Defreitas is a Portuguese name & I’m guessing New Bedford is one of those places, like the state of Rhode Island or Provincetown, Mass., with a large Portuguese population. The Portuguese make very good sausages (linguica) in Provincetown, but overall I’m disappointed at their lack of – wait for it – culinary influence.
Dearie, do autumn raspberries taste the same as July raspberries?
Yes, that part of the coast (in Massachusetts near Rhode Island) abounds in Portuguese names. I believe that in the heyday of the fishing industry here a lot of people came from Portugal and the Azores and stayed.
Around here (around our country house, in Westport, in that same area) a kind of bramble that bears fruit in late July and is clearly a close relative of the usual raspberry. The fruit is delicious but a little watery, not good for making jam and should be eaten promptly. Called wineberries, although I don’t think anyone makes wine from them.
The city today was full of young persons besporting themselves in the sun, and wearing bright t-shirts announcing “Selwyn Fresher”, “Wolfson Fresher” and the like.
A colleague told me this week that he’s just had a salutary experience: one of his new research students is his first born in the 1990s. I can only conclude that he’s not been noticing the birth decade of his undergraduates for some time.
Our kitchen garden has lately been assaulted by deer, presumably partly because many of the field crops have been harvested. In my youth you saw deer only in the Highlands, the New Forest, or Exmoor, but now they are everywhere. The local pest variety is Muntjac. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntjac
They used to have deer parks in the old days. There’s a Turner painting at the Tate, The Deer At Petworth. In Wolf Hall there’s a lot about deer parks: the king’s 15-year-old son, the Duke of Richmond, in Yorkshire, complains that he hasn’t got a deer park to take his friends hunting. I think Richmond Park may have been a deer park too. Symmetrically, my cousin, an Oxford professor, always has a lot of muntjac in his garden in north Oxford. I’d never heard of them until he & his wife started putting them on their Christmas cards.
Alma, my daughter, is now planning to study philosophy as an undergraduate. She knows she can get in in Norway, but she’s also applying to both Edinburgh & St Andrews. I really liked the Cambridge course description, but she doesn’t think she’d get in there.
The Scots university fees are nuts. It’s free for Scottish applicants and all EU applicants…except those applying from England & Whales who have to pay tons & tons (like Norwegians). I blame Alex Salmon for this.
Ask your Oxford cuz to take you some photos of the deer herd that Magdalen keeps. Handsome. We were staring at them a few years ago and a retired Fellow strolled up, a Canadian, and told us all about them and lots more about Oxford. Very agreeable. Worcester Coll used to keep a flock of wallabies, but gave ’em up after one drowned while skating on their lake. (I’m sure I’ve told you that story before, but I am very fond of it, so do forgive me. I picture a flock of wallabies in Rev Walker poses.) http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/R/4399/artist_name/Sir%20Henry%20Raeburn/record_id/2469#.UGdLOrQTtjc
Anyway, my daughter read philosophy. In summary “Aristotle is the man”. I chided her that au bloody contraire, David Hume was the Daddy. She wouldn’t have it. And she had legit claims to knowing far more about it than I did, though I did point out that she knew Aristotle only in translation, and that his physics was rubbish. She pointed out that I knew his physics only in translation. Hey ho.
“she doesn’t think she’d get in there”: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Somebody has to get in. A youngster can always apply and let the admissions tutors decide whether she and the demands of the course are a good match. Sometimes, of course, they’ll decide that even if they are a good match there aren’t enough places to offer that particular applicant one of them. Well, falling off a horse occasionally isn’t the end of the world. Mind you, and don’t let a whisper of this get around, Edinburgh is a far finer city than Cambridge. And I’ll say this for St Andrews: everyone I know who went there seems to be tremendously loyal and affectionate towards the University, which is less true of Edinburgh I think. Perhaps that’s a price it pays for being in a city rather than a wee seaside burgh.
That Scottish policy looks odd. Well, paying no fees isn’t odd, and I’m pretty ure that EU rules require that other EU citizens have to be treated as the country’s own residents. I don’t know why Norway isn’t part of that, since we use to opt in on everything that doesn’t directly affect the prize of butter.
Neither do I know why those EU rules don’t apply to other UK citizens. It might be an internal British affair that the EU has nothing to say about, or it might.be that the policy hasn’t been tried in the EU court. But it looks like something that would seem rational when England/Wales(/Northern Ireland?) inroduced/extended university fees. I assume this applied also to Scottish and foreign students, and the Scottish government reciprocated — maybe out of fear of having to pay education also for a large share of English students.
