APAPS 7: Orthographics or The Songbird in the Teapot

The pre-walk publicity went out as follows:-

The next APAPS walk will start at 7am Wednesday 10th August on the Agua Belas tracks. Breakfast will be at Snack Bar Terinho Pêra e Fica afterwards, approx 9.30 am. Those of you who had breakfast there on 6th July will remember how good it was. I think that we can be reasonably confident of it being just as good again.

A walk of some 8.50 kms, in two parts – 4.15 kms on the flat, 4.35 kms climbs up and back down about 200 metres of steady ascent. If anyone doesn´t fancy doing the ascent bit, there is an opt-out whereby they could stay on the flat and meet the climbers on their way back; a map will be provided on the day.

No sooner was the notice out than the corrective emails began to come in. Some people might categorise them as being pedantic, but your blogger prefers diplomacy and calls them erudite  (!!!!!). Basically, I was being taught that the place names should have been Águas Belas and Pára. On the photographic evidence, I have no grounds for complaint.

 

But more of this anon.

The Starters assembled on a cool morning perfect for gentle strolling,

 

although it has to be said that the ladies´ choreographic technique was less co-ordinated than in the past.

 ( From the Archives )

More practice required.

The Track

The Statistics

Total Distance: 8.40 kms.  Moving Time: 1 hr 55 mins. Average Moving Speed: 4.4 kph. Total Climb: something like 448 metres. All completed the full track, the easy option being spurned once more.

Anyway, I had ample time during the walk to learn more from my erudite friend about accentuation in written Portuguese ( eat your heart out, Aristotle, no ancient philosophy this morning). If I understood it correctly, "pára" was the official 3rd person singular, present tense of the  verb “parar” prior to the Acordo Ortográfico de 1990, but now the official word is "para". It seems that not everyone agreed that it was a good idea to drop the accent because now the verb could be confused with the preposition "para". Fair enough, I said, and asked if the accent had been  there before 1990 precisely in order to distinguish the verbal  “para” from the preposition “para”, or was it there for some another reason? The question remained unanswered. Never mind, and the walk otherwise passed without incident as far as I know.

Back at Café Terinho, dead on 9.30 am as planned, our breakfast orders were taken by the ever-welcoming Ana. While we waited for the food, Myriam sized people up for their Anniversary T-shirts and Paul added field notes to his Compendium of AWWWs´ Vital Statistics.

 

Considerable debate arose on whether to measure all the way round or just across the... ahem… front.

Food on the table, the meal was of course super – as delicious as it was colourful.

Janet, ever solicitous, gave Paul an extra egg to fortify him for his drive up to Lisboa that morning.

Since Ana has banned wi-fi from her Snack Bar, it is now possible to have a proper topic of conversation over a meal and for this we were indebted to Myriam who delighted us – whenever, that is, she could be heard over the frequent shouts of “more toast!” – with anecdotes drawing on  Chinese tea drinking practices. The first of these was the tragic story of the prized songbird whose owner, at a birdsong contest in a tea shop, popped it into an empty teapot for safekeeping, only for the tea boy to lift the lid and fill the pot up with freshly boiled water. So now serious Chinese tea drinkers prop the lid open to show when they want a top-up.

The second one instructed us on how to indicate gratitude when someone pours more tea into your cup at a Chinese dinner. This ritual derives from the time of the Qianlong Emperor (1735 – 1796). Now I don´t really have the heart to repeat the whole story here, because a leaked extract from the recent OFSWAGS´ inspection report on APAPS (as yet not published in full) (see WAPAPS blog for APAPS 6) included a remark to the effect that these blogs are long on waffle – (for heaven´s sake! “Waffle”? well, I ask you!) – but the gist is that the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty had the habit of  going around his country in disguise to find out what his people were thinking and saying. By the way, Qianlong is pronounced Ch´ian-lung and Qing is pronounced Ch´ing, but for reasons best known to themselves and the Russians the Chinese dropped the Wade-Giles system of alphabetical spelling in the 1960s and developed something called Pinyin. So Ch´ became Q.That was when Peking stopped being called Peking and became Beijing and the Giant Panda suddenly ceased being Ta-hsiung-mao and became Daxiongmao. The Chinese equivalent I suppose to the Acordo Ortográfico changes in Portugal. But, I ask you, how on earth can anyone expect the letter Q  to represent the sound Ch ?

Now, the Qing (the Ch´ing)  were not even (Han ) Chinese but Manchu Mongols – invaders from the North - and Qianlong was not even the guy´s real name (which was Aisin Gioro Hongli) but was the Era Name  for his emperorship - his ceremonial name if you like. He also had a third name, his Temple Name, which was Qing Gaozong, but that need not detain us. Because, you can read all about him at this link  https://g.co/kgs/lyH7NH a link which includes among other essential facts the information that he had no less than 2 or 3 Empresses, 7 Imperial Noble Consorts, 5 Noble Consorts, 6 Consorts, 6 Imperial Concubines, 13 Noble Ladies, and 7 First Class, Second Class and Other Female Attendants.  No wonder he needed to nip off in disguise occasionally to get away from it all. Which is what he did, and it was when he was away, keeping up the pretence of being ordinary when mixing with ordinary folk, that he would pour tea for his mates (his courtiers in real life). Of course, they could not respond with the customary kow-tows in acknowledgement of Imperial favour – that would have given the game away – so they would tap the table ritualistically, three times with the middle three fingers of the right hand – the 2nd and 4th fingers representing the kow-tow-er´s two hands on the ground and the 3rd finger being his forehead touching the dust.

Through time, there have been several other folk legends of rulers going out among their people in disguise. Alfred The Great when he was rehearsing for The Great Bake-Off, Richard the Lionheart in the Robin Hood stories, Harun-al-Rashid Caliph of Baghdad,  the Guidman o´ Ballengeich aka James V of Scotland and the father of Mary Queen of Scots, among them. In these modern times, King Abdullah of Jordan is reputed to be partial to donning his leathers and zooming off round his country on his Harley- Davidson.

But I find it hard to go on…that slur of “waffle” has cut too deep…………………………………………………. ”Me a waffler? Un remplissageur? Moi?.”

And the obligatory closing quotation:-

“The human mind´s ability to rationalise its own shortcomings into virtues is unlimited.”