An acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word; not to be confused with an abbreviation. Words ending in ….nym are often used to describe different classes of words and the relationship between words; nym literally means ‘name’ in Greek. The word ‘acronym’ appeared in The Times’ Codeword on 9 May 2022. It registered in my subconscious and for some reason I associate it with ‘mnemonic’ (don’t ask!) which coincidentally appeared in the same puzzle four days later on 13^th May! This is enough reason to start scribbling!!

So first, what about the …. nyms? There is a long list of these and I thought I could just mention a few, not wanting to ‘nym’ you to sleep! Let’s start with ‘chrononym’, a term for a specific period of time, such as summer or week; ‘homonyms’ are words with identical pronunciations but different spellings and meaning, such as site and sight, or words with identical pronunciations and spellings but different meanings such as ‘coach’ (single-decker bus) and ‘coach’ (to train a team); we have all heard of a ‘pseudonym’, the fictitious name, especially one used by an author – for example JK Rowling’s series of novels under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, (Note 1); ‘synonyms’ meaning similar and opposite words; lastly in this selection ‘xenonym’, a name for a people or a language or a city which is not used by the natives themselves – for example the German city of Cologne is known by the Deutsche as Koln.

I couldn’t find acronym in my old dictionary (when I hear ‘acro’ I immediately think of acrow prop and their use in supporting ceilings etc!!). Here in Europe the acronym NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is very much in the news at the moment. Set up in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union, one of its founding principles is an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. Finland and Sweden are currently seeking to join the alliance, the last thing that Putin imagined when he started his ill-fated invasion of Ukraine.

Other well-used acronyms whose origins are maybe unclear are RADAR (radio detecting and ranging), SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), AWOL (absent without leave), LASER (light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation), FUCK (for unlawful carnal knowledge) and NASA. Most people know that Benelux is an acronym for the countries of Belgium Netherlands and Luxembourg and that PIN stands for Personal Identification Number but what about TASER? Actually the American inventor of this incapacitator Jack Cover was a fan of the Tom Swift books about an inventor of amazing gadgets so it stands for Tom A Swift Electric Rifle! You might have thought that COVID was an acronym but it doesn’t follow the rule of using the initial letters; it is simply the name for the virus SARS – CoV-2 or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2. Staying on the medical theme, AIDS is an acronym, standing for Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and FACE Face  (Smile? Eyes dropped?) Arms (Raise both arms?) Speech (Speak and understand?) and Time (To call the emergency number) to assist in the identification of a stroke.

WAGs have been in the news here in the UK. For those of you bemused by this acronym, it came about when the Wives And Girlfriends (WAGs) of our national football team accompanied their partners at some football match in 2006, and were photographed by the paparazzi shopping. Two WAGs called Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy have been in the High Court in London fighting a libel case; in the popular press dubbed Wagatha Christie! The vacuous nature of the spat was neatly summed up by Hilary Rose in The Times: “Two women spending millions of pounds and hours of their lives slugging it out over something that doesn’t matter. The case will turn on such matters as who follows who on Instagram, whether you would be offended if someone unfollowed you, who said what to whom and why.”         Sad!

And given that a recent football player moved to an English club on a salary of over £440k per week I scratch my head and wonder how obscene is the amount of money washing around this sport, so divorced from the real world of its fan base. Being paid only 1% of this amount would be beyond most individual’s wildest dreams.

While BIT, a Binary digit, a basic unit of information in a binary numbering system, is an acronym, the BBC, BT, BACS and ISBN are not. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) is an abbreviation as is LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender) but these days you could add the letter Q if you continue to question and a ‘+’ if ‘intersex’. 

Mnemonics are simple ways to remember sequences, items, ideas For instance the colours of the spectrum of light can be remembered by ‘ROYGBIV’ – red orange yellow green blue indigo violet. Then there is the rhyme mnemonic to remember how many days in each month – ‘30 days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31 except February my dear son; it has 28 and that is fine, but in a Leap Year 29.’

