I bought a long lens for my camera. It's so long I hardly know what to do with it. These were my experiments yesterday....

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Warwick Davis

My first visit to the London Photo Fair today. Lots of dealers from all over Europe, especially France and Belgium. Some really impressive stuff on offer but mostly out of my price range. What do people do with large, fragile old photos costing hundreds of pounds, exactly? I suppose if I was a rich man I'd have a room full of them in filing cabinets. I came across a fascinating album of German marines in China in the 1910s. The dealer quoted me "twenty fifty" which quite surprised me and I prepared to hand over the cash. "No, two thousand and fifty" he clarified. He found that very entertaining. I told him I would save up.

Luckily, there were a few cartes de visite in the under-£5 bracket that I was able to afford. I like the floppy child and the woman with the huge bustle especially.....

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I was helping anicca_anicca2 out with some translation yesterday. Well, I say "helping"; I hardly did anything but make a few suggestions. English speaking Germans never fail to impress me with their conversational fluency in my native tongue, and the same goes for numerous Greeks, Swedes, Norwegians, Netherlanders, Swiss and Austrians I've met too. In all cases these are people who did not have the advantage of a native English speaking parent, or a childhood spent abroad in an English-speaking country. No, they learned the hard way, at school and university. If you meet a British person who has done this it is a truly remarkable thing to behold. I remember once I met an Englishman who had achieved fluency in Hungarian. I was in awe of him. It was like meeting someone who had learned to speak to dolphins.

I think British language teaching probably suffers from some deeply engrained defect. Jerome K. Jerome shared this opinion over 100 years ago when he wrote his comic novel "Three men on the Bummel", which is about three English friends on a cycling holiday in Germany. The book was so popular in Germany that it was used as a standard English teaching text for some years. Here are some extracts.....

"For they have a way of teaching languages in Germany that is not our way, and the consequence is that when the German youth or maiden leaves the gymnasium or high school at fifteen, “it” (as in Germany one conveniently may say) can understand and speak the tongue it has been learning.  In England we have a method that for obtaining the least possible result at the greatest possible expenditure of time and money is perhaps unequalled.  An English boy who has been through a good middle-class school in England can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, about female gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed perhaps of neither, is liable to pall.  Possibly, if he be a bright exception, he may be able to tell the time, or make a few guarded observations concerning the weather.  No doubt he could repeat a goodly number of irregular verbs by heart; only, as a matter of fact, few foreigners care to listen to their own irregular verbs, recited by young Englishmen.  Likewise he might be able to remember a choice selection of grotesquely involved French idioms, such as no modern Frenchman has ever heard or understands when he does hear."

"In the German school the method is somewhat different.  One hour every day is devoted to the same language.  The idea is not to give the lad time between each lesson to forget what he learned at the last; the idea is for him to get on.  There is no comic foreigner provided for his amusement.  The desired language is taught by a German school-master who knows it inside and out as thoroughly as he knows his own.  Maybe this system does not provide the German youth with that perfection of foreign accent for which the British tourist is in every land remarkable, but it has other advantages.  The boy does not call his master “froggy,” or “sausage,” nor prepare for the French or English hour any exhibition of homely wit whatever.  He just sits there, and for his own sake tries to learn that foreign tongue with as little trouble to everybody concerned as possible.  When he has left school he can talk, not about penknives and gardeners and aunts merely, but about European politics, history, Shakespeare, or the musical glasses, according to the turn the conversation may take."

Yes, he may have had his faults. His female characters are limited to two types, the grotesque frump or the enfeebled virginal or 'fallen' young angel. His personal life reflected this, forever falling for and idealising younger girls while ignoring (and eventually leaving) his faithful wife and ten children.

But what a great story teller he was, nevertheless, developing a unique style of carefully balanced sentimentality, hard social reality and caricature...and what caricature!. Characters so vivid that they are instantly recognisable, even when adapted for film or TV, updated or played by any number of different actors with different faces. Scrooge is immortal, no matter what you do to him.

And this is maybe why he has become a victim of his own success, or a victim of TV's success. Through television these characters have become so well known, as iconic as 19th century Mickey Mice, that there is little incentive to go looking for them in the original books. Britain has given up reading Dickens. I certainly didn't bother until I was in my 20s, and I made an astonishing discovery. He's in them. The narrator is omnipresent, and he's hilarious. I never expected him to be there. This renders all dramatic interpretation of his work oddly hollow. While excising the dialogue and transplanting it into a TV script may function, Dickens himself is rendered mute. He's deleted. For example, take a very minor character from the Pickwick Papers, Mr Miller, who is thrashed at a game of cards. An actor may give a highly polished performance of Mr Miller feeling awkward and defeated, but we can't hear Dickens saying "he felt as much out of his element as a dolphin in a sentry-box".

Of course, Dickens didn't just narrate on paper, he did it in person too, giving hundreds of hugely popular public readings. Maybe this is what we are missing today, literature as a kind of intimate conversation. Literature as an extension of conversation. Indeed, as most of his novels were written in instalments Dickens was constantly responding to feedback and altering his story lines as certain threads and characters proved more popular than others.They were a two way street.

Which sounds oddly familiar. Isn't that what bloggers are doing now? Forget TV adaptations, if Dickens was alive today he'd be doing this. He'd be a 200-year-old blogger.


(cartoon borrowed from Kate Beaton)

Finland

I learned how to make macaroni cheese. It is one of those simple recipes that my parents never cooked, because it reminded them too much of their tedious 1950s childhoods.

A patient at work told me a story which illustrates the position of macaroni cheese in British cuisine quite well. It was the 1940s and her brother came home from work "what's for dinner, Mum?" he enquired.
"Macaroni cheese" she replied.
"Oh." he responded, a little downcast. Then big sister returned home and asked the same question. She got the same answer. Macaroni cheese.
"Oh." she responded, also evidently disappointed. Now mother started to seethe. Then poor Dad came home from work, unaware. What was for dinner? Same answer. Macaroni cheese.
"Oh" he responded, crestfallen.

And mother emptied the entire pan of macaroni cheese over his head.

I have no idea how to deactivate my voicemail. My mobile phone provider says it's nothing to do with them and I've got to phone Nokia. Please don't leave a message. I will never listen to it. Can you not use email?

Two cakes!

Czech firemen sing a Christmas carol while wreaking revenge on a variety of fire-causing domestic appliances. Happy Christmas!