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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| An Ancestral Herring My father used to repeat this riddle that he’d learned as a kid: If a herring and a half cost three ha’pence, how much does a herring cost? Seeing that not only the penny has long disappeared from British currency, and the ha’pence (halfpenny piece) even longer, one can get an idea of just how old the question is. The question is almost meaningless now, and I know from experience that asking it merely invokes history lessons on the intricacies of extinct British coin systems. Which is a pity, since it’s actually quite a clever and amusing little jest. It depends, you see, upon the deliberate confusion induced by saying thee ha’pence, rather than one-and-a-half pennies. That’s what it is, after all. And the moment we see that is the instant we realise how simple the problem is. Obviously, a herring costs a penny (another indicator of the great age of the riddle). The story does offer evidence of the fact that I carry around both my own history but also that of my parents’ time. In this way my memory includes the lore (and, I hope, the wisdom) of over a century of experience and learning. It’s really no wonder that I often feel like a dinosaur that never evolved into a bird. Word count: 214 |
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