Personal Blogs

I thought I'd make an old-fashioned record of a couple of musical-hall songs. On vinyl, you know, and when you've played the first side you turn the record over: all that sort of stuff, needle etc.

But I hit a problem.

I decided the 'A' side should be 'I do like to be beside the seaside'. But then, you see, I couldn't decide what the 'B' side should be.

“But where are the snows of yester-year?” popped into my head for some reason.

This famous refrain is from Rosetti's translation of the Ballade des dames de temps jadis by Villon. You can find several translation of the poem collected at a rather nice site http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/snows_of_yesteryear.html

But what intrigued me was finding that Rosetti invented 'yester-year’ to translate the French ‘antan’. 

'Antan' is from Latin 'ante annum' and so probably meant 'before the year' = 'last year', and so Rosetti's translation is rather glorious. 'Yester' seems to have had an original sense of recent or close in time, and there are several English compounds. Apart from 'yesterday' we have 'yestermorn', 'yestereve' and so on.  But before Rosetti’s coining 'yester-year' doesn't seem to have been recorded.

Nowadays both 'yesteryear' and 'antan' have acquired the wider meaning of times gone by, not just last year, presumably influenced by the wistful nostalgia of Villon's brilliant line.

'Yester' is interesting because it seems to have the same origins as Latin 'hesterno' and ancient and modern Greek χθες (pronounced something like 'ch' in 'loch' followed by 'thez'.)

Greek for tomorrow is αύριο, avrio. Once I dined with a Greek priest and he told me this anecdote.

“Some American tourists were here last week. They asked me if Greek has word corresponding to the Spanish mañana. 'Of course', I replied. 'But not so definite'”.

...who longs for identity?

Naomi!

All the kids loved the Sistine Chapel. Except Jilly.

She thought the ceiling was rather silly.

There's a giant conifer near where I live, a redwood I think. I took this shot looking up into the canopy.

This tree always inspire awes me. I suppose as redwoods go it is comparatively small. The base of the trunk would be about 15 feet round, I suppose, and the tree about 50 feet or so high. But when I look up into the branches it seems as if I am gazing into a magical world where a whole ecoystem might live.

I don't know what species it is, but my guess is a Californian redwood, Wellingtonia. In which case it might grow a whole lot bigger.

My awsome new invention, an early prototype of which you see above, is an essential aid to all who aspire to compose 'Spoonerisms'. Simply rotate the outer ring relative to the inner (or vice versa) to generate such striking examples as the following imaginary headline

Cads Bake Bad Cakes – Mary Berry

Eons ago I had a book called 'Verse and Worse'.

A particular humorous poem from it has stuck in my head all these years. I don't know who the original author was, and I may have got the odd word wrong here and there. But here is what I recall.

I thought I'd been crying

But it was only the rain

What' sthe waerher like on youy paknet

To baldly go

Q. Why do chickens cross the road?

A. Because it's there.