With my navigator’s hat on, we have “Grid to mag add, mag to grid get rid.” This mnemonic helps when you need to convert a bearing on a map or chart to a compass bearing as the compass is affected by the earth’s magnetic field. If you are confused about Latitude and Longitude remember this connection mnemonic: there is an N in Longitude and an N in North. Therefore lines of Latitude must run east to west as there is no N in latitude!

Our Intake DS Staff Sergeant Cameron Scots Guards at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst would be amused, I hope, that I still remember GRIT Group Range Indication Type of Fire (Normally shouted with an urgent voice: “One section, 150m to front, machine gun in hedgerow, rapid fire!”, a very basic military infantry mnemonic.

King George III came to the throne in 1760. For those who had an interest in these things but a poor memory, the mnemonic ‘George III said with a smile, 1760 yards in a mile.’ sufficed. For those of you who have fully converted to the metric system of measurement, it’s nonsense!

Richard 27^th May 2022

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 Others include Eric Blair (George Orwell), Mary Evans (George Eliot), Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell), CS Lewis (Clive Hamilton) and Agatha Christie (Mary Westmacott)

If you are a regular reader of these electronic postcards you may understand that I sponge up news stories like an industrial vacuum cleaner and these often include the daily obituaries. Some have a passing interest, sorry, no pun intended here: others are full of nuggets of wonderful examples of living life, sometimes well, sometimes not so well! Recently I read of Sergio Costa, who founded the Costa coffee chain and, not anticipating the explosion of the British love for coffee shops, sold it to Whitbread for £23m in 1995. Whitbread sold the brand to Coca-Cola for some £3.9 billion in 2019. Sir Ken Robinson was another (See PC 195 Snippets September 2020) and then there was Doreen Lofthouse , who virtually single-handedly grew the strong menthol lozenge ‘Fisherman’s Friend’ into a global brand. Another who caught my eye was Marilyn Bergman who died in January aged 93.

I hadn’t heard of her and maybe you haven’t either? You will however remember, if you’re old enough, the 1973 film ‘The Way We Were’ with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford. The title song ‘The Way We Were’ was sung by Streisand and has been recorded by many others, but its lyrics were written by Marilyn Bergman who, with her husband Alan, became one of the most successful song-writing teams in musical history. (Note 1) Marilyn also wrote, inter alia, the lyrics for ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, sung as Steve McQueen, playing the part of Thomas Crown in the film of the same name, flew round and around the sky in his glider (Note 2). I just need to close my eyes for a second to visualise this sequence; in my ear I recall lines like ‘Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel.’ Just gorgeous!

From The Thomas Crown Affair

Prompted by Marilyn’s obituary I began thinking how lyrics constantly invade one’s conscious and subconscious; bear in mind when you read my thoughts, lyrics are very generational!! How often do I silently sing ‘Monday Monday, so good to me’ (Note 3) at the start of the working week or does it get drowned out by ‘just another manic Monday’? (Note 4). In PCs 109 and 110 (November 2017) I scribbled about my own classical and ‘pop’ music journeys and what follows are just incoherent thoughts in the same vein!

In 1967 The Moody Blues sang a song entitled ‘Nights in White Satin’. I don’t think I ever saw the words written down and always imagined knights, as in medieval gentlemen, wearing white satin tights, which must have been all the rage in 1415 when we fought the Battle of Crecy. Personally I hate silky, satin sheets, white or any other colour, preferring a 200 thread count cotton sheet and therefore the satin-tight wearing knight is a better image!!

