John Maidment's Blog

A troubador

Rutebeuf is the “nom de guerre” of a French trouvère (troubador). His true name is not known, but he probably was born in Champagne about 1230 and died around 1285.

Quite a lot of his writings have survived and you can see them in the original mediaeval French on the French Wikisource

Rutebeuf seems to have been quite a character. His songs contain many references to his poverty, though it is quite clear from other things he writes about that he received commissions to write from some very influential people. One of Rutebeuf’s problems seems to have been that he was addicted to gambling.

I first came across the name Rutebeuf in a song called Pauvre Rutebeuf recorded by Joan Baez in 1965. In a fit of nostalgia I downloaded the song from iTunes this morning. The song was put together by a French singer/song writer called Léo Ferré from extracts of various of the troubador’s songs, which he translated into modern French, well sort of.

Here it is.

You can hear Joan Baez singing the song on YouTube. She switches the text around a bit and doesn’t sing the last two lines

This is not a rant. Honest. I shall stay calm and reasonable throughout. Honest.

The first lot comes from our old friends, the estate agents, whose recent, entirely understandable and forgivable errorettes include the following:

1. A compliant sitting room What the sitting room complies with is not stated. Possibly it is the European Sitting Room Directive, which states: Sitting rooms, wherever possible, should afford a wealth of space for sitting.
2. A much sort after location
3. A well tendered garden

Then last night on the Film 4 channel the continuity announcer, giving notice of a forthcoming showing of the film Walk the Line, used the word biopic, which she had as [baɪˈɒpɪk]. All I am going to say isː surely it should be [ˈbaɪəʊpɪk].

There. I thought I did very well, don’t you? Of course, what I really meant to say was…

Werner Heisenberg 1901-1976

Inspired by my last post, I spent an hour or so adding a couple of entries to SID. One of them was on airflow and its characteristics for various speech sounds. This reminded me of an anecdote I read many years ago. I no longer remember where. It seems it may well be apocryphal, which is a shame, but it’s a nice story anyway. It concerns Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics. It is said that when Heisenberg was an old man he once said: When I meet God, I will ask him two questions. Why relativity? And why turbulence? And I really believe he will have the answer to the first.

Whatever the truth of the anecdote, it remains true that why fluid flows become turbulent is still one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics.

I was very pleased to receive the news that Patricia Ashby has been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship, one of only 50 in the country. Patricia arrived in UCL to study for the MA in Phonetics the year after I did. You can read more on this story on the University of Westminster website

I don’t know how to categorise this post. I suppose it is a rant, but what I usually mean by a rant is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek letting off of steam about something which is, in essence, rather trivial. This post is not tongue-in-cheek and the issue is far, far from trivial. I don’t usually do heavy posts, but I think this is important.

I imagine quite a lot of my readers already know of the shocking shooting spree which claimed 13 lives in Cumbria. If you don’t, you can read about it here — at least you can at the moment.

My concern is that already politicians are trotting out remarks like “no knee-jerk reaction” and “we must wait until we know all the facts” This is usually a signal, I think, that they mean to do very little and probably far too late. It is my opinion that legislation should be passed as quickly as possible to outlaw the possession of any sort of gun by private citizens. The stark fact is that the gunman in Cumbria had two legally owned guns, he killed 12 innocent people and himself, and he could not have done so if had no access to the guns. Why should we wait until we know all the facts? Those, it seems to me, are the only facts we need to know.

Already, and I am sure we will hear more of this, there are arguments being aired by people who have a vested interest in keeping some sort of private gun ownership legal. Here are some of these, together with my reaction to them:

• The UK already has one of the most stringent gun control regimes in the world. Excellent. Let’s take the next step and make it the first to ban private gun ownership completely
• Massacres like the ones in Cumbria, Hungerford, and Dunblane are rare in the UK. Again excellent. Let’s make every effort to make them non-existent
• Some people need to own guns. Who?
  • Farmers – to control vermin. Tough. Farmers will have to find another way to control vermin.
  • Sportsmen, such as target-shooters and clay pigeon shooters. Such people, if they have to own guns, should not be allowed to keep them anywhere else except in secure, licenced gun stores.

I am sure there will be other defences of what I consider to be the indefensible. I should make it clear that I have no experience of guns, know no-one in this country who has been the victim of a gun attack, and have no motive other than what I see as an obvious rational response to such atrocities.