Subtitles of the Week

“And he put a trout up me. And waggled it round. I could feel its eyes.”
(Linda, Nighty Night Series 2)

“Is there currently a tool that provides centralised control for all Windows XP software firewalls that exist as part of the workstation OS on a network?”
(A very obviously fake viewer question sent into Mike Nash, the world's most staggeringly awful autocue reader and presenter of the Microsoft Security 360 November webcast)

“But they’re naked.”
“Naturally. It’s much too dangerous to jump through the fire with your clothes on.”
“What religion can they possibly be learning, jumping over bonfires?”
(Howie and Lord Summerisle, The Wicker Man)

“Suppose they are running secret drug trials?”
“What, and turning them into killer nuns?”
(Murphy and Carter, Murphy’s Law)

“A panic in the colony could transform this year’s offspring into a giant omelette.”
(Narrator, Penguin Baywatch)

All the rage

Having one of those days when this city does my head in. On my way home from work, I nearly got knocked down by a suicidal cyclist hurtling round a corner without looking when I was trying to cross the road at the lethal High Holborn and Kingsway junction. I then trailed down the never-ending Holborn escalators into the pits of the Piccadilly Line and bundled myself into a heaving train to Finsbury Park, where a crowd of lemmings on an even more heaving platform started boarding the train in a zombie-like trance before I'd had the chance to get to the door to escape. When I did manage to force myself out of the carriage, some old git branded me a troublemaker and passed a shirty comment because I hadn't got off the train quickly enough. I simply wasn't in the mood.

So to counter my negativity and see London once again in a happy light...

Our best London eating experiences…so far…

1. Chez Bruce, Wandsworth Common. The first time I could afford to splash out on an expensive meal out in London, and it didn’t disappoint.
2. Fish In A Tie, Clapham Junction. Haven’t been back there in a while, since moving to Crouch End, but in my day the atmosphere was cosy, the food was consistently excellent and everything was unbelievably cheap – sea bass and roast duck for under £7. Crazy.
3. Amaranth. Great Thai restaurant in Earlsfield, with orchids decorating the food. Also the place where I totally failed to notice I was sitting next to John Peel. And that, sadly, is an experience that will never be repeated.
4. Cats, Stroud Green Road. Even better Thai food, this time north of the river.
5. Tas. (The Cut, London Bridge and others) The best Turkish food in London, with bread to die for. Not forgetting Tas Pide, next to the Globe, which gives you so much free food that you hardly need to bother ordering a main course.
6. The Triangle, Ferme Park Road, Crouch End, for its amazing décor and candlelit ambiance.
7. Archipelago, Whitfield Street. With crocodile, ostrich and peacock and chocolate-coated scorpion on the menu, it’s also the only place where you are actually seeking out the insects in its (lovebug) salad. You need a password to enter, sit on a throne and the menu is written on a papyrus scroll.
8. L’Autre, Shepherd Market. The only Polish-Mexican bistro in town.
9. Kastoori, Tooting. Vegetarian Indian via East Africa. The dahi puri are mouth-meltingly explosive heaven.
10. La Bodega, Tottenham Lane. Might not be the best tapas bar in town and the manager can be stroppy, but it’s as good a meal as I’ve ever had in Spain, the place is always packed and buzzing, the menu very reasonably priced, and there’s always a bottle of Licor 43 behind the bar.
11. Michael Moore’s, Marylebone. Food so good you can taste the individual, fresh flavours of each dish, whilst they simultaneously combine to make an exciting whole. And you get to meet the chef. And no, he's not the loud, large American who made Bowling For Columbine but a multi-lingual Ainsley Harriott lookalike who'll give you a free glass of champagne and plate of truffles if you're nice enough to him.
12. Sarkhels, Southfields. Another outstanding curry house, with an amazing chef and a different region of India being reflected in the menu each week.
13. Les Associés, Park Road, Crouch End. Foul pink and red décor (which Arabella Weir described as straight out of a ‘70s Scottish B&B) but the rustic French cuisine is hard to beat.

Balderdash and Piffle, or Keep It Real

What a stuffy bunch of old farts are in charge of content of the Oxford English Dictionary. Surely we the English-speaking people should be in charge of it instead. I’m sitting here watching BBC2’s Balderdash And Piffle while Dave is out at a school governors’ meeting, and I’m almost speechless at their inflexible rejections of the obvious. Which is ironic, really, since they aren’t that interested in “talk” and are instead obsessed with getting evidence of a word’s usage from written sources alone. The case currently being investigated is “nit nurse”, which they have sourced from a 1985 Guardian cutting stating, “Whatever happened to the nit nurse?” So this means that they are claiming that the first recorded instance of the term “nit nurse” is from a question wondering why they have become obsolete.

My studies in Linguistics taught me that language is in a permanent state of flux, and it’s speech that adapts long before the graphical representation of that speech. In our formative years, we are discouraged from writing in a colloquial style and encouraged to be formal and strictly adherent to grammatical rules and formulae, so it’s no wonder that there’s a significant delay to changes in our vernacular being noted by the pen. But the OED needs to spend more time in sound archives and watching film and video material too – if speech has been put onto tape, it’s a factual, accurate record that surely has to be considered as valid source material. But if the squirmingly pernickety Chief Editor still won’t accept this, they should consider an alternative: television subtitle archives. It’s a shame that teletext subtitles for the hard-of-hearing really only exist from the early '90s onwards, as they could be a marvellous mine of information for language investigators. Of course anything that pre-dates this will have to be subtitled when it is re-broadcast now, at least on network television. When I started subtitling, it quickly became clear just how many words I was typing into the screen that I had never actually had to spell before. Is hard-on hyphenated, for example? How do you transcribe Ali G (punani, aiiight?) or Bo Selecta?

