Unstructured

Unsolicited health-related emails

At various points over the last year or so I’ve found myself signed up to something called SELF Daily and to the Patient Access mailing list. I think I’ve now unsubscribed from SELF, but still seem to be signed up to Patient Access, although I never do more than skim it. 

If you were previously feeling OK about being middle-aged, some of the emails I've received from these lists seem to have been designed to put you right about this forthwith. Here are some particular gems:

FFS.

Phthisis

I don’t really know much about the 11-plus exam, though both my parents took it in their day and successfully got in to their local grammar school. Buckinghamshire is one of the small number of English counties that retains the 11-plus and grammar schools (here's a list of them), so I’ve occasionally been aware of colleagues at the OU talking about it. Milton Keynes doesn’t have a grammar school, which I guess is in line with its ethos; also they’d probably stopped building new ones by the time MK was set up.

My clever mum was recently talking about her 11-plus - which, evidently, she took a year early – and related how she had clinched it by correctly spelling ‘phthisis’, despite it being a word she’d (unsurprisingly) never heard before. It’s a sufficiently unusual word to immediately take me back to my A-level English Literature syllabus, which included a number of T. S. Eliot poems, including Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, which is the only place I’ve seen this word (it means: consumptive, afflicted by a wasting disease). MedicineNet has it that it’s pronounced TIE-sis, which I’m sure is correct though it’s sufficiently obscure nowadays for anyone coming across it to pronounce it phonetically.

Anyway, Burbank. A seedy tale of something or other – like many of Eliot’s poems, it was clearly not intended to be comprehensible by the mere mortal. Snip is of the copy of it that I studied for my A-level, together with explanatory notes made at the time.

Estate agents' random capitalisation

What is wrong with them? Just a few snips from Rightmove:

And while we’re on the topic, what the hell is a ‘family bathroom’? One that comes with a couple of kids?

Old Zip Coon

Ruth and I ended up in a conversation recently about ‘Singing Together’, the BBC radio show for schools that we both remembered from our primary schools, though I don’t think that at my school we tuned in to the live show – as I recall, teachers used to record the episodes and then play them back to the class on a cassette player at a convenient time. This is an interesting BBC article about the series. Shame that so few episodes survive in the archives.

I remembered several songs from ‘Singing Together’ during my last year at primary school, including 'Johnny Todd' and the charmingly-named ‘Old Zip Coon’. I found a recording of a song of this name on YouTube, though with different words to the song I remember. Pancocojams notes that the stirring chorus beginning 'O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day' was the source of the much later song 'Zip A Dee Do Da', as written for the now-blacklisted 1946 Disney movie 'Song of the South'.

I *think* the version sung by Al Bernard in the video clip here is the one we sang with 'Singing Together', and the version #2 lyrics look about right. As a class I seem to remember OZC being voted our favourite song from that series’ collection. I also seem to remember that our class teacher Mrs Duff forgot to record the final episode where the winning song was announced, so we never found out the winner. She was quite apologetic.

Nest, purveyor of cute/threatening products

Ruth purchased a 'Nest Protect' smoke alarm a while back, part of the Nest range of Smart Home products (I believe Nest has since been taken over by Google). It works on the house WiFi and links to a phone app, which helpfully sends a notification to your smartphone if your house is ablaze. As per this a while back when some cooking had created a certain amount of smoke that had filtered out to the hallway. The alarm itself is a lot politer than old-style smoke alarms – it doesn’t just go off in crude fashion, but first a voice cautions that the smoke levels mean it will soon go off, and warns that it’s quite loud, giving you about enough time to shriek and open all the windows.

'Nest Protect' in our hallway

Helpful notifications from the Nest app

Was somewhat alarmed to receive a similar ‘smoke clearing’ message the other week while sitting in my MK flat. Texted Ruth asking if she had set the house on fire, but it turned out she’d just overheated some butter while sautéeing potatoes for her dinner.

Ruth has resisted buying any further Nest products, particularly the cute but faintly sinister Nest Cam, which keeps an eye on your home, meaning, presumably, that you could potentially watch live footage of your home being burgled from the helpless vantage point of a holiday in Tenerife. As, possibly, could the Cam's previous owner, if you've made the mistake of buying a used one. Although some Smart Home products sound intriguing, this American couple's experience is enough to put you off having a fully-featured smart home. Similar to the media stuff about Alexa emitting random maniacal laughter.