Wildfires

It started with a Californian heatwave. Where I was, the temperature rose to thirty-five degrees Celsius, followed by highs of thirty-eight and a couple of days with a scorching forty-two! Then came a prolonged night-time thunderstorm, with countless lightning strikes igniting the tinder-dry vegetation. Many of the innumerable small fires soon merged to form large conflagrations spreading their ugly fumes and flames to threaten everything and everyone in surrounding areas.

By the morning, ash was raining down on us through the increasingly acrid air. An official warning went out: Be prepared to evacuate! To think, I had come for a short family visit in March, yet here I was five months later, marooned by the pandemic and now, along with everyone else, threatened by fire.

What to do? We decided to pack what we could and head initially, the next day, to an in-law's place some fifty miles away. “Take only what is of value to you,” the kids were told. “Provided into doesn't take much room.”

The situation has growing ever more ominous by the time we finally departed, well aware that the family could have seen the last of their house and home with all but the few belongings we were taking with us. The children were deposited with the in-laws while we went to check on somewhere to stay. We were fortunate. Many people had nowhere to go and had to rely on emergency arrangements made by local authorities or organisations, everything complicated by the need for social distancing. In our case, a relation of the in-laws had a temporarily empty flat we could use not far from San Francisco airport. We went there, left some things – then drove back to the fire-threatened house to rescue what else we could. The air, thick and tinged with an orange glow, was painful to breathe. Inside, items were quickly collected, including clothes and food from fridge, freezer and cupboards. This time, before we had left a mandatory order to get out had been issued. Incredibly, we later learned that some people refused to go and had to be forcibly removed. All roads into the area were then closed.

We collected the kids and arranged our temporary refuge as comfortably as we could. From there we were able to follow the fight against the flames. Press conferences and fire-fighters' briefings from the command and control centre set up in the local park just a few hundred metres from the family's home, were shown online. We also continually checked air quality on the Purple Air site. Single figures were best, but anything under fifty on the scale used was still shown as acceptable. Where we had come from it was well over four hundred.

But even in our new location the air wasn't always good. All depended on the winds, as pollution from other fires, and there were many of them, could easily drift in our direction. Compared to what we had left behind, however, it was fine. And three times we drove to a coastal area where the air was fresher, for an evening walk.

We remained refugees for eight days. By then the fire – 'our' fire – was sufficiently contained for us to be allowed back. It had destroyed more than nine hundred homes, but our area was now considered safe. At most, two thousand four hundred people had been fighting the flames, ringing them in, denying them fresh fuel. Weather permitting, helicopters and a fixed-wing plane joined the battle. When we walked past the park now we could see dozens of long vans marked 'mobile sleeping trailer' or 'mobile shower trailer' drawn up on the grass. The fight, though being steadily won, was not yet over.

Watch Your Words

 Once upon a time, English – Old English that is – had lots of inflections, those little word endings that alter depending on number, gender and grammatical function. If you are a native speaker of the language you have probably never wondered over the fact that English adjectives never change, for example. Thus you can have a green light or a thousand green lights, the word green remains the same. It wouldn't in most other languages.

With few exceptions, the only change to nouns is the addition of an s in the plural. And there is only one gender. But in Old English woman, quean and wife, for instance, were masculine, feminine and neuter respectively! Foot was masculine, hand feminine and eye neuter and words that agreed with them had to be adjusted accordingly. Such complications you do not have to think about today.

But, there is one big, potentially puzzling, or sometimes hilarious, drawback. When almost all the inflections have disappeared, you have to watch out for your word order. Get them the wrong way round – and who doesn't at times? – and you can cause confusion, or laughter. How about this quoted in the BBC Radio 4 News Quizz comedy programme. It was taken from a parish magazine somewhere in England:

Join us on the 2^nd and 4^th of the month for Brexit with hot sausages aimed at children under 10 years old.

Or this, seen at an English launderette (US laundromat):

Automatic washing machines: please remove all your clothes when the light goes out.

Or this:

The painting went to the elderly gentleman with the heavy gilt frame.

So watch your words. Or where you place them.

Adapted from How To Write Much Better English.

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My Life in Houses

 

My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster

This a book club choice. If you thoroughly enjoy one detailed description of rooms and houses after another, it is definitely something for you. But for someone who isn't at all enthralled by a continual succession of such accounts, the question in my mind from the start was what on earth can there be to sustain interest?

I could find very little. A touch of humour would have helped. Nay, an outsize overdose of it. But this is straight-faced, straight-laced writing. Some greater insight into climbing up the socio-economic ladder from a rented home on a working-class council estate in Carlisle to owning a large house in London, a weekend cottage in the Lake District and a holiday home in Portugal all at the same time, might have helped. Alas, there was little of that either. Even the autobiographical background is minimal and also very sketchy. For example, Forster suddenly reveals that she got married from one of her homes and out of nowhere we learn she has a husband, not a word about him having previously been mentioned. And like her parents and children, he remains a shadowy figure. There tends to be more detail about wallpaper than her family. And as I was not waiting with baited breath to discover whether there would be a sitting tenant in the next abode or noisy neighbours, I can only label the book – for me – a colossal bore. Moreover, it adds insult to injury in exceeding its proclaimed mandate by describing houses other people lived in (Elizabeth Barret Browning and Daphne du Maurier) in addition to Forster's own.

I fear this made me maliciously hope she would discover all her dwellings were suffering from untreatable dry rot, woodworm, leaking roofs, ditto drains, flooding and severe subsidence, while a horde of the most obnoxious sitting tenants, who had been temporarily absent and whom she didn't previously know about, suddenly turn up to claim their right of abode. Plus that the neighbours on either side and at the back are the loudest and most abusive people on the planet. It might have injected some spark of life into the book. At best, I thought it could have made a series of articles in a House & Home-type magazine.

The others in the group may well have had very different views. In my exile, I still don't know, although the meeting at which it was to be discussed has been held. Most of the online reviewers would certainly disagree with me – but then a large percentage of them proclaim themselves to be Forster admirers on the basis of her other books. When I looked, both the UK and US Amazon sites had 150-odd 'global' reviews, i.e. they were substantially the same, and both had an average rating of 4.6 (!). GoodReads had 76 reviews and 605 ratings, with an average score of 3.9.

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