The Mirror Crack'd

A many gendered thing My Spanish husband is struggling with the concept of non-binary personal pronouns - or not so much the concept as their practical application in interpersonal relations. The problem arises out of Spanish being (as with most Romance languages, apart from Romanian apparently) so heavily gendered. Some neuters have crept into modern Spanish, such as chice instead of chico / chica  for boy/girl. But in standard Spanish even they/them are (is?) gendered:  ellos/ellas. C onjugating the verb 'to be' in the third person in a gender fluid era has become a veritable minefield, linguistically and socially. As I approach my seventy-second birthday I think I'll settle on the personal pronouns ho/hum! Betwixt and between I've never known how to refer to that dead patch between Christmas and New Year. Although strictly part of the Twelve Days of Christmas the nameless void from 28th to 30th December inclusive (ie after Boxing Day and before New Year's Eve) i...

As we approach the end of another rollercoaster year of 'natural' and manmade disasters, I'm taking a moment to look back - and forward. Janus, the two-faced Roman god, gave his name to the month of January, a time for both reflection and anticipation. But as I find myself unexpectedly housebound with a bout of 'flu - or it could be Covid but who has a lateral flow test kit lying around these days? - I'm self-isolating for the remainder of December. Fortuitously, this gives me some time to ponder the existential ' quo vadis ?' questions now rather than waiting until the New Year. I can always have another bite of the glacé cherry then, of course, so these are just some preliminary musings, though with so much hanging in the balance - Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, a second Trump presidency - my observations at this stage can't really be anything more than prefatory. Let's start with the unfolding situation in Syria, the outcome of which could prove to be piv...