I guess it comes down to that for mutual agreements to work, there has to be a fair balance between the partners, and i guess the EU rules were introduced when policies were similar in all or most countries.
She applied to Oxford in spite of getting less than universal encouragement from her school teachers. (I had told her that I hoped she would apply to Edinburgh and St Andrews too. But she didn’t, going instead for Bristol and I can’t remember where else. As you may know the candidates are allowed to apply in any one year to a maximum of five British universities.)
When she came back from her visit to Oxford for her interviews and tests she told us two things. (i) It had been very tough and, alas, she thought they wouldn’t accept her. (ii) But she was glad that she’d applied because the whole thing had been exhilarating, so she had no regrets.
But it would seem that she had shone, and they accepted her (subject to her A level results, of course). She enjoyed the course and did very well at it.
Oh, well, she’s obviously brilliant. For what its worth I didn’t like the Oxford internet description of its philosophy faculty & curriculum. It goes on about how it’s one of the best in the world etc. but isn’t helpful, whereas the Cambridge one even gives a reading list, in order of hardness, to get you through the interview. What they put in the glossy brochures isn’t necessarily the same as taking a 3-year course there, however.
Trond, I agree it appears balmy. Scotland’s relationship with the EU & its rules is a big question mark at the moment. If they withdraw from the UK they have to negotiate new EU entry terms.
The daughter didn’t want to apply to Cambridge – she grew up here. Apart from her Aussie spells of course: it didn’t cross her mind to go to Australia for a degree, and I kept schtum – Lord knows what it might have cost, and we’d never have seen her. It’s not like some young Viking studying on the Scottish east coast, who can practically row home with a westerly gale behind her.
My daughter wants to move to Australia; all based on a soap opera she used to watch when she was 5, about a horse ranch. I’m just hoping she doesn’t meet any handsome young jackeroo types or we’ll never see her again.
Well, it does indeed look balmy, but my point was rather that the balmyness may have been forced upon them by others. A policy of no fees for anyone is reasonable but probably too expensive. No fees for one’s own citizens and a fee for foreign students, often fully or partly paid for by grant from the student’s home country, is a reasonable alternative. A mutual agreement with other countries not to take fees from eachother’s citizens is also reasonable. But for the citizens of a country that won’t join the agreement and thus will have to pay more than their fellow students, this will seem utterly unfair and stupid.
It’s sneakier than that. A student from Cardiff will be paying £9,000 a year at Bristol University or at Edinburgh University. That doesn’t seem unfair and stupid. It’s only when she arrives at Edinburgh and finds her new roommates from Paris, Düsseldorf and Glasgow are studying for free that the balminess will hit her (or her parents).
I know, it does look unfair and balmy. But those Glaswegians have their education for free in the same way as your daughter would in Norway, and les parisiens & die dusseldörfer are given a free education in Scotland in exchange for the Scottish students to have the same in France and Germany. Since Scottish students aren’t given a free education in England&Wales, English&Welsh students aren’t given one in Scotland, which is really stupid, but the fault for the balmyness really falls on the government who won’t play their part.
Now, I don’t know enough EU law to know if the Scottish government really can take fees from students from the rest of the UK, since the rest-UK arguably treats foreign students no worse than they treat their own. But it seems obvious that a government can’t keep paying for students from a neighbouring country if it’s not reciprocated. if a country has to accept a heavily skewed arrangement, and Scotland has to pay up in the end, it would seem that when the law was written nobody could conceive that a European government would make public education forbiddingly expensive.
Balmy as parts of Scotland often are, the parliament is typically barmy.
When my daughter was gap-yearing in eastern Oz she had a spell at a dude ranch sort of a place in the outback, where she did menial chores in return for the chance to do a lot of riding. She was delighted with the deal.
The point is, you should blame Tony Blair for the fees more than Alex Salmond for responding to them. And then you should blame David Cameron for not giving Nick Clegg a victory on fees and Nick Clegg for not demanding one with more fervour.
For the Norwegian policy, I don’t know what’s going on. I think the Norwegian government pays school fees for a large number of approved educations abroad.
“… not one of forty characteristics of the City of Troy and the Trojan War plain fit the Mediterranean setting, but they all fit the plains near Cambridge and the Gog Magog Hills, …”
A Bad Guide
We look down on dogs, cats look down on us, and pigs is equals.
That’s why we call them pigs.
We just call them pigs because they won’t take up jogging.
On the Merits of Supervising a Friend’s Cat and Garden while She is Absent: autumn raspberries! Yum.
Shopkeeper rescues robber.
