If you've been following the escapades of My Friend Rosey over past few years you will know that she works as an assistant to a schoolteacher with a class of twenty or so bouncy nine and ten year olds. You will also be aware that when she ‘gets down with them’ as she calls it, she often reverts to childhood herself which is why she is so popular with her charges. The trouble is, she gets so involved that she often picks things up from them. I don't mean coughs and colds, although that does happen occasionally. No, I mean for instance ways of speaking. Just recently she has adopted the irritating use of the word ‘like’ as an embellishment to every sentence she utters. She goes (sorry, I meant to say she says - even I'm at it now!) ‘I was like doing this and like this happened and I’m like…….’ Grrrrr! I reminded her that according to the Oxford English Dictionary the primary use of ‘like’ is as a preposition meaning similar to. She then screwed up her nose, put on her sourest expression and told me I was getting old! The cheek of it! So I said to her ‘do you like like licking lollipops andlike lemons like?’ It fell on stony ground!
The other irritating thing she’s picked up is the growing use of the word ‘so’ when starting a sentence. This I think she has picked up from media commentators on the telly. I said to her ‘So, do you still like to like sew?’ She grinned at me and told me I was a so-and so. I guess I had that coming!
Anyway, I've been meaning to tell you that she’s got a new boyfriend. We've not met him yet. You may recall a couple of years ago I mentioned the time she excitedly told us about a new beau who she claimed was a barrister. We were all very impressed until we found out he was in fact a barista at Starbucks! Not that there’s anything wrong with that you understand, it just that… well, you know! Now her new chap is apparently a pleasant enough bloke in his early forties. We don’t know much more about him yet, but we'll start probing soon and I’ll report back to you. She told us that he is a conductor. Bearing in mind the confusion I described above, I thought I should establish straight away whether he waved a baton or checked tickets on a train. He is in fact, in his spare time, the former and has recently taken the post of leader of the Rosey’s choir! What his actual full time job is, the one which pays the bills and buys Rosey’s chardonnay, we have yet to find out mainly because Rosey doesn't seem to know herself! She said she asked him and it sounded so complicated that she just nodded knowingly and promptly forgot!
This weekend five of us are meeting in Rosey’s allotment shed for a drink and a chat, so we may find out more then - provided that is, the floodwater has cleared and the shed re-joins terra firma! I’ll keep you informed!
