Michael: Everyone hates homework.
Herself: What’s the sample size and what’s your source?
Michael: [Pause] Everyone.
Archives for March 2015
Extravagance
The Princess made tea and marble cake for me recently because she has a saintly side.
After our first round of tea, the pot was empty. “Will I make more?” she asked. “Yes, please do,” I said. “I’ll just go and put on the kettle, will I use a fresh teabag?” she asked. “Of course!” I replied. “Oho,” said she, “we all partied.”
The Glory that was Greece, the Grandeur that was Rome
The other day, I was wondering aloud how the Romans did all the maths they needed for their engineering achievements in those very cumbersome Roman numerals. Mr. Waffle tells me that they did the difficult bits in Greek numbers and then translated them back into Roman numerals at the end.
Did you know that already? I am rather surprised about the numbers of my friends who did Greek in school, it turns out it’s useful for odd conversations in your 40s. A friend’s wife said something quite innocent about some word possibly coming from the Greek for horse and she was instantly corrected by her husband and mine who said, “No, hippos is a horse*.” Reporting, this rather disapprovingly, to some other friends, it turned out that they had studied Greek also and one of them said wistfully, “Greek was my favourite subject.” She is not the kind of person I would have thought of as a lover of ancient Greek but it just goes to show how little we know of our friends. I suppose at this stage you could count on the fingers of one hand the numbers of children anywhere studying ancient Greek except maybe in Greece.
Bonus prize for you, if you know how the Greeks did their numbers. I can stop any time.
*This is very unlike both of them and I can only attribute it to the lasting power of Greek teaching in the Irish school system.
All Mod Cons
Yesterday the eircom man came and restored our broadband and television. I cannot tell you how delighted we all are after our long fallow period. Things we have done in the evening in the absence of internet and television: played cards, played table soccer, read books and learnt off poetry by heart from books. I think the consensus is that well and good as those things may be, a full life cannot be lived without internet and television. There it is. Philistinism will out. Personally, I was bereft without the television. If you had asked me, I would have said that I hardly watched any television. I was wrong. To celebrate the return of the television, I stayed up watching the Miliband v. Cameron debate; clearly, very worthwhile.
On the plus side, everyone now knows Up the Airy Mountain. And much of Lepanto which is no joke, I can tell you. Parts of it are a bit obscure to the modern reader and I said to herself, “We need a glossary.” And she replied, “The internet is our glossary.” Welcome back, glossary, we missed you.
Palm Sunday
Today is Palm Sunday. A fact I had forgotten until I entered the church this morning and Michael began loudly complaining when he saw the size of the missalette. “It’s three times longer than normal,” he hissed. “That means mass will last three hours.”
While it didn’t last three hours, it certainly was grand and long. The priest read the first gospel (which I think is not compulsory), he read the longer version of the long gospel (you know the one, it’s the miniature passion play) and then, crowning indignity, he gave a sermon which is normally unheard of on Passion Sunday. The elderly lady in the pew in front fainted. A group of older mentally handicapped people who were behind us made noise throughout the mass much of it mournful. One could hardly blame them. At communion, one of them ran up to the altar scattering pensioners in her wake; it was a difficult Sunday for the pensioners.
As our neighbour’s teenage daughter came down from communion, Mr. Waffle asked whether I thought her top was entirely appropriate for mass. She was wearing a pink hoodie and it was only when she passed me that I saw that the legend on the back was: “Hockey is my religion.”
It was that kind of Sunday. How was your own weekend?
