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What's Mike's P&W on about this
month? Epic movies? |
| Mike's
Pith & Wind -
Quo Vadis
I was attempting to be funny the other night
at The Wild Thyme Café and tried
to conjure up a fake a Latin title for last
song of the first set which has a latin
flavour – and all I could come up
with was Quo Vadis. It had the
desired effect of mystifying the audience,
but it wasn’t anything I’d learnt
in my four fraught years studying Latin
at school. (In fact it’s the name
of a popular epic movie from 1951 derived
from the book of the same name).
Trying to learn Latin might give
the wrong impression. Setting up the pattern
of a lifetime I tended to shy away from
anything that required actual effort at
school, and even though I enjoyed studying
English, foreign languages (I was
also miserable at French) fell into the
same category as maths, physics and chemistry
in which I showed neither interest nor aptitude
and was quickly transferred to the lowest
stream with the yokel sons of well-to-do
College old boy farmers.
People who flaunt their knowledge of Latin,
and there are a few of them still lingering
around the courts, will tell you that it’s
a useful study even though it’s long
been a dead language, as it forms the basis
of most of today’s Western European
languages. On reflection I imagine that
they’re probably right and I sometimes
wish I had paid more attention at the time
– incidentally, the same goes for
my piano lessons.
As it was I found the whole exercise tedious
and not a little unnerving as I had Christ’s
College’s irascible headmaster, the
indomitable Harry Hornsby.. read
more
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Dick's
Toolbox - The Great War
On the 28th of July
this year we will acknowledge the start
of the First World War, an industrial strength
slaughterhouse that lasted over four years
and killed nine million combatants. Far
more than that were injured, crippled or
maimed. France which bore the brunt of the
fighting suffered terribly: 73% casualties
of the nearly eight and a half million men
mobilised. To put this in context France
had a population of 40 million the start
of the war; six in ten men between the ages
of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were
permanently maimed. After the war France
suffered a decline in population and economic
growth as there weren’t enough men
to marry the eligible women, man the factories
and till the fields.
The Gallipoli campaign was a minor sideshow
in this terrible conflict, another of Winston
Churchill’s not-so-bright ideas that,
rather than.. read
more |
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