Paka

I have just wandered down to the beach, as one does, in order to investigate the possibility of a nice cool drink in the evening sun.

The cool drink, in the form of a large mug of iced lime tea, was forthcoming at the princely sum of 30p (50cUS) but the evening sun was not.

After several days of glorious brightness from the heavens the late afternoon, when I chose to forego writing training reports in my hotel room, greeted me with grey clouds.

Still, it was cool. It was pleasant. It was exhausting.

I am not now accustomed to walking so far. The distance must have been well over two hundred metres of exacting conditions—sand and such, that would sap the energy of the fittest person.

It may have come to your attention by now that the words ‘fit’ and ‘Leyman’ are uneasy bedfellows.

However, let it not be said that rigorous conditions such as these will deter an ardent explorer of strange and exotic places such as I.

At one point I even stopped en route, as they say, to take a photograph of some flowers growing in the sand. Thus the flowers are recorded for posterity. There are, I suspect, unkind persons out there who may suggest that I also stopped to gasp for breath but this is not the case.

This is a long, sandy beach. It is fringed partially with Coconut Palms and also some odd-looking trees whose roots begin up near the top and cascade out to dig into the sand away from the main trunk.

The World is full of peculiar things if we stop and look for them.

Those flowers, for example. They, too, are growing on sand. What nutrients could they possibly get from well-washed sand? Yet they thrive and flower.

Why do they flower? I observed no insects near them but maybe there are insect at other times of day. There also appeared to be no seeds. So why have flowers?

I feel I should talk in hushed tones, thus pretending to be David Attenborough.

The sea is calm. There is only the slightest ruffling of the surface and almost no surf. It is, possibly, the most surfless sea I have ever witnessed. Is it the lull before the storm? Are we about to be inundated with a tropical downpour that will threaten to sweep the hotel and all of us hapless patrons out to sea?

Unlikely, but I am donning my waterproof underwear just in case. No point in being unprepared, is there?

And so back to the room. There is work to be done. Preparation for tomorrow’s class. It will not teach itself and, sadly, it is yet to become an automatic function.

Perhaps there will come a day when I can imagine my lesson in some sort of helmet that the students can then fit on their heads and absorb the information directly into the brain.

Maybe this is not so farfetched. We already have speech recognition although they have yet to build a software programme that recognises my particular speech patterns!

Perhaps it will not be too far into the future when they build something that will convert brainwaves into usable communication devices.

Of course this will need to be used with considerable care; reading some people’s comments on ‘Facebook’ may invoke some sort of unwarranted mental exclamation that may get printed before you have a chance to amend the comment.

On balance it may be better to stick to the keyboard even if some commentators on ‘Facebook’ would benefit from the improved English that an automatic system might provide.

That brings me to my final thought.

I have been called a ‘Grammar Nazi’. That’s good. I regard that as a compliment. If people mangle the English language then they deserve a pat on the back of the head with a large volume of ‘The Concise Oxford Dictionary’ travelling at pace.

But.

Does this happen with other languages?

Do the Germans have ‘Grammar Nazis’, for example—although, in all conscience, they could probably benefit from an alternative name!

What about Chinese? One wonders if you get the characters in the wrong sequence have you changed a political comment into an order for shark fin soup?

Peculiarities abound. You just have to look.