Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2007

mike_lyle_uk@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk had it ...

Excellent.  A quorum (two might appear more like an assignation).

Also Brit!

20 miles might come in handy. What's your asking price?

Is this a reference to a Monty Python sketch that I missed?

bounceme@two.wolff.co.uk had it ...

Earthman, your mode of speech is difficult for me to follow, so I'm
not able to decipher whether you will join us or not.  I can easily
transport you if that's a problem.  

[...]

And it was so.

Courtesy Laura's efficiency, there venued at the Portabello restaurant
in South Parade, Oxford, Dame Katy Jennison, Dame Laura Spira, unDame
David the Omrud, and unDame Mike Lyle. As so often, Mike was ordered
to edit the proceedings, and, as so rarely, this time failed to
wriggle out of it.

Laura said something about an agenda, but that was the last the editor
remembers hearing about it. An emergent theme was almost entitled /
Shooting With Strangers/, as, bizarrely, the subject of firearms in
their more comic roles recurred. It struck us as a good and suitably
ambiguous title in case any of us was tempted to take part in an
exciting new sport mentioned by David: extreme novel-writing. Not, as
I imagined, something like typing The Great [adjective ad lib] Novel
while dangling from a bungee cord, but even more challenging:
apparently contestants have to deliver a complete novel in thirty
days. Hmm. Discussion of the comedic potential of near misses included
a gunfight heard, though not seen, by my father as a boy --a little
understanding over a fraudulent raffle for a dead duck: luckily it was
a typical Australian gunfight, as the participants were too pissed to
hit anybody on purpose, and Queensland does a nice line in wide open
spaces offering plenty of dodging room. The Strangers theme arose
because of David's Limousin neighbours' fondness for large parties de
chasse from which nobody ever brings much game home, and my serious
reservations about going "hunting" with people you don't know.

Sheep and goats were, of course, never far from our thoughts. David
wowed all with an absurdly small GPS thingy, which not only knew where
he'd left the car, but was demonstrably capable of telling his mobile
telephone about it. But the editor was frankly disappointed in the
Omrud gadget-count, having expected more than three. Geothermal
heating, heat pumps, the extraordinary efficiency of rural French
drain constructors, local hospitality and general welcomingness, and
the good old-fashioned way even local officials still trust you to pay
up in due course out there, etc.

Huge approval ratings for Mrs Gaskell, especially as adapted by Auntie
Beeb and acted by some of the nation's finest thesps. The differences
between American and Chinese mah-jongg (for pinyin showoffs, /
majiang/, it seems); the relative vileness of Oxford and Cheltenham
tap-water, absent friends, tooth-filing among the tribes of equatorial
Africa and Beverley Hills, something I can't read about lamps. A very
rude item from Dame Laura about a 16th-century dick-head's majolica
dinner-plate --don't miss it:
http://www.goofball.com/news/20030918201

Reservations were expressed about the authenticity of the restaurant's
name: surely PortObello, as in Market, not ..A...? Doors feminine,
harbours masculine, no? This is what it looks like, anyhow:
http://www.portabellorestaurant.co.uk/
Those chairs are a bit slippery. A decent place, though your editor
thought the excessive oil on his morels and fried bass was a bit
stale, and deplores this modern thing of crushed potatoes instead of
properly mashed. The battered haddock and chips on others' plates was
exemplary and twice the size.

After three hours' happy chatter of a transcendental kind, the party
had to break up, with an esprit du sidewalk final word about
residential boinks in nice places, and a final final word about roll-
up "pianos" from Maplin, which I'm giving in profusion this Christmas.
I hope only one of us found a parking ticket on the windscreen: I'd
mistaken a permit-only space for an after-six-thirty one. Damn. But
worth every penny, of course.

... You know, maybe the bit I can't read was about "langs", not
"lamps". The preceding word begins with an S ...

--
Mike.