In the same year, the year that Celina was born so a good year (!), Procol Harum sang ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ whose lyrics started ‘We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor.’ What’s intriguing is this phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale’. There is no RAL number for ‘pale’; ‘signal white’ is RAL 9003 and Pure White 9010 (Note 5)

Some years ago there was a documentary called “Searching for Sugar Man”; it was intriguing. It recalled a three decade search for Sixto Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter whose 1970 debut album had no success in the USA. However it had found its way to South Africa where it found favour in the dawn of the anti-Apartheid movement.  Rodriguez was found living right at home in Detroit, unaware of his fame in the southern tip of the African continent; the subsequent three-venue concert tour of South Africa was a sell-out!  His lyrics have been described as Dylanesque and anti-establishment and there is much to like on the album ‘Searching for Sugar Man’. The song ‘Cause’ has some lovely completely bizarre lines that make no sense but, sung to his music, fit so well. Please, if you have never heard it, look on line; it starts: “ ‘Cause I lost my job two weeks before Christmas, And I talked to Jesus at the sewer, And the Pope said it was none of his God-damned business, While the rain drank champagne.” Later he sings ‘So I set sail in a teardrop and escaped beneath the door sill’; somehow I imagine that!

Water features in one of Adele’s songs: ‘Set Fire to the Rain’. One of the interpretations I read was that, as water and fire both erode and destroy, the process of setting fire to the rain uncovers the truth behind the lies.  

Rod Stewart’s another whose lyrics resonate with me. Years ago on an Air Defence reconnaissance in Gibraltar, his ‘I don’t Want to Talk About It’ went around and around: ‘…. And the stars in the sky don’t mean nothing to you, they’re a mirror’. His 2013 album ‘Time’ contained a song ‘Brighton Beach’ with some great lines sang in his gravelly voice: ‘I remember when you were only 17, you were the finest girl my eyes had ever seen. I guess you found it hard to simply just ignore, this scruffy, beat-up, working-class, teenage, troubadour. …… under the stars on Brighton Beach.’  

I have little interest in football but keep a weather eye on the fortunes of the local team, Brighton & Hove Albion, sitting in the middle of the Premier League at the moment. The current manager has had a fantastic season. But it was in 1990 that the coverage the World Cup matches was accompanied by Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma. Did I care, did anyone care, what the lyrics meant? The aria (‘Let no one sleep’) is from the final act of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot and by the end of the tournament I guarantee the fans in pubs watching the match could sing the lyrics without knowing what they meant!

And it doesn’t matter! More to come later in Part 2.

Richard 20^th May 2022

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 She also wrote the hit song ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’.

Note 2 The original Thomas Crown Affair film was made in 1968 with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. A remake in 1999 starred Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.

Note 3. The Mamas & The Papas 1966

Note 4 Manic Monday by The Bangles 1986

Note 5 RAL is a colour matching system used in Europe created and administered by the Gewrman RAL gGmbH.

Cafés have been in the news recently as the population adjusts to more flexible working arrangements. Here Debrett’s, the British Guide to Social Etiquette that was founded in 1769, has issued advice on the problem of WFC (Working from Cafés) – not to be confused with WFH (Working from Home). WFH is all jolly well but it’s lonely and often the simple addition of being within sight and sound of others can lift one’s spirits. So those WFH have migrated to WFC! The issue Debrett’s has identified is that of table usage; become absorbed in your laptop and you hog a table for too long, depriving the café of income from new customers.

At one end of the spectrum, in Manchester and London the Costa chain is trialling soundproof booths you can rent for £13 per hour. At the other end the Hackney Coffee Company has introduced a policy of no laptops on weekends and after 1700 on weekdays.

The Hope has, you may recall, recently installed charging points so it’s a hot topic. Of course the primary purpose of a café these days is to host customers who are meeting friends for a coffee and a chat; in the Hope case this might also mean grabbing some delicious Brazilian pastry from the delicatessen next door!    

You will have read how I have come to enjoy time in The Hope Café, overhearing conversations that might contribute to some sort of post, getting to know Josh and Susie, meeting Sami and Edith. To conjure up tales from inside one’s head is always possible but people relate better to real life observations! I would like to think I am sensitive to the WFC issues and on busy days vacate my table after an hour or so.

This week I found Sami head down in a book, with a half drunk coffee and a crumb-scattered plate. His latest book is The Man Who Died Twice, the sequel to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. He looked up and smiled as I approached; I sense his holiday has done him good or maybe it was giving his evidence to the Post Office Inquiry (See PC 235 Generosity in Government June 2021).

