Translating is a pretty lonely business and one can go for hours and hours without speaking to anyone. Scarcely surprising, then, that the last words one speaks or reads or writes can sometimes hang suspended in the air for a long time. The other day this phrase echoed in mind for much of the afternoon: “Reg was sub-normal and feeling much better”. I am transcribing my grandmother’s diaries for the year 1943 at the moment, and Reg was her brother.
Uncle Reg! How his name was invoked by my poor mother when I spent my young adulthood lounging about the house doing very precisely nothing. “Why don’t you DO something? At your age, Reg was hiking round the Tyrol”, or words to that effect. And so the mythical Reg has gone down in family history as an example to all us layabouts.
Quyyatigiga
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