Defreitas is a Portuguese name & I’m guessing New Bedford is one of those places, like the state of Rhode Island or Provincetown, Mass., with a large Portuguese population. The Portuguese make very good sausages (linguica) in Provincetown, but overall I’m disappointed at their lack of – wait for it – culinary influence.
Dearie, do autumn raspberries taste the same as July raspberries?
Not as good, a little blander, but good enough to enjoy.
Yes, that part of the coast (in Massachusetts near Rhode Island) abounds in Portuguese names. I believe that in the heyday of the fishing industry here a lot of people came from Portugal and the Azores and stayed.
Around here (around our country house, in Westport, in that same area) a kind of bramble that bears fruit in late July and is clearly a close relative of the usual raspberry. The fruit is delicious but a little watery, not good for making jam and should be eaten promptly. Called wineberries, although I don’t think anyone makes wine from them.
Time rolls by.
The city today was full of young persons besporting themselves in the sun, and wearing bright t-shirts announcing “Selwyn Fresher”, “Wolfson Fresher” and the like.
A colleague told me this week that he’s just had a salutary experience: one of his new research students is his first born in the 1990s. I can only conclude that he’s not been noticing the birth decade of his undergraduates for some time.
Our kitchen garden has lately been assaulted by deer, presumably partly because many of the field crops have been harvested. In my youth you saw deer only in the Highlands, the New Forest, or Exmoor, but now they are everywhere. The local pest variety is Muntjac. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntjac
They used to have deer parks in the old days. There’s a Turner painting at the Tate, The Deer At Petworth. In Wolf Hall there’s a lot about deer parks: the king’s 15-year-old son, the Duke of Richmond, in Yorkshire, complains that he hasn’t got a deer park to take his friends hunting. I think Richmond Park may have been a deer park too. Symmetrically, my cousin, an Oxford professor, always has a lot of muntjac in his garden in north Oxford. I’d never heard of them until he & his wife started putting them on their Christmas cards.
Alma, my daughter, is now planning to study philosophy as an undergraduate. She knows she can get in in Norway, but she’s also applying to both Edinburgh & St Andrews. I really liked the Cambridge course description, but she doesn’t think she’d get in there.
The Scots university fees are nuts. It’s free for Scottish applicants and all EU applicants…except those applying from England & Whales who have to pay tons & tons (like Norwegians). I blame Alex Salmon for this.
Ask your Oxford cuz to take you some photos of the deer herd that Magdalen keeps. Handsome. We were staring at them a few years ago and a retired Fellow strolled up, a Canadian, and told us all about them and lots more about Oxford. Very agreeable. Worcester Coll used to keep a flock of wallabies, but gave ’em up after one drowned while skating on their lake. (I’m sure I’ve told you that story before, but I am very fond of it, so do forgive me. I picture a flock of wallabies in Rev Walker poses.)
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/R/4399/artist_name/Sir%20Henry%20Raeburn/record_id/2469#.UGdLOrQTtjc
Anyway, my daughter read philosophy. In summary “Aristotle is the man”. I chided her that au bloody contraire, David Hume was the Daddy. She wouldn’t have it. And she had legit claims to knowing far more about it than I did, though I did point out that she knew Aristotle only in translation, and that his physics was rubbish. She pointed out that I knew his physics only in translation. Hey ho.
“she doesn’t think she’d get in there”: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Somebody has to get in. A youngster can always apply and let the admissions tutors decide whether she and the demands of the course are a good match. Sometimes, of course, they’ll decide that even if they are a good match there aren’t enough places to offer that particular applicant one of them. Well, falling off a horse occasionally isn’t the end of the world. Mind you, and don’t let a whisper of this get around, Edinburgh is a far finer city than Cambridge. And I’ll say this for St Andrews: everyone I know who went there seems to be tremendously loyal and affectionate towards the University, which is less true of Edinburgh I think. Perhaps that’s a price it pays for being in a city rather than a wee seaside burgh.
Many thanks, Dearie, I’m forwarding your comment to Alma. Did your daughter like her course? Where did she go?
I do love that Walker painting. We may have discussed it before. I remember googling the location and seeing a photo of the lake.
I hadn’t heard about the wallabies, I’m going to look them up.
That Scottish policy looks odd. Well, paying no fees isn’t odd, and I’m pretty ure that EU rules require that other EU citizens have to be treated as the country’s own residents. I don’t know why Norway isn’t part of that, since we use to opt in on everything that doesn’t directly affect the prize of butter.
Neither do I know why those EU rules don’t apply to other UK citizens. It might be an internal British affair that the EU has nothing to say about, or it might.be that the policy hasn’t been tried in the EU court. But it looks like something that would seem rational when England/Wales(/Northern Ireland?) inroduced/extended university fees. I assume this applied also to Scottish and foreign students, and the Scottish government reciprocated — maybe out of fear of having to pay education also for a large share of English students.
