English as she is spoke

English is a frightful language for me. It is my native tongue, but this does not mean that I know it as well as I like to think. For instance, no English teacher I had in my five years of secondary education gave me a comprehensive run-down of English tenses. Instead, I pieced together elements of Ancient Greek, Latin, French and German (and overheard once that Russian has a future pluperfect, which sounds delightfully over-the-top). None of those languages is English, and even the education I received in those languages failed to cover things properly. For instance, on learning Greek I was told that Greek's aorist tense was an element in had in common with English, as no other language could say "I did", instead requiring either the imperfect (I was doing, I began to do, I used to do) or the perfect (I have done). For years I believed this to be the case, and made quite a fool of myself when I ran into someone who knew better than I. If you want to read up on this sort of thing, it's one of those funny little areas where Wikipedia is quite reliable.

This is not simply a modern problem. It was my father who taught me Ancient Greek, and he was at school in the fifties and sixties. He clearly did not receive a comprehensive grounding in English grammar, either, and had to flesh out his understanding by way of other languages. I presume that there are tiny cliques of people at secretive schools who are inducted into the ways of English, perhaps abroad, and it is only through their efforts that English grammar can still be understood! Perhaps you think I am being unreasonable in being sorrowful that English teachers do not cover English in its entirety. After all, it has clearly not been demanded for decades.

I recall faintly what we did cover in secondary school. To quote Henry Reed, " Today we have naming of parts." We got out our little green English exercise books, and copied down definitions of what a verb was, a noun, a conjunction, an adjective, and all those other little ephemera. I remember too the catalogue of collective nouns: a murder of ravens, a pride of lions, a troop of monkeys. I really can only remember those three, as we never revisited collective nouns. We had spelling tests, which were usually so easy as to lull one into a false sense of security. These were based on whichever book we were reading at the time. In my first year, I had to read The Red Pony, which I found awfully depressing. There was no spark of hope anywhere in it, nor in my life at the time.* We also read Walkabout and Kpo the Leopard, neither of which made strong impressions on me at twelve, and which some of my contemporaries have wholly forgotten. I assume we did more things than this in the first year, but they have all rather slipped out of my mind, like the leaves of a badly bound book.

The remaining years are less fixed in my mind. We went to some plays (Macbeth, Death of A Salesman, Great Expectations) and read a variety of texts that often bored me rigid: Macbeth, Great Expectations, Julius Caesar, a selection of war poetry (Henry Reed above, for instance, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, &c), some Shakespearean sonnets, and a very disturbing book called The Collector, which I cannot recommend as reading material for teenagers of fourteen or fifteen. One of the less perverse things about that particular book was that it contained references to The Tempest, which our teacher had to painstakingly explain, as our Shakespeare play that year was Macbeth. Some elements of English were introduced to us: synecdoche, for instance. I usually found that I got a more comprehensive grounding in terminology from my Classics teachers. When it came to the metre of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, it was introduced as Iambic Pentameter, we were given a brief rundown on how it worked, and then we dashed off. I do not remember it coming up again. Introducing us to The Aeneid, our teacher took us through all the rules of hexameter, including all the oddities. When we studied Euripides' Medea, that teacher took us through the new meter found in the parts spoken by the characters.

I rather lost faith in English as a subject, and have yet to regain it. Maybe I am just being a naughty little naysayer, viewing the bad things and blindly ignoring that I did at least learn a few collective nouns, read a few good . . . no, I can't call any of those set texts good. Anyway, I did learn something about verse. It was not a complete waste of time. It is just a bit sad that I learned more about English from studying ancient languages, and even then I erred. Anyway, today is apparently Women's Day and Book Lover's Day, so I conclude by inviting you to go read a book that has women in it - which is fairly easy, I should think! I'm settling down to A Passage to India again.

* At the time I was being bullied, and my teacher (form teacher, English teacher and the man who chose the book) refused to help. It is hence that I can trace my earliest dislike of "classic literature". A depressing book, that is supposedly a classic, makes you want to kill yourself when you already want to kill yourself because you're being bullied.

The Indefatigable Federation!

As you can see, the Federation reinforcements are now pretty much done. They have a few more spots that need work - starboard running lights and some small details. Anyway, allow me to present to you the newest ships in the fleet. The new Dreadnought is USS Alliance, NCC-2113, the new Battlecruiser is USS Montana, NCC-1765, USS Mecca is the Chicago-class New Heavy Cruiser, NCC-1659, USS Mutso, NCC-1506, is the Kearsage-class New Light Cruiser, and last and also least is USS Ortega, NCC-700, the name ship of her class of Destroyers. You may have noticed a theme here: all the ships have short names. I have only violated my search for the tiniest of names once, in the case of USS Enterprise!

Rushed off my feet!

It is a bit of a busy old time here at P Towers. As well as working on several different bits of gaming-related stuff, from Star Trek to 28mm terrain, I'm also doing a spot of courting, and having to deal with my automocar. The infernal device has been giving me such grief of late that I had already decided to stop driving it. I was coming back from somewhere the other day and had to turn it off and on to reset the computer. It's an automatic, and keeps trying to start at traffic lights in third gear. I am as vexed as other drivers! Anyway, I pulled over, turned it off and on again, and nothing. It clicked a bit. I had experienced this before, so gave it ten minutes. No. Another ten minutes. No. Ring the accident guys. Wait another forty minutes. Try it again. Yes! Cancel accident guys. Drive home. Hate car with a passion! So yesterday I had to ring my insurance folk to cancel it, which was a breeze. I filled out the form required for a partial refund of road tax, also declaring the car off-road.

The saga is not over yet. I need a car to get to a wedding in September. Public transport won't cut it. So I also rang Mum's insurer, who had to ring someone else, and eventually discovered that I can't get insurance on her car for the two days I would need. Insurance companies say the darnedest things! So now I need to sort out a rental car. I have also tried to book the hotel, but they are having trouble with the code for the wedding, as they were yesterday, so they are calling me back some time today. Whew!

Last night I went to see a friend, which is to say she picked me up, as her house is either inaccessible by public transport or would demand a ridiculously circuitous route. Some time this morning she'll bring me back, I'll try to field a call from the hotel at some point, and my young lady is coming over about midday. We would like to go for a walk, but I managed to slash the side of my left foot on a piece of dead and ancient computer the other night, so any footwear hurts. Telly instead, then! Then I need to catch a bus down to see some more friends in Newcastle in the evening.

Everything seemed fairly quiet on Wednesday. I read Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, which is a thoroughly disturbing little book, and started nibbling
around the edges of my copy of A Passage to India, which is as stuffed with introductions as a pepper is with rice! I am going to dissolve them before going on to the main event. If it gets too dark - and from what basic knowledge I have of the storyline, that seems fairly likely - I shall break off and read some Betjeman. I began reading him the other day, and he's very moreish. Yes, I am on something of a literary kick at the minute. I read Cold Comfort Farm the other day, and very funny it was, too. As I have mentioned before, my formal schooling included a lot of very successful work by my teachers (and the devisers of the curriculum, no doubt) to put me off classic literature. I am now returning to conquer that mountain of unread paper! Wish me luck.

Federation Reinforcements

All is going well on this front, folks. I have blocked in the main colours, repeatedly washed the starships, and am now having a bit of a think about highlighting and names. I am also grudgingly fiddling with the Dreadnought. I had not been paying attention, and had glued her rear nacelles on angled rather than all flat and horizontal. I realised and attempted to rectify my error, but discovered that only through GS and some judicious use of props (paintbrushes and a syringe) could I sort out the trouble. The nameless Dread is still sitting in place. This is inarguably one instance where resin models would have been easier to secure than metal ones. Still, there is no use crying over misplaced bovine lactation - or soya substitute in my case.

I am going to knock up a wee campaign for what ships I have, including a few merchantmen you can see pictured below. I hope to get a few games in, either with my brother or a friend, or perhaps even both! It's a bit of a shame that the first will be the first wargame of 2012 for me, but there we are. I am very much behind the rest of the gaming world at the minute. There is no likelihood of 40k's 6th Ed appearing on my shelf in the near future. The money is lacking. I may buy a couple of packs of those pretty Musketeer Miniatures BEF Early War cavalry. Until such time as that happens, take a look at what I have similarly won from Mongoose and the few vessels I decided to scratch or kitbash into something I could pop on the battlefield.