On that note, it’s time for ER. And, lacking a degree in medicine, that’s a whole other subtitling nightmare. ("CBC, BP, KUB, lytes, sux, trauma panel, tox screen, C-spine and a head CT...SATS are down, vitals are good, we need to tube him, V-tach, V-fib, asystole, 10 of lidocaine, 48 of adrenalin, bag him, I'm in..." Cue continue spouting bollocks until "Time of death" 45 minutes later.)

REBECCA

Behind You

A week of serious actors in serious comedy… On Tuesday we went to see Sir Ian McKellen playing Dame Widow Twankey in Aladdin at the Old Vic. Marvellous fun, with all the panto prerequisites of excruciating jokes, saucy cheekiness for the adults, boos, jeers, cheers, silly singalongs, “Oh, no it isn’t”s and “Behind you!”s. Bad guy Roger Allam was in his element, finally being allowed to ham it up beyond any typically reasonable dramatic boundaries. Sir Ian was part Barbara Cartland, part Edith Piaf and a lot Les Dawson, of course brilliantly good, though he didn’t really indulge in his audience or go with the flow like other dames I’ve seen. The greatest I've known to date was Berwick Kaler, the York Theatre Royal’s stalwart Mackem dame, unknown outside of his two decades of pantomime stardom there, who would ad lib so beyond the script that he’d leave his cast standing with their mouths open – making it all the more hilarious for his audience.

Then on Friday (the 13th, eegads) we went to see Richard Griffiths, John Hurt and Ken Stott in Heroes, managing to get the last two (restricted view) seats in the house. Despite the actors having a tendency to go and sit in the one corner of the stage we couldn’t actually see, this was simply one of the most wonderful plays I have seen in a long time. A single act, the funny but poignant script had been lovingly translated by Tom Stoppard at his absolute best, and he’d laboured the language into perfection. What a joy it is to see something worked into such beautiful English that you’d never guess it had been written in anything else. No translators I’ve worked with have ever had the luxury of time that Stoppard had clearly been awarded for his oeuvre, which made me sad. Linguists are all too often under appreciated, underpaid and under pressure, and so much about that isn’t right. The translators I work with love the fun and imagination of translating films, but they are continuously expected to meet ridiculous deadlines when clients demand stupidly tight turnarounds for their DVD releases. Yet translators have also had their pay slashed by 30% by subtitling companies in the last two years. Hence most find themselves having to return to translating washing machine manuals simply to be able to make a living. Though maybe Widow Twankey has one of their manuals in her laundry. You never know.

REBECCA

Jungle Fever

Started out 2006 with a trip to Tate Modern to see the Rousseau “Jungles In Paris” exhibition this afternoon, since my godmother has lent me her membership card and we could get in for free. Having taken up watercolours at City Lit last term I have grown even huger respect for artists who can “do it properly” and put my own meagre efforts to shame. Rousseau has astonishingly detailed brushwork, a vibrant use of colour and tonality, and is just too bloody good at painting trees. Despite not being professionally trained, he actually taught watercolours to try to drag himself out of abject poverty. He could no doubt have shown me a thing or two, whatever snide comments his critics may have made of his use of perspective. Watercolours really are rather difficult, despite how easy Hannah Gordon made them look on all those episodes of Watercolour Challenge I used to subtitle. All the paintings in this exhibition were oils, a medium which I might feel more at home in, since you can slap on lots of bright colours very quickly, are allowed to be abstract, and can paint over your mistakes. Oh, to have been blessed with a bit more patience!

As with the Frida Kahlo exhibition last year (so soon...), the Rousseau show is wonderfully placed into context, with photos, leaflets, letters and films of the period and the Paris that he lived in. He never went abroad, basing his tigers, monkeys, palms and tropical flowers from botanical and zoological gardens in Paris, and fuelling the city’s fascination for all things colonial in the process. The exhibition contains scary photos of mock tribal villages from the World’s Fair of 1889, where they’d shipped in natives from various French colonies and made them recreate their home environment for all to stare at.

The Tate (and all of London’s art galleries) is one thing I will truly miss if we leave London, though I’m still not sure about Rachel Whiteread’s plastic white cube installation. (Bring back the giant red ear trumpet. Or the Weather Project. The Weather Project, with its fog that made people high, was cool.) Tate Modern has one of the city’s smartest bars (for members only) which serves tapas and Pimms and is air-conditioned in summer. And the vistas of St Paul’s from every floor are just magnificent. This afternoon the cityscape glowed pink in the setting sunlight and children were playing on a giant snowslide outside. So many films feature that view – Tate Modern has served as two different universities (Spooks, Enduring Love) and a swanky hotel (Sugar Rush) in the past year alone.

So, 2006, eh? Who knows where we’ll be by the end of it? A year in which my mum will never exist. That sobering thought meant I couldn’t even be bothered to stay up until midnight last night. Though that was partly because I couldn’t face any more alcohol, as I had the hangover from hell after spending the previous evening downing shots of Canadian maple whisky in the company of a fine group of friends. January is our detox month, bar those last few tempting morsels of leftover Christmas chocolate. I’ve got to go back on my wheat and dairy free diet, which a nutritionist put me on a couple of months ago in a bid to get my thyroid gland to reduce in size. It’s a mean woman that deprives me of cheese.

On that note, have a good one.

REBECCA