Walking in to work gives a moment of time for thoughts… it’s quite a lovely little space in the day when I trot along pondering the ineffable… a time for solitude and peace… and so the brain wanders, meanders the finer points of life… comes up with solutions to anything from kitchen design to why I wanted to be an anthropologist when I was a child…. Went for a job interview yesterday and was asked this question and then had to say why, found myself describing an old Australian atlas that my parents had which was fascinating, it had, in the middle pages, old sepia images of ‘peoples of the world’… photographs of family groupings, of stern Norwegians in patterned woollen clothing, of pygmy men standing proud!, of a Chinese family with the father with pigtail and odd platform sandals/shoes… different worlds, different lives….

Oh yes the job interview was for part time work at Rohan… need more money so have to work more!

Another pondering meandering thought was about accents and dialects… maybe it’s something to do with walking through the centre of Cambridge so often and all I hear are fascinating accents, numerous languages and odd dialects… ok so how come people from all over, initially mostly, Europe, all speaking different languages, having different accents arrive in a vast new continent, settle in regions right across the continent covering vastly differing geographical areas and then other diverse groups from Asia and Africa also arrive and settle, including of course indigenous peoples that have their own languages… and out of all this an accent develops that is distinct and easily recognisable, with even local dialects and variations?? How come they all speak American? Or Australian, the same thing happened there and both continents now have a distinct accent? How or why did this happen?