KoraKarnivala

Sinbad gets it right.

He sends me a link and comments nowt, just leaves it there for me to delete with a dismissive click.

In fact, this is exactly what my blog is here for ...

[Quoting my sponsors who beg me to push the 'educational' slant, bleaghh]

... to boldly post to trans-Pond readerships who don't know their ano from their kato.

My much-abused Sinbad (at least I hope that is my effect) sends me a wonderful youtube of the Kora-super-Brum rave ~ going on well into the soir and showing how we too know how to celebrate Casual Friday.

I don't hold with making it easy for today's clickers and prefer to send y'all direct to the source and scroll down to all this Carnival 2010 Ano Korakiana hootenanny.

Another good reason you should read Blogue Baddelois @ source is to savour how deliciously wife Lin is emerging as 'Carrie' to Badass's Chazza Pooter.

Say no more. I gave myself a fright in the church porch ce matin. Arriving to collect maman, I glanced at the guest book and saw the Baddeley nomen as visiting on the 21st of the month - cimeron! But phew, twas 21/Jan ... but quand meme.

Postscript: I was brooding about making this a separate post, then decided it was too petty, then realised that since it happened minutes after panicking at the sight of the Baddeley hancock, I could add it here.

I arrived to collect maman with a veritable rottweiler of a lady - non-melting beurre a l'exterieur but just below the surface she does without, intolerant of fools; I should know - and there was someone whose letter had appeared in the latest Athens News.

She didn't mean it but she said "Hey, good letter."

At that moment I froze, knowing what'd come next. He looked up with his anorak grin ... and proceeded to recite the whole letter at three times its repetition length. She stood there, eye contact locked.

"Well, as I said, I liked it, seems like someone else did, too."

John Hancock ~ conscientiously providing you with the link, I saw that JH had a connection with Quincy, Massachusetts. I have a memory burned in hot poker of that name.

As the 1997 Hong Kong handover approached, I made the difficult decision to disrupt life and move to Texas where my ma-in-law lived, deposit wife and child and scout for new work.

I had pals in Boston so I went there and booked into a moderate hotel and decided to fight my loneliness and strangerli-ness by striding out and distracting myself with a walking tour of the city.

I asked the desk klurk which way was Quinssie (as I thought it pronounced) to which he affected puzzlement and assured me there was nowhere he knew called 'quinssie'.

Within the hour and asking sensible people I learned that it's pernounced Quinzee. Quinz like twins; ee like ee bah goom.

It was a vulnerable and lonely and unhappy and worrying time for me and that quincy/quinzy jape caught me at the precise nadir moment of questioning myself as a husband and father.

I never forgot it and I never forgot that klerk who, bad luck for him, looked like our current speaker John Bercow - simian of face and bearing, dead ringer for an expense-account-fiddler.

Stephanie went on to be senior editor for Little, Brown; I went on to go on, some mss assessing, proof reading, mainly raising Georgina and getting really really good at flat-top picking to a bawling kid.

Then one day came a fact-checking job on a new guide book to Bawston and Hahvud and all points west of the Charles - and guess who was the best-equipped stranger in town with all day to to go check it wuz all up-to-date? Right on.

And so into 'the hotel' I timidly stepped and there before me was the Klerk and I asked him how to find Quinssie and he told me ... in fact, it was pronounced Quinzy.

Really? And why could he not have told me that 2 years earlier?

Remembering back, it was a bit embarrassing the fuss I made, but I made my sad pathetic lonely point and left and adjusted the text to alert readers to possible patronising inaccuracies from the 'concierge'.

Ouf! Immigrants.