Amazing fun

A little while ago I had cause to complain about the Surrey Library catalogue not distinguishing easy read versions of books from the real McCoy. And then about Amazon for economy with the truth about the location of some of their partners, partners who like to masquerade as English when they are not, thus suggesting earlier delivery times than you actually get. And by the time you find this out you are at the checkout and can't be bothered to change.

A rather different problem this time involving their French branch, a problem which was resolved quite satisfactorily but which resulted in no less than seven emails to me. It all started out with an article about 'La Dame aux Camélias' in the NYRB, an article on the occasion of a new biography of the original dame and a new translation of the book, an article which sufficiently intrigued me for me to want to read the thing in the original, literary French of this era being fairly easy going. So off to Amazon.France, being confused by a French branch within Amazon.England on the way. Amazon.France offer quite a lot of versions of the book in question and I try for a hard back. Not available to you sir, try again. Try for one of the larger paper back versions, this one, as it happens, from the UK operation called the Book Depository, to realise, rather too late, that 'La Dama de las Camelias' is probably in Spanish rather than French, so no good at all. So I cancel the order, which seems to work and which generates a flurry of emails. Once this has settled down and I am reasonably confident that the cancelled order has indeed settled down I try again, settling this time for a Livre de Poche edition from Amazon.France proper; cheap and cheerful and which arrived a few days later. I shall report on the inside of the book in due course.

A case where confusion over exactly from whom you were buying the book was compounded by confusion over exactly what language it was in. Must remember to check my bank statement in due course.

A confusion which coincided with a confusion about grass widows, a term I first came across many years ago in Sholokov's (Михаи́л Алекса́ндрович Шо́лохов to the cognoscenti)  'And quiet flows the Don'. I had vaguely, without bothering to check, thought that it must be an agriculturally flavoured term for a wife temporarily without her husband, in this particular book because of service in the army. Then the other day, I came across a footnote in a French novel which told me that the English locution came from a corruption of the French word grâce. Not quite clear how this might be and my Micro Robert does not help. So off to the OED to find that grass widow is from the old Teutonic and is littered through old & young Middle Dutch, old English and so on. There are also straw widows. So clearly nothing to do with grâce and probably nothing to do with graisse or grasse either, although one could dream up stories explaining how the locution came to mean what it does for all of them. But OED seems to think that it may have come from the time when one used to put work horses out for a spell of rest & recreation in a grassy field, a time before the meaning focused on retirement to the exclusion of other forms of recreation. Which will do, even if a bit forced.

PS: forgot to record an outing on a Bullingdon yesterday, from Concert Hall Approach 1 to Smith Square, via Aldwych and Trafalgar Square. Many buses flavouring the air with their fumes as you wait behind them. No hop charge (as opposed to the day charge), so less than half an hour but, sadly, the TFL activity log no longer displays one's hop durations so one can no longer track activity in fine detail.