“Hi! Richard. Glad I got that over …. but everyone’s been talking about the BBC Panorama programme ‘Scandal in The Post Office’ by Nick Wallis.”

“I’ve got it recorded but haven’t had time to watch it. Is it revealing?”

“Absolutely! The most significant case they reviewed was of Martin Griffiths. A sub-postmaster with an unblemished record of some 13 years in Great Sutton in Cheshire, a few months after the Horizon computer system was installed he had a shortfall of over £61,000. According to his widow, he was persecuted by the Post Office, made to pay it back and had his licence terminated. Unable to cope this father of two teenagers committed suicide.”

“Wow! That’s horrible!”

“There’s more. A firm of forensic auditors, Second Sight, were investigating the hundreds of cases of missing money. A few days before they were due to report, the Post Office made a ‘take it or leave it’ financial offer to his widow Gina Griffiths on condition of her silence. They were worried that news of Martin’s suicide would have made headline news particularly for the tabloid press and the whole edifice of the Post Office would have come crashing down. The CEO of this organisation from 2012 to 2019, Paula Vennells, was made a CBE for ‘her services to the Post Office’. Now it’s been suggested she should have that honour taken away.”  

“Isn’t she an ordained priest?”

Sami nodded and shrugged his shoulders! ‘I don’t think being a priest necessarily makes you a wonderful manager and leader, or vica versa!’

I appreciate that this scandal may be of little interest to some, but for me and others it’s so utterly unbelievable yet jaw-droopingly true that it needs to remain in focus until those whose lives were destroyed, in some cases completely, see justice. Those responsible for the Post Office’s management and leadership during this time must be called to account in court.

I excuse myself and head back to my table, as I need to scribble something for this week’s post. Edith’s been rather down, reports Josh. He senses the whole Ukraine nightmare and the ridiculous use by Russia’s Putin of the word Nazi have reawakened nightmares of her own. While completely understandable, objectively it has caused many who had scant knowledge of the 1935-1945 period to reach for the history books, just as those who experienced it are coming to the end of their own lives. This is a good thing, understanding the past, particularly our own past, as it should help us to make better informed decisions today and tomorrow.

Josh hovers near my table, checking no one needs him, and asks for my opinion:

“The other evening Luke and I had three other couples to supper and, after the main course had been cleared away and before some pudding, a couple got up saying they wanted to have a cigarette and headed for the front door. Another couple obviously liked the idea and joined them, leaving the table half empty! I want individuals to enjoy themselves but afterwards felt they could have waited until they walked home. Then I remembered how lovely a post prandial smoke was, so understood the urge.”

“Wasn’t it just, sitting around the table, smoke from cigarettes and cigars mingling with the smell of red wine and meat! Later a glass of port, Cognac or Drambuie helped the conversation to flow. Times change and I understand your conundrum; are you gracious and don’t make a fuss or simply ask your guests to be patient? I wonder whether Debrett’s can rule on this conundrum! Should I write to them?”

“Why not” says Josh then with a “sorry, need to get back to work, maybe see you next week?” he moves back to behind the counter.

Maybe!

Richard 13^th May 2022

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Some new acquaintances, a Ukrainian and her English partner, came to tea last month. I know I am sometimes insensitive but I just can’t help myself, wanting to understand how individuals came to be how they are, where they are today! What steps have led them to be sitting in our living room having tea and lemon drizzle cake with us? Then I had this image of stepping stones across a shallow stream, some stones small, others more like a boulder, some within an easy stride, others requiring a jump. You remember doing this, getting your balance, thinking how you are going to lift off through your feet, deciding which stone of two to step to, grateful obtaining your balance when you arrive; maybe stepping straight off onto another, maybe recovering your breath and pausing, assimilating, assessing?

If you look back over your life so far, you can see your experiences as these stones, these places you have moved through, sometimes changing behaviour to do so but more likely ‘more of the same’. Do you want to look under them to see what lurks in the darkness, or are you happy to see them for what they are, simple steps on your path through life? Most stones in a field have slugs lying under them and it’s damp and smelly; those across a stream are washed by cool water but contain a micro-kingdom of minute creatures and plant life. Revisiting one’s experiences can be cathartic and insightful or it can be painful and emotional. Experiences have happened and cannot be reworked or relived; they just are.

