How about a drinkette?- Part 3

As at the end of last week’s column I was recalling Lima. I shall stay there, to recount the most peculiar bar experience I’ve ever had—and it really was bizarre. I was in a small bar near the central market in the Miraflores suburb of Lima, where I lived (I mean I lived in Miraflores, not in the market), sitting with a newspaper—the newspaper of the United Left, of course—and chatting to regulars, when a couple of young men flounced in kitted out in full drag (floral frocks, high heels, bling). They did a brief song and dance routine, then cried out “Promotion!” After that they came round the tables and gave each customer a couple of candies and a peppermint, all wrapped in cellophane, and an advertising flier for the relevant sweet manufacturing company. Well, I suppose it’s one way of earning a living. One more peculiar bar experience now. On my way to Oxbow once, I stopped at the Leribe Hotel for a drink. Sitting in their very pleasant garden, I suddenly felt spooked out, as if a ghost had sat next to me. I then realised what was disturbing me was a statue in the garden—a pillar with an owl on top of it. I was convinced the stone owl was going to turn its head and stare at me. It was only days later that I realised what had got into me. When  I was a teenager I used to watch a thriller series on TV called “The Prisoner”, which was all about the surveillance of dissidents (very Orwellian). One of the surveillance devices was an owl statue like that one in Leribe, which really did swivel, to film the inmates—that is what I had sub-consciously recalled. Memory, the mind, the imagination—these are all very wonderful and mysterious. I wonder if my readers have had similar experiences? (And no, Madam, we don’t want to hear about the time you were convinced your knickers were on fire). I shall now move from the ridiculous to the sublime (though it’s still quite ridiculous). On my most recent trip to Paris I took the Eurostar train—through the Channel Tunnel—to the north Paris station, the Gare du Nord. I had a hotel room booked and there’s a taxi-rank just outside the station, but I’d never before explored around the station and remembered reading that the railway terminal building is one of the most beautiful in Europe, so I thought I’d have a drink and a good gaze at the architecture. The latter was, indeed, wonderful, with caryatids (oh, look it up!) and direction plaques including, very romantically, for trains to Vienna and Budapest and Istanbul. I sat at a pavement café and ordered a Ricard (that is a pastis, an aniseed-flavoured drink; the brand you get in Lesotho is Pernod, but I prefer Ricard, which is darker and more herby). I asked for it, in French, to be served without ice and the waitress blinked and said “but sir, we never serve it with ice.”  Now my French is good, but I have real difficulties producing the initial rolled “rrr” of a word such as Ricard—the sound comes and goes—and the waitress thought I’d asked not for a Ricard but for a deca, the French for decaffeinated coffee. Later on we had a chat about a customer who’d apparently scarpered without paying his bill and when I said “I believe he’s gone”, she told me my French was really good—specifically I’d remembered to use the subjunctive (conditional) form of “gone” after “I believe”—she was really impressed, but I did, she said, have problems with my “rrr.” I ordered another Ricard to congratulate myself on being vraiment Parisien, and once again the “rrr” fell flat. A little later she came back for a longer chat and we practised my “rrr.” I then asked her about her English and she said it was OK, but that she had big problems with her soft “th” (as in (“thick”) and hard “th” (as in “that”). Now these sounds are a problem for pretty well every English language learner in the world (that’s why some Basotho go for a barf, not a bath). The sounds came into English from Old Norse during the Viking invasions and they’re still used in modern Norwegian and Icelandic (and, oddly enough, the soft one is used in Spanish), but in no other language I am aware of. The waitress and I then set up a competition, with she going “rrr, rrr, rrr” and me trying to imitate and then retaliating with “thick, that, thick, that.”  Until the duty manager came over and asked us to stop because we were making the place sound like a lunatic asylum and might scare customers away. Chris Dunton