Discontinuous Blogging

It’s been a while since my last posting. The last week has been spent on golf courses - mostly hauling my overweight bulk around St Andrews and watching golf as it should be played in the 134th Open Championship, but on three occasions actually swinging clubs myself on lesser courses.

The journey to Scotland in the ancient Jeep added the word “discontinuous” to my vocabulary and I now use it all the time. You’ll find the word on a road sign on the M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow where motorists are advised of a “discontinuous hard shoulder”. It sounds like a golfing injury of the sort that might afflict the likes of Fred Couples or Jose Maria Olazabal but checking on Google I find dozens of references to discontinuous hard shoulders on Britain’s major roads.

The elder brother provided a good example of discontinuous postcard writing. Having had a good day of golf and wine with the two Jims and myself he retired to his room in the monastic student hall of residence where we were staying at St Andrews to write a postcard for an elderly American friend. He aimed to describe the adulation being bestowed on Jack Nicklaus who was making his last appearance as a competitor at an Open Championship. Sadly the elder brother fell asleep half way through a particularly convoluted sentence and at breakfast the next morning he had to admit that he could find no logical conclusion to the sentence. This has all the hallmarks of a great New Statesman competition and maybe we should try to copyright the idea: “provide a conclusion (in not more than 100 words) to the sentence in progress. Winners will receive a bottle of Famous Grouse…” etc., etc.

Arriving home from the golf I found that the “bantam that the fox killed” (see passim), had resurrected herself in a discontinuous sort of way. Apparently the fox had killed a similar fowl and ours had been hiding herself away for a couple of weeks sitting on an egg or something. The wife is keen to purchase an “Omlet” or “Egglu” fox-proof chicken coop so that we can start to rear our own (and have fresh eggs).

Discontinuity has also been affecting the wife’s goldfish. The pond in our garden is a contained space and there has been much celebration of the quantity of newborn fish spotted recently and respectively by the wife, the cat and the local heron. The trouble is that every time she checks the number of fish in the pond (small and large) she comes up with a different total, sometimes very much less and then, later, very much more. All too complicated, but might there be commercial possibilities here? I must start working on an outline business plan for Ranting Goldfish Hatcheries, PLC.