Firstly, thanks to David Ritchie for his continuing saga of chickens, puppies,
estate sales, family life, academia and other obituaries, crabbing (literal &
figurative), and, and, … A highlight of the week (and doubtless a saving
feature of this list!).
“Hexit” — terrific!
I detect in [German] media accounts of the seeming chaos of opinions in Britain
following the ‘Brexit’ referendum (especially those concerning the meteoric
rise of the number of signatures on an online petition calling for another
vote) a sense of Schadenfreude. (The British and American dictionaries have
only ‘pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune’; the
German-English dictionary qualifies — I suspect correctly — that ‘pleasure
[Freude]’ as ‘malicious [boshafte].’) Seemingly clueless interviewees moaning
that they didn’t bother casting a ballot because they thought ‘“Remain” was a
sure thing’ feature prominently in the news accounts that I have seen.
My own reaction (apart from cursing myself for recently sticking a wad of
20-pound notes into a drawer on return from Britain ‘for next time’ rather than
exchanging them) is thinking that perhaps most Brexit supporters don’t realize
they are attempting to lock the barn door long after the horse and all of its
harness and other accoutrements have been sold off (I almost added ‘lock, stock
and barrel’ — but will spare list members’ stomachs such metaphor-mixing so
early on a Monday morning).
My personal case in point:
Last October I bought a new bicycle (a Raleigh ‘Devon HS’ featuring everything
I could wish for on a bike) which prominently displays an attractive
silver-metal Raleigh head badge featuring the time-honoured motto “Best of
Britain.”
A surprise awaited me as I searched for a website I could recommend to a North
American friend who expressed interest as a potential buyer of that or a
similar model: I could not find my bike on any English-language website.
Further research brought enlightenment: The Raleigh Bicycle Company — one of
the oldest in the world (established in Nottingham in 1888 from a bicycle
company that had been using the Raleigh name since 1885) — is currently owned
by the Dutch corporation Accell. Apparently production of Raleigh bicycles
ended in the UK in 2003. The ‘Best of Britain’ bicycle I bought and all others
offered under that trademark in this country are now manufactured (i.e.,
assembled from parts imported largely from the Far East) — and are available
only in — Germany!
Chris Bruce,
now off for his morning constitutional
on ‘das Beste aus Großbritannien’ in
one of the most bicycle-friendly of cities
in a country featuring an impressive array
of exclusive urban and rural bicycle paths,
i.e., Kiel, Germany
P.S. The ‘horse’ metaphor is not so far-fetched when referring to bicycles — in
German one of the colloquial (though slightly archaic) terms for bicylce is
‘Drahtesel’ (literally ‘wire donkey')
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