We’re off again, this time for just a couple of days, to help with the launching of a 17-year-old, on her way off to University in Britain. This is our third launching of a 17-year-old this season (all girls, as it happens). Proof enough that the next generation is well on its way. No wait, let me count here: that’s one, um, two and – eeuw, the next after the next generation. Now, that is depressing.
Meanwhile for entertainment while we are away, he’s a squib from the ever dependable Michael Quinion (link), except somehow he forgot to mention Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play, Albert’s Bridge:
GO FORTH When somebody says some job is like painting the Forth Bridge they mean it's never-ending. Although the famous railway bridge across the Firth of Forth north of Edinburgh was opened in 1890, recent research by the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the metaphor first appears in print only in 1955. But the symbolism of the endless task was around long before then. As early as 1894, it was reported in the Glasgow Herald: "The Forth bridge receives a new coat of paint every three years, and one-third is done each year, so that the painters are continually at work." In 1901, US papers commented "The Forth bridge is constantly being repainted" and the factette was repeated down the years until it was embedded in the public mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Now an expensive refit is using epoxy resin and polyurethane coverings in place of traditional paint (though still in the same rust-red colour). Last week, a BBC television programme reported that the finish is so much more resistant to the rain, gales, salt spray and ice that batter the bridge that when the refit ends in 2009, nobody will need to paint the bridge for 30 years. But how long will it take for the cliché to die?
And come to think of it, I remember hearing somewhere that the Eskimos really don’t have any more words for snow than we do.
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