Bonjour, Monsieur...

Awoken this morning at half-seven by a 'phone call from Belgium. I grant you that I should have been up and about and sorting out breakfast for the children by then but I was still asleep at that point.
Despite speaking, reading and writing a lot of French recently (and the fact that I have qualifications in French coming out of my ears), communication was difficult at that hour. Luckily my caller (who is renting us his apartment in the south of France) is a jolly fellow and had more to say to me than I had to ask of him. At least I now know how to pronounce his Flemish surname. It involves a lot of digging deep into the back of the larynx, a fair amount of saliva and a handy packet of throat lozenges in case it all goes wrong.

I suppose it's only right that I put in a brief mention of the holiday we are planning. I must have subconsciously named this blog after a famous French holiday as it has been occupying a huge amount of my thoughts of late.

Now it's time to show off my Flemish pronounciation at the bank as I order a banker's draft.

Language barriers

I rang a guy called Lyn (Lin? Lynn?) today about hiring or perhaps puchasing a pair of PA speakers. This was on behalf of my Congolese friends, of course.
I offered to talk to "a guy called Lyn" (he is very emphatic about the "guy" bit) because my African friends command of English is patchy. I don't really know whether I was any use as Lyn spoke a third language - "Roadiese". He kept referring to "cabs". "A couple of cabs", "a decent pair of second-hand cabs".
It turns out that "cabs" are speaker cabinