Sunday 30 June 2013

Piglet Cuckoo MP beer

  • In Polish, the word for please is proszę, which the British cannot distinguish in pronunciation from prosię, meaning piglet. How many times have I walked into a Polish bar and said "Two beers, piglet!"?
  • In Welsh, the word for beer is cwrw (do remember that w is a vowel). A cuckoo is, unsurprisingly, cwcw, which is a distressingly close thing.
  • The Greek for beer is μπύρα, which is bloody confusing for the linguistically inept mathematician who knows the letters, but not that mu and pi combine to give a b. So actually, they call it beer.
One might have assumed that linguistic Darwinism would have assured that all words relating to beer and its purchase would be unambiguous and easily understood by all: I favour calling it "beer" everywhere.

(The Polish for cuckoo is kukułka.)

Sunday 16 June 2013

Safle bws encore

I have in the past had cause to remark on the bus-stops of Aberystwyth:

Now - to my surprise and delight, the rarest of events just outside my own house! Over a period of months, the authorities [sic] have erected a fine new stop some 25 yards east of the previous; nobody is sure why. Endless hours of fun are to be had watching putative customers deciding which one actually works - the same confusion afflicts the bus drivers.

We know of no plans ro remove the "old" one.

Saturday 15 June 2013

The best pub in Llandudno

We travel to Llandudno, a town of over-high buildings where the model aeroplane enthusiasts dress their craft as seagulls and rare cable-hauled trams run amok in the streets.

Those habitual liars Trip Advisor tell you the best pub in town is a place I will not name, to avoid risk of libeling. With minimal effort we found two contenders in The Cottage Loaf and The Albert - who knows how many more and better there may actually be?

They also undersing one of the country's most exceptional ancient monuments where you can see blissfully happy people excavating malachite, to impede the parking of cars.