I guess it comes down to that for mutual agreements to work, there has to be a fair balance between the partners, and i guess the EU rules were introduced when policies were similar in all or most countries.
She applied to Oxford in spite of getting less than universal encouragement from her school teachers. (I had told her that I hoped she would apply to Edinburgh and St Andrews too. But she didn’t, going instead for Bristol and I can’t remember where else. As you may know the candidates are allowed to apply in any one year to a maximum of five British universities.)
When she came back from her visit to Oxford for her interviews and tests she told us two things. (i) It had been very tough and, alas, she thought they wouldn’t accept her. (ii) But she was glad that she’d applied because the whole thing had been exhilarating, so she had no regrets.
But it would seem that she had shone, and they accepted her (subject to her A level results, of course). She enjoyed the course and did very well at it.
Oh, well, she’s obviously brilliant. For what its worth I didn’t like the Oxford internet description of its philosophy faculty & curriculum. It goes on about how it’s one of the best in the world etc. but isn’t helpful, whereas the Cambridge one even gives a reading list, in order of hardness, to get you through the interview. What they put in the glossy brochures isn’t necessarily the same as taking a 3-year course there, however.
Trond, I agree it appears balmy. Scotland’s relationship with the EU & its rules is a big question mark at the moment. If they withdraw from the UK they have to negotiate new EU entry terms.
The daughter didn’t want to apply to Cambridge – she grew up here. Apart from her Aussie spells of course: it didn’t cross her mind to go to Australia for a degree, and I kept schtum – Lord knows what it might have cost, and we’d never have seen her. It’s not like some young Viking studying on the Scottish east coast, who can practically row home with a westerly gale behind her.
My daughter wants to move to Australia; all based on a soap opera she used to watch when she was 5, about a horse ranch. I’m just hoping she doesn’t meet any handsome young jackeroo types or we’ll never see her again.
Well, it does indeed look balmy, but my point was rather that the balmyness may have been forced upon them by others. A policy of no fees for anyone is reasonable but probably too expensive. No fees for one’s own citizens and a fee for foreign students, often fully or partly paid for by grant from the student’s home country, is a reasonable alternative. A mutual agreement with other countries not to take fees from eachother’s citizens is also reasonable. But for the citizens of a country that won’t join the agreement and thus will have to pay more than their fellow students, this will seem utterly unfair and stupid.
It’s sneakier than that. A student from Cardiff will be paying £9,000 a year at Bristol University or at Edinburgh University. That doesn’t seem unfair and stupid. It’s only when she arrives at Edinburgh and finds her new roommates from Paris, Düsseldorf and Glasgow are studying for free that the balminess will hit her (or her parents).
I know, it does look unfair and balmy. But those Glaswegians have their education for free in the same way as your daughter would in Norway, and les parisiens & die dusseldörfer are given a free education in Scotland in exchange for the Scottish students to have the same in France and Germany. Since Scottish students aren’t given a free education in England&Wales, English&Welsh students aren’t given one in Scotland, which is really stupid, but the fault for the balmyness really falls on the government who won’t play their part.
Now, I don’t know enough EU law to know if the Scottish government really can take fees from students from the rest of the UK, since the rest-UK arguably treats foreign students no worse than they treat their own. But it seems obvious that a government can’t keep paying for students from a neighbouring country if it’s not reciprocated. if a country has to accept a heavily skewed arrangement, and Scotland has to pay up in the end, it would seem that when the law was written nobody could conceive that a European government would make public education forbiddingly expensive.
Balmy as parts of Scotland often are, the parliament is typically barmy.
When my daughter was gap-yearing in eastern Oz she had a spell at a dude ranch sort of a place in the outback, where she did menial chores in return for the chance to do a lot of riding. She was delighted with the deal.
The point is, you should blame Tony Blair for the fees more than Alex Salmond for responding to them. And then you should blame David Cameron for not giving Nick Clegg a victory on fees and Nick Clegg for not demanding one with more fervour.
For the Norwegian policy, I don’t know what’s going on. I think the Norwegian government pays school fees for a large number of approved educations abroad.
Here’s a balmy bit of Scotland.
http://www.portpatrick.me.uk/public-gardens-scotland.asp
About studying in Cambridge – it’s so historical.
“… not one of forty characteristics of the City of Troy and the Trojan War plain fit the Mediterranean setting, but they all fit the plains near Cambridge and the Gog Magog Hills, …”
Ain’t the web wonderful?