The Dorsser

The other day I was reading a book in the park when I noticed a middle-aged man sitting on the bench in front of me. His head was in his hands, his growing boldspot exposed to the passerby’s. His dress was shabby enough to evoke pity, but just not enough to assume the worst. He was under nourished, badly dressed and unshaven. And that is when they arrived, his two screaming boys. Both perfectly clean with carefully combed hair, one waving a pirate’s sword and the other with a wood-and-plastic bow and arrow. They came running passed with a little girl, also armed with a plastic sword.

As they stormed past, the exhausted father watched them with one eye, noticing that the little group ran up the stairs to the upper level of the park, followed by the girls parents. I presumed that he found that comforting to know that his boys were being watched by a parent as his head sunk back into his hands. I read on.

A few minutes later, the girl’s mother appears back downstairs and a deeper truth is revealed about the poor fellow. She tells him that they are leaving, and that his boys are still on the upper level. The father looks at her with his weary eyes and thanks her, followed by the words “they’re used to it”, to avoid being thought of as a slouching father. The girls’s mother gives a half smile and walks off. As soon as she is out of sight, he puts himself back into position.

A small fifteen minutes later, the boys entice the father to playing football on a small patch of green grass. Reluctantly he had dragged himself over there to join his enthusiastic boys, and as the game progressed, he starting getting a taste for it. The ball was being kicked from Indian to Pirate to Father who ran as fast as he could with the little feet of the boys chasing him on his heels. The father’s face lit up in enjoyment. But just as he kicked the ball to his little Indian we heard a whistle blow. The Parks Department: No football on the grass!

“Huh?” the poor fellow retorted, “we can’t play football on the grass?”

And then, of course, the inevitable shake of the head with authority. The man guided his little ones off the grass and into the playground area, dragging his heart behind him. Back to his bench. And there you have the whole truth of tragedy. When you are feeling down, you can not just be let down any further, it does not work like that. No, you need a small lifting of the spirits to be able to be properly pushed down lower. Life. It’s the small things.

It is almost impossible not to judge a translation on a sign when you see one. You look at the English, then back at the French, then back at the English. If German or Italian is there too, and you have the time, you compare those too. Often you will notice that it is not the same – the sense may be different, the implications could be different, but most often of all, the politiness level is rarely the same: French signs tend to assume you are an 18th century aristocrat taking the metro, while the English version assumes that you have a vocabulary of 20 words. And of course, sometimes, it is exactly the same.

But rarely do you really feel like one language “wins” by really nailing it, unless, that is, it is a name. If you didn’t already look at the accompanying picture, then this would be a good time to do so. Indeed. I propose that from now on, we only speak of  the Forest Eagle Owl in French. Le Grand-Duc du Népal, at your service.

(Picture taken in the Ménagerie, Paris V)

Every once in a while you see a situation which just can not end well. Whatever direction the unfolding chain of events takes you in your head, it always seems to go badly. Or worse. And it had come around again. This time, all it took was a simple cardboard invitation by the phone in the hotel room: Playstation available. Now any rational person will argue that you can just ignore it, just as you can change the TV channel from indecent material, but I feel that that fails to take into account the full scope of human psychology. A playstation. Here. Hum. That looks like a cloud drifting our way, it’s not such great weather out there you know…

Of course not everyone would be confronted with this problem. If you are in the hotel on business, all your thought process has to do is balance the re-reading of tomorrow’s presentation with a quick spin of Gran Turismo. Professional as you are, you quickly realise that you will be fine with few hours less of sleep. But that delicate balance does not work to well if you are there with your significant other. After all, even just the fact that you are in a hotel already suggests that you are out of your usual routine, that it is a moment of togetherness. You could even say that it is the stuff of the adventure of the relationship. And that, somehow, does not translated well into understanding the attraction of Grand Theft Auto. This is one of those cultural barriers, where what you want and what you feel you ought to do painfully conflicts.

Perhaps someday our culture will have changed. Children may learn to see that romantic getaways can involve participants having bags under the eyes at breakfast due to a heavy night of Need for Speed. And businessmen or visiting lecturers can open the morning meeting with the suggestion to postpone as they could not get around to revising their notes the night before due to a Call of Duty at the hotel. What a great society we would have become (erhm) if that came about, but we are not there yet.

What actually saves the day at the hotel is the fact that you have to go down to the lobby to get your Nintendo or Playstation. That could be just enough of a level of effort to protect the romantic harmony of travellers and perhaps even the quality of business meetings in town. But then, you can not help but wonder, why should you offer it at all if it only taunts the hotel guests? I think there is at least one possible answer here. Besides holidaying people and business travel, there is one other group of people stay in hotels and who would be thrilled to find the console: those unfortunate souls who just got booted out of their houses by their spouses. Well, they do exist. And for irony’s sake, let us hope that it was not for playing Tomb Raider…

Technological innovation has now led us to new ways of discovering that your neighbourhood is going down the drain. And this was in dire need. Successful regulation has led to buildings being kept, cleaners and impeccable garbage collecting led to tidy streets, and mass produced clothing has led to decently dressed people. So how are you supposed to know if your neighbourhood is still up there? You will never guess the latest indicator.

Sure you can turn to the town hall, the Mairie, and find an elabourate report on composition of the neighbourhood, the number of accidents, the crime rate and so on. But other than that it is going up or down for your area, you still need an opinion about how “bad” it was in the first place. It is not easy. I think I have stumbled upon a simpler method, a much simpler method: buy some cake.

Even if the pastry in the local bakery is not a give-away of the quality of the area, it may still prove very enlightening. Buy one of those little cakes and you might discover a whole new piece of depressing technology – the automatic change dispenser. Yes, really. The smiling lady who used to give you your change, has been replaced by a robot! Well, in at least one bakery in the 13th district. The coins you feed into it yourself, the bills the lady feed in on the other side. The staff has no access to the money. Why do we need a robot to intervene exactly at the moment of human contact? Or more from a business perspective, when the baker is supposed to be making idle chit-chat with the customer in the hope of keeping their custom? A moment of thought would suggest that it must be something which is more important than the continued return of the patron. Since mistakes would not be very costly at a bakery -perhaps a few cents here and there- it must be the threat of theft.

But theft? Is the staff suspected or is it the clientele which steals the pennies from the people that bake our bread? Besides the depressing thought, if that is not a sign that your neighbourhood is not what it was, then nothing is. This must also be the single easiest technological give-away not to move into an area. Future buyers take note: test the local baguette not only for the bread, but also to know who gives you the change!