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Jigjag, I hope you enjoyed your Christmas shopping. Did you opt for soup or coffee or both? I feel you might have needed proper sustenance!

I enjoyed some bits of Matthew Parris's column in today's Times. He's discussing the theory that as we grow older, we lose our sense of proportion. He says 'We get crosser and crosser about smaller things. We obsess about apostrophes and punctuation...' I think we pedants carry a very heavy burden - we got 'crosser and crosser...' long before old age came along!

Grunger, I remember being exhausted after we'd sorted all the fo'c'sle and focsle and bosun and bo'sun and boatswain stuff.

I meant to post that your "two soups" post earlier reminded me of a couple of nights we spent in Avoca (near Dublin), which we discovered, after we arrived, was the basis for "Ballykissangel" (which didn't mean much, as neither of us had ever seen it).
Anyway, two rivers meet in the village, one very muddy, the other clear. The muddiness and clearness remained separated for at least* half a mile downstream of the confluence.

*we didn't follow it any further

Malone, Grunger

Thank you for your advice. I wasn’t sure what to have at the market café today, so for once, I looked at the blackboard and an item caught my eye:

Soup of the Day’s £2

I decided, with trepidation, to teach Cassie some grammar.

“I am afraid you have a superfluous apostrophe” I told her. “The other day you referred to your two soups as Soup of the Days, which of course has no apostrophe, but it should be Soups of the Day anyway.”

“As usual you are wrong” she rebuked me. “On Wednesdays we only have one soup, which is vegetable, and the description is quite correct. It is saying that Soup of the Day is £2. The apostrophe is replacing a missing letter.”

I was taken aback, but I had to admit she was right. Of course, I had to order the soup, which was substantial and tasty.

Chrise

That is amazing - how does it happen?

I suppose there is little turbulence and thus sideways mixing.

It was the inspiration for The meeting of the waters"

https://visitwicklow.ie/listing/meeting-of-the-waters-avoca-valley/

Jigjag. My first reaction to Cassie's rebuke was 'Ha, that serves Jigjag right'! The apparently superfluous apostrophe might have caught me out too, to course, but it never will now. I'll be hyper-vigilant now.

ChrisE, the river stuff was interesting.

Hello all

I'm so glad you guys are talking to each other again. I've been following your banter with great amusement, especially the delightful Cassie. I imagine her as the old-fashioned type who nonchalantly takes your order with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth (current legislation notwithstanding). The varied career of Grunger is also quite fascinating. Amazing to have accomplished so much, though surprisingly, waitress seems not to be on her CV. Could Cassie take her on for the Christmas season perhaps?

Geing, Grunger waitressing? She has far too many pies to make for that to be a good use of her time.

My apologies. Naturally, such a talented lady would have enough on her plate already

Thanks, Getting. Grunger is very versatile, so might like to be dishing out pies rather than cooking them. From the stories on the Forum, it's often Jigjag with a lot - an awful lot -on his plate!