(SM) Few people, even of my age, have seen the silver threepenny bit. I was once given one as change by a bus conductor about 1953 but had to spend it to get home, or walk two miles. I have found another one (1920) in my heap of old coins. They're tiddlers, 5/8" across. The chunky version was around in 1940, as I have one, and two more from the sixties. They're nice. Equivalent in the fifties to about 30p in today's money.
My mum used to have a few for sprinkling in the Christmas pud; although I can't remember ever seeing them in circulation. Here in the Channel Islands we had our own 3d bits. In Guernsey they were nickel silver with a scalloped edge and in Jersey they were round. The latter reason was why we never had 3d slots on our pay-on-answer paypghones.
I can just recall the silver threepenny bit in the Christmas pudding, but I think they'd all been lost by my adolescence. I don't know about the buying power of the dodecagonal version, but I can remember being able to buy a poke of chips for 3d around 1960.
In 1960, 3d was the standard child fare on an Edinburgh bus, 6d for adults. I remember my grandmother once showed me a silver thruppence, but I don't remember what it looked like. But here's a site with more info.
I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a silver 1.25p piece when I was very young, but I don't think we still had them for the Christmas pudding. I expect INJ had eaten them all.
My first Dutch lesson tonight, with a new teacher. This batch should be more effective than the first lot, which I did when I was still in England and not hearing Dutch every day.
[Rosie] Loosening up nicely. All I need really is a heavy cold. A propos something else, I think I just persuaded the global director of Shell to stand in front of my video camera and give me his opinion on ethical management. My job amazes me sometimes.
(pen) Do they give you a Welsh primer? If you can pronounce Machynlleth correctly you will have problem with any language anywhere in the known Universe, except possibly Xhosa and Scouse.
[Rosie] The trouble with Machynlleth (with the lisping 'L' like Sister Wendy's, is that right?) is there is no R in it. In Dutch, the Gs are gagging, as are the aitches, the Rs are rolled, the emphasis comes just about every other syllable and there are usually at least five syllables per word. Nouns like 'verzekering' (insurance, with the emphasis on the 'zek', pron. 'zay') are compounded from all kinds of words mulched together. It all takes an awful lot of effort for a poor Anglo-Saxon speaking accustomed to putting together one syllable at a time.
(pen) Maybe Welsh not the best idea, then, though the gutturals are splendid. Try chwech ( = six). Vowel is "ä." The Welsh "r" and the breathy unvoiced "rh" are rolled but too short and front-of mouth for Dutch, if my hearing is correct. Isn't the Dutch "v" often pronounced "f"? In Welsh the "f" is always pronounced "v". Not much help there, then. Couldn't hear any double-L in Sister Wendy's speech. It's a non-plosive hiss from the sides of the tongue about halfway back ("voiceless lateral fricative" apparently). Don't spoil it by following it with an ordinary "L". Dead easy. :-)
*waves from England, for a change* Had a surprisingly calm North Sea crossing last night, despite driving to the port in gales and lashing rain. The geordies complaining this morning that 'the curtains were moving' made me giggle though.
[Raak] Good to see you back. i was just thinking today that you hadn't posted for a while (whether that "while" is a few days or longer I didn't check, but I was aware that you were missing...).
Not that anyone will will notice... but there will be a brief outage on Thursday night when the Powers That Be perform a memory upgrade ('bout 9ish or thereabouts).
I'd always wanted to try Cheddar Gorge Haiku... perhaps too similar to what we've got going now. I also thought it'd be good fun to write a play one line / stage direction / light cue at a time.
[Knobbly] If you do 'view source', however that works on your particular browser, nested in amongst all the HTML muck you'll see a hidden line 4 and line 5 that occurred to me. Why I didn't use the HIDE tags is beyond me. I must have thought we were temporarily back in 1998 or something.
Back. Ferry apparently headed back towards the English coast in the middle of the night so some poor chap with fits could be helicoptered orf. After all the fuss was over, I got up at 6am and went out on deck with a huge cup of tea and a piece of my mum's neighbour's best fruitcake for breakfast expecting to see the lights on Rotterdam and we were still in the middle of the black North Sea. Quelle disappointment. However, all was well. The customs people didn't object to the vintage stationary engine I had stashed in the boot, and the trousers I bought for the windy miller fit like a charm.
we're leaving the mill on Saturday lunchtime and heading back to Blighty via Dover for a wedding near Bath on Sunday. And then dashing back to NL. This time, the windy miller is coming with me - hurrah!
... but here in sunny Strasbourg, Christmas is upon us, with the opening of the annual Christmas markets. How are things looking elsewhere in the Morniverse?
Here in the Netherlands, Sintaklaas (December 5) is more important than Christmas. His arrival from Spain, as documented on national TV, was dogged by bad weather, but he is already out and about with his blacked-out moorish assistants, strangely all called Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) and gathering information about how good the children have been. Children leave their shoes out overnight in the hope of having them filled with sweets (snoepjes) if they've been good, and a lump of coal is they haven't. Traditional sweets are particular to Dutch tastes - pepernoten which looks like earwax and tastes of aniseed, and strange crunchy things that look like dog meal and taste of aniseed. I'm not fond of aniseed...
I made some pelargonium cuttings earlier in the year - far more than I could ever possibly use. Enough to start a small nursery, in point of fact. And of course, as I didn't really care whether they lived or died, most of the little blighters have survived. So what shall I do with 'em all now? I've got dozens and dozens! Any suggestions? Anyone want a few pot plants?