My advice is always to see them for what they are; don’t attach any unwarranted emotions to them and step forward to the next stone! Coincidently, my local Ekah yoga studio started their May newsletter with this quote from Abraham Maslow (he of the Hierarchy of Needs): “In any given moment we have two options, to step forward into growth or step back into safety.” I could add a third, ‘or to remain paralysed by indecision, fear and doubt’!!

Recently there has been some news coverage of how people look as they age and more importantly how they behave. We have always imagined that life expectancy would go on increasing as healthier lifestyles and better healthcare contributed to longer life; you may remember that in the USA at the beginning of 1900 the average age for a man was 46! Figures for life expectancy are very dependent on where you live. In the UK, in the most deprived areas where sadly endemic poverty, substance abuse and abysmal levels of expectation still exist, its 73.5 for men compared with 83.2 in the least deprived; for women its 78.3 compared with 86.3. Ten years of living lost just because you were born in the wrong place? In the words of the prophet: “Something must be done!”

Interestingly, as the end of one’s life becomes more of a fuzzy reality than something below the horizon, we stop investing in the future – for the future is here! The importance is to distinguish between being project-focused, ie getting stuff done and investing in the future and process-focused ie doing stuff and living in the present.  

Started in 2014, there are now five volumes of my scribbles!

And still with the life theme …..it’s getting better as far as ‘Living with Covid’ (Note 1) is concerned but there was a period just before Easter here in the UK when everything seemed to go tits up! Flights were cancelled, ferries didn’t sail, the M20 motorway to Dover became a lorry park and queues formed everywhere; ‘staff shortages’ became a defensive cry. One of the reasons may have been that the government increased the number of identifiable Covid symptoms from 9 to 11. Now the working population seem to think: “OMG! I have a sniffle/ache/memory lapse/itch/hot flush/brain fog/cognitive difficulties/red big toe. Maybe I have Covid?” in the manner of someone in a Bingo Hall shouting ‘Bingo’ – and so not turn up for work, for instance as security in an airport.

But they actually feel fine so when Lucy says let’s go on a four day break to Budapest and Alan says yes, let’s and they get to Luton Airport for their Easyjet flight, to find the queues are horrendous and why didn’t they allow enough time and when the local newspaper’s reporter shoves a microphone in their face to ask for their reaction, Alan says there aren’t enough staff, that the queues are horrendous and the country’s going to the dogs. Irony alive!

Stepping through life is often recorded in celebrating birthdays and Celina’s is coming up. She needed a new Kindle; her much-loved one is tired and we knew that the sharpness of the display had improved immeasurably. Amazon advertise a ‘Trade-in’ offer for an old Kindle. Send it back and they give you a £15 voucher and 20% off a new one. But if you are an avid reader you don’t want to be without one, for even a day. I ordered a new one, it arrived and we deregistered the old one. The Trade-In instructions are easy to follow and it’s gone; the offer of £15 plus 20% off a new one is now valid. I manage to find a real human to talk to in Amazon Customer Services and explained to John I had just bought a new one, wouldn’t be buying another new one for a few years and could he give me the 20% refund. This question was above his pay grade and I was put on hold; 10 minutes later a refund was agreed. You just have to ask!

When I started reading the last paragraph of Rose Wild’s Feedback in a Saturday Times a fortnight ago, my imagination went into overdrive: “While I was writing this a cow came crashing down the chimney bringing with it 100 years’ worth of soot and dust.” Once the absurdity of this picture dawned, I reread it. For ‘cow’ read ‘crow’!

Don’t be paralysed by the unknown; have faith that the step you take will be OK. And if it isn’t, that’s OK too, as you can learn from what transpired.

Richard 6th May 2022

http://www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1 Had my Spring Booster Covid vaccine last week so all up to date!