Author Archives: wendywelch

The Tuesday Swimming Incident

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The Monday book will be back next week. Sit back and enjoy the story of Wendy’s latest adventure….

Regular readers know that I enjoy canning. Like, a lot. It’s my down time upper. So yesterday evening I was squeezing out seven quarts of mixed veg from our garden, which is putting out more daily. Having a good time, rocking out to a little oldies Abba, slicing and dicing and spicing.

I threw a load of laundry in at the end, because canning is a messy business. And because Tuesday morning is my swim aerobics class with my sister, and it had been ages since my suit had been washed, what the heck, in it goes.

(Yes, I know washing is bad for suits. Just like fungal growth is bad for suits. It needed a scrub.)

Next day, sis and I are paddling in the pool preparatory to class beginning, and I feel something in the lower area. Like elastic that’s poked through. Oh well, I think, I know better than to wash a suit with other clothes, ruined it. I reach in….

…. and pull out a string bean.

A dried up string bean that looked so much like elastic at first that I didn’t realize what was happening. Until I felt a little pebble-like thing caressing my cheek….

After removing the two beans and the other half of the string bean husk, I placed them as surreptitiously as possible on the drain at the side of the pool.

A few minutes into class, the lifeguard gets this incredulous look on his face, climbs down from his chair, and walks to The Place of the Bean.

My sister who drags me to the class each week shouts, “It’s a string bean and it’s hers!” She points at me. “She cans everything and it got in her suit!”

Fortunately the instructor had The Beegees blasting at top decibel so not many of the participants heard her. Only one woman turned and asked, “Do you can in your suit? Is that cooler? I can a lot and…”

I am not banned from the pool. That is the good news.

My sister will die at the time and place of my choosing, and they will find her with a green bean shoved into her throat, serial killer style. That is the other good news.

Thank you for coming to my comedy of errors life show.

Wull Ferlies neer decis

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Jack makes it over the line for his Wednesday post for a change –

I’m very happy to see a revival of interest in the Scots language in Scotland.

The blue area is mainly Gaelic and The small Irish area is similar to ‘Central Scots’.

When Wendy teaches classes in cultural geography she often notes that countries are defined by their languages and culture. Scotland is no exception. The three main languages are Gaelic, Scots and English. The traditional culture is mainly centered around Gaelic and Scots.

My natural language has always been ‘Scots-English’ – in other words standard English with a large injection of Scots words and phrases. Of course I’m really bilingual, having disciplined myself to speak ‘proper’ English in formal settings and my natural language in more social ones, very much like Gaelic speakers do.

However, for a very long time Scots language has been frowned on in schools and described as just poor English, and there are many reasons for that. I don’t really blame my teachers as they believed that to get on in life we had to speak ‘proper English’.

One thing that really irks me is the apologetic apostrophe, where a word in Scots is similar to the English equivalent and the writer adds the apostrophe as if there’s a letter missing. Examples would be o in Scots and of in English or fa and fall. It doesn’t happen where the words are completely different, so why do it when their similar?

When Wendy first came to Scotland she worked with Matthew Fitt, a writer of Scots language children’s books that really helped begin the change in attitudes. More recently my friends Steve Byrne, Fiona Fyfe and Frieda Morrison have put their shoulders to the wheel and there are moves within the Scottish parliament to get things to the same level of support enjoyed by Gaelic.

Following the forming of the United Kingdom in 1707 and despite Scotland retaining many existing powers over law, education and Church, the language and culture were seen by the authorities as too ‘different’. After an abortive attempt to rename the country as North Britain a subtler approach was adopted and that was much more successful.

But the language lived on, particularly in rural and working class areas, and I’m glad that despite my elevation to the middle classes I’ve never lost it. Perhaps singing traditional Scots songs helped!

The 2011 Scottish census returned 1.5 million speakers of Scots within Scotland making up some 30% of the Scottish population of 5.4 million.

Some examples again – ‘Haud yir wheest’ (keep your mouth closed), ‘ca cannie’ (go carefully), ‘lang may yir lum reek’ (may you always have something to burn in your fire).

As an extra –

Living here in Appalachia, where many Ulster-Scots settled I have little trouble being understood by the locals. Lots of Scots words, grammar and pronunciation came over here.

Wull ferlies neer decis is Scots for ‘will wonders never cease’.