Mooching

Ah...Marsala, who knew ?

Today I mooched. And while I was in a book shop, I met a confused Chinese gentleman from Singapore. He was very polite, we were both looking at dictionaries, but he, as I would have done, was trying to get the one he had looked at back into place and the ones around it tidied up.
I reached for one near it, then we had the usual British, 'sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.'
The man was looking for a Canadian dictionary with phonetic pronunciation, but couldn't find one.
'Barrage,' he said, 'I was always taught to say BArrage but here, it sounds as though they say, 'baRRAGE.'
'That's true,' I said, the same thing with garage, and I pronounce them both the way you have been taught, but then my English is RP.' Of course, that's how he was taught in Singapore, by teachers with RP English accents. He had lived and studied in Britain, near Bristol, but had gone to the university of Bath. We talked about the amazing architecture there.

'Your English is very good,' I told him, 'you shouldn't worry about it, you don't need to reproduce the pronunciation, just understand it.' Then we talked about the BBC, the touchstone of correct pronunciation.
So there we both were, neither of us quite got it, this Canadian thing, but we both understood each other.

The arrival of almost all of the rest of my family is now five weeks away and I am getting pretty excited. It's like Advent. I should have a special mid-year Advent calendar - the sort with choccie in of course.
And yet for Austen, five weeks until they come over also means only five weeks of term. There is some blindspot that teachers have where the summer term is always going to be the term when you catch up on all the backlog. And it never, ever, EVER is, because everyone thinks the same thing, so all the days you think you will have get packed by other people with the things they didn't have time to fit in during the rest of the year, so I can really, REALLY empathise with him right now.

My friend Dawn is just three weeks away from a trip, funded by a Fulbright-Hays grant to study natural disasters and health issues in Bangladesh. I'm excited about her trip too.
Dawn, who I've mentioned before, is an alternative High School teacher, but has kept her studies alive and has a tremendous range of interests.
Dawn and 11 colleagues are going with three Geography University teachers, so I imagine it is going to be a pretty amazing and rewarding trip.

When my sister and I were quite young, maybe I was ten or eleven, my parents looked into the possibility of emigrating to Canada. Her sister was here in Toronto and a few years prior to that, my nan had visited her. She came back with tales of how everything was bigger in Canada, everything.

But we - obviously - didn't ever make the move. An irony really, since my father was an engineer and I'm sure would have made a good living here.

I am glad I didn't miss out on a British grammar school education, that was a real privilege, and I wouldn't want my children to be anyone other than who they are, but I do sometimes think about how much both of my parents would have loved this country individually.

My mother would have loved the people, the social aspects, being near her sister, although to be with one sister she may have had to leave another, and perhaps that factored into the final decision.
My father would have loved the natural world here, the rivers and mountains, the flora and fauna.
But we didn't come then, and this isn't where we would have come to in any case, although I'm sure at some point we would have made it out here to visit my dad's cousin on Vancouver Island.

But sometimes I wonder.....