the postman, she would have been disposed of.
As soon as Jay and I entered the room teeming with dogs and cats, Fluff jumped up on a chair and addressed us directly. There was no doubt about her meaning, and we let her persuade us to remove her from those uncongenial surroundings.
She settled in happily at home, and in a short time she had us trained to feed her, open doors, take her for walks and rides in the car. She sat on the chesterfield and chairs, and it was only after several serious discussions she abandoned her intention of sleeping on my bed.
She practised a form of blackmail on me that always left me feeling guilty. When it was obvious I was getting ready to leave, she cavorted around with little cries of delight that she was going to be allowed to accompany me; when I made it obvious that she couldn't come this time, she subsided into a little lump of misery, giving me to understand that I had broken her heart.
When I returned, she would jump up on a chair to talk to me on my own level and then she'd tell me about what sort of a day she had had. As long as I kept answering her, she would keep on "talking."
When I took her for a trim, they would give her a puppy cut, which made her look very young, even when she passed into her teens. We were out walking after one of these cuts, and some people who stopped to pet her told me she would be a big dog when she grew up!
Fluff was a sweet little old lady, and I remember her fondly. Now I have a cat which has nothing in common with Fluff, but I have to admit that he is equally spoiled. Do you think I may be a pushover?
SUGGESTED WEBSITES
Bruce Galway suggests this link for a video of a funny routine of a ventriloquist:
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http://nw-seniors.org/stories.html
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." - Albert Einstein
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