What's the alternative?

Next time I'm going to suggest I shop n'stay.

Collateral damage

The recent judgment against the Metropolitan Police for a catalogue of errors leading to the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in a London Underground station on 22 July 2005 doesn't even touch on their botched attempts to cover themselves subsequently, by trying to blame the victim. After hearing that despite the judgment, Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair feels no responsibility for anything his staff did or didn't do, I happened upon these lines in a book by Jose Saramago ("The Double"): "The best way to achieve a universal exoneration is to conclude that since everyone is to blame, no-one is guilty."

How not to use a dictionary

I pass this sign every day on the way to work and it illustrates a few perils of looking things up in dictionaries and/or using babelfish or other automatic translation programmes. Firstly, looking up each word separately in a set expression - the original should have hyphens, i.e. "prêt-à-porter"; secondly not checking for differences between nouns ("un prêt" would indeed be a loan) and adjectives/adverbs; thirdly not realising that "porter" can mean wear as well as carry, which you would have thought, in context, they might have guessed from the long list of English equivalents of "porter"; and fourthly, a basic structural word-order issue which makes "prêt-à-porter homme" in French into "men's ready-to-wear" in English. I have probably made equally bad mistakes myself in various languages but you would think someone running a business would check before paying for a sign!
However, while most of us would translate "retouche", in this context, as "alterations", I quite like the idea of a workshop of final improvement!

Brilliant Europe

I don't seem to have been able to draw breath for a month, so it's a good thing we are having a 4-day weekend with the Toussaint (All Saints) holiday yesterday and "bridging" today. I therefore took myself to one of the Europalia exhibitions because although these last until February, I know that if I don't make an effort now, Europalia will have been and gone again and I won't have gone to any of the exhibitions. This year (Europalia is held every other year) instead of featuring a single country, because of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome the theme is all the countries of Europe.

The one I managed to see is called "Brilliant Europe - Jewels from the European Courts" and was very interesting although there weren't that many things I would have liked to take away with me - a game I always play at exhibitions! Top of the list would probably be the ruby engagement ring of the Italian queens - I suppose this means it "belongs" to the House of Savoy - and a ruby and rock-crystal-topped "smelling salts" bottle that belonged to the Empress Eugénie. Naturally neither of these is illustrated in the photos on the website, although there is a pretty diamond ring there that I don't remember the history of.

There were also some lovely portraits including this one of the same Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and the famous one - or rather a copy - of Sissi (the one on the left on here); I hadn't noticed the diamond stars in her hair before, apparently she launched a fashion for them. I just checked Eugénie's real name, which was given in the audioguide as Eugenia de Montijo, and it appears she was born Doña Maria Eugenia Ignatia Augustina de Palafox-Kirkpatrick. What a splendid name!