The Message..
The wrong book arrives from Amazon. I ordered The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. What arrives is a work of serious, you might say, cold academic criticism. It is a compilation of articles on the poet and value judgments are largely absent. Most of the articles are in French. It is part of a series called Lectures d'une oeuvre. The layout of the cover reveals the reason for the mistake, as the title, introduced by the phrase Lectures d'une oeuvre is called The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, just like The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. As anyone reading this post will have gathered, I am rather keen on Elizabeth Bishop, so I think I will read these serendipitous lectures.
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In Barrica, a tapas bar in London, there are some grilled, small green peppers called pimientos de Padron. I last ate them in a tapas bar in Madrid. The are slightly spicy in flavour but rarely hot like a chilli pepper. Only sometimes you are luck (or unlucky) enough to get a hot one. So the pleasure of eating them is enhanced (or marred)by an element of Russian roulette. On this occasion none of the peppers is hot. Had there been one, there are a number of sherries on the wine list to come to the rescue, rather in the way that dock leaves are said to grow near stinging nettles. A chilled, salty manzanilla would have done the trick. As it happens I have one standing by just in case.
6 comments:
Interesting message with its alternative spelling
of the word beginning with "f".
The typeface is larger than usual; not so much as if you're shouting but rather that you've raised your voice. I take it the change is accidental but you may wish to bear it in mind when switching to campaigning mode. It would have been appropriate when you were explaining to me, in a slightly raised voice, why no pictures of TW's clock would ever appear on Now's The Time.
cc I think it appealed to me partly because it made me feel at least temporarily a better speller.
BB I did it more or less on purpose as an experiment
Your message reminds me of a conversation i had today. A client, a remarkable humourless group of civil servants had spent days agreeing, tweaking and refining the name of a project that we are a small part of. many hours and e-mail later the name and logo were signed off.
the project the Climate Change Risk Assesment is hugly important to the UK economy and invovles economists and environmentalists and planners coming up with a way of measuring cost and risk to the UK economy of future climate change. The by line agreed by these civil servants which we dutiful put on the website was the First UK's climate change risk assessment. A few weeks later a message came through from DEFRA saying it had to be changed because the acronyn FUKC could so easily be mispelt! And you wonder what the government debt is being spent on!
There is a fashion chain called Fcuk which boldly exploits its ambiguities on its tee shirts etc.
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