Thread 20 - TalkLair: "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness; that is life"

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous Thread 19)

Britain swelters in yet another heatwave.

In the TalkLair, all the curtains are closed against the blazing sun as the denizens lurk like creatures of the night... or maybe we are creatures of the night. But rest assured, despite our scary fangs, the denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

That is such a perfectly named rock formation! I don't remember it, but then I haven't been there since I was in my mid-teens and therefore probably sulking.

My Yorkshire father made jokes about Flamborough Head but as far as i remember we never went there as children and I’ve not been since either. That’s quite a rock formation. Next time we’re in God’s Own County…

That looks amazing! I have never been to Flamborough Head but now I think I want to.

It's a lovely walk around there @artant - there's also loads of nesting seabirds including puffins, if you go at the right time of year.

This month, DH has a couple of visiting researchers from Japan and so on Sunday we took them on the Dales Bus to Grassington (where All Creatures Great & Small is filmed), where we fed them a pub Sunday roast followed by a hike along the river. They seemed to enjoy the experience - I was reflecting that it probably couldn't be more different from Japanese public transport, or at least what I've heard about Japanese public transport:

• The timetable was a work of optional semi-fiction, as were the bus stops, people would just say "Could you drop me off at that tree?" or similar
• Everybody on the bus was super-chatty, including the bus driver, in heavy Yorkshire accents, even if they'd never met before
• Squeezing past other vehicles/sheep/cyclists/horses on the narrow winding roads
• On the way back, the bus arrived late, because (see above point) it had lost an argument with a hedge and the left wing mirror had been ripped off, so the driver had had to stop, pick it up, call the depot. And then tell us all about it, of course.
• So when we got to the famous narrow arch at Bolton Abbey, the driver asked the passengers to keep an eye out as we squeaked through, "You've got at least 3 inches, keep going" etc.
• Occasionally he forgot the route and would shout back to the passengers, "Mind's gone blank, which way?" and somebody would shout "Left 'ere!"
• When we finally got back to the first proper town, we had to wait 20 minutes for a mechanic to arrive with a replacement wing mirror, so everybody got out and sat at the bus stop chatting while it was installed.

That will certainly give them a good story to tell when they go home.

That is a part of the world I'd like to be heading out towards on my bike, Kuc. But at this rate, it'll probably be next summer! Spent a bit of time in North Yorkshire some years back, but would love to explore in more detail. And a narrow gap at an arch, and a wing-mirror knocked off the bus; I had that too! And now I'm desperately trying to remember where, and can't bring it to mind!

I spent some nice weekends up the Yorkshire/Derbyshire Peak District climbing with my well 'ard Sheffield climbing mate. Those were the days, bit of a hike to the bus stop. Wait for the bus for up to an hour, then get off in the middle of nowhere within a half hour hike to Stanage Edge or the like.

North Yorkshire is one of my favourite places in the world. Almost sixty years ago my school friends and I and my then-boyfriend (later DH1) did a walking holiday along the coast from Scarborough to Whitby via Robin Hood’s Bay, inland to Goathlands and back out to Boggle Hole YH and back to Scarborough. I’m still friends with the girls (!) I went with, although alas DH1 died over 25 years ago.

I have the ambition to do (most of) the Fife Coastal Path one of these days. I'm not going to go West of the Forth bridges to be fair - but from the bridges to at least Newport on Tay and probably Newburgh and perhaps up the river to Perth where I have cousins to see. I hear it's a fantastic walk and so many of the towns and beaches are familiar to me from my younger days, it will be a brilliant wee adventure. It comes in at about 100 miles so a good week or so of walking if I take it easy and enjoy the stops.

Catching up because Mumsnet has been unusable slow for me recently, while London bus journeys aren’t as sociable as Yorkshire ones, I do recall a bus driver stopping to let me turn right into a petrol station years ago only for my trusty mini to run out of petrol. I gestured for him to go on as I couldn’t take advantage of him letting me through but, instead of driving on and leaving me to it, he got off the bus and pushed my car across the road and up a slope into the petrol station. The passengers on his bus looked a bit befuddled!

Sounds very Yorkshire to me!

I spent 4 years at Richmond High School for Girls - my dad was based in Catterick. It was (with hindsight) a rubbish school at the time (Brenda Hale had long since left). The male Geography teacher taught us entirely the wrong O-level syllabus, which made the exam interesting - I did relatively well, based on what I knew from primary school - and the Biology mistress was very young and newly married and embarrassed by any mention of sex. But I absolutely loved living there and cried all the way to Northern Ireland.

Last weekend + Monday, DH and I did a cheeky trip to the Netherlands. All the classics: Rijksmuseum, windmills, canals, pancakes. Also, the natural history museum in Leiden - brand new building, absolutely fantastic exhibits which were so good that even the possibly-most-complete T. rex skeleton ever found was only one of the notable wonders! It's a very easy journey from where we are.

We left the teenagers at home and they coped wonderfully, cooked own meals, made own sandwiches for college, no parties

I do wonder about maybe learning Dutch, it doesn't seem too difficult.

Just reading up about Trix, sounds amazing!

Incredible scenes here on SM of crowds literally thronging the streets for Sir Billy Boston's funeral. Big crowd as the cortège paused outside the Griffin pub he used to run. Very touching, made me quite proud to be a Wiganer.

Dutch isn't to bad if you have English, but you have to be able to pronounce the soft g. The biggest issue I had was the Dutch people have such good English that it's hard to practice at beginner level. Add in the typical directness and you get "oh your Dutch just isn't very good so we'll speak English"

Whereas in France and Austria I found no shortage of everyday people who would much rather I have a bash at their language than speak English.

Dutch is quite easy to learn to read - especially if you know some German - but hard to pronounce.

Danish is a real bugger to pronounce - and so sloppy-sounding if the language you learned in school was German!

I think a common problem with learning other languages as an adult is the tendency to teach them in written form, which is confusing if you use the same writing system and frankly insane if you don't. I offer you Arabic (aka "guess the vowels") and Amharic (don't even go there! Fun, though.)

I've been doing Korean on Duolingo ever since we got back from our trip there this spring, all I can say is - at least it's actually a sort-of-logical phonetic writing system!

I do have the barest smattering of German from before we were married, DH was working in Germany and so I went over quite a lot. I find even my tiny amount of German quite useful in working out the meaning of Dutch words as often they're either English-like or German-like.

The Korean alphabet was invented long after other alphabets (I learned from the children’s museum I took the DGC to in August) which is probably why it’s more logical.

We've been to see the giant statue of King Sejong the Great, creator of said alphabet, it's huge and gold (edit: the statue, not the alphabet)

It's a magnificent achievement. An alphabet designed logically, with phonetically similar letters also being visually similar, intended to allow anyone to learn it in a day and create a 100% literate population.

Although he was mainly the ideas man, so the scholars who actually created it should also get statues.

At my age, it's definitely taking me way more than a day to learn but I do agree, it's so well-designed and logical.

Forgot to mention, the other night I opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, and found this little sweetheart snuffling around in the porch - perhaps sheltering from the torrential rain, or investigating our log store for hibernation? I quickly took a couple of photos and then stepped away so as not to frighten it. Should I set up a den? Put out food (not sure about this, we already have a fox problem)?

Oh, gorgeous!

I'm not sure of the size of your tiles for scale, but it looks as if it may be a young one. You can make fox-proof feeding stations, with the bowl under a roof that's too low for a fax to get into. But it needs to be heavy enough that the fox can't move it. A paving slab up on bricks or similar. They like cat food- but not the fish ones.

If you want to give it a house, don't get one of the ones made from coir or those very fine twiggy things. Their spines can get sruck in those.

I suspect learning alphabets is faster when there's been a Royal decree saying you must.

Ataturk switched Turkish from Arabic to Roman script in the 1920s to help improve literacy levels. There are photos of him with a portable blackboard demonstrating it to baffled-looking Anatolian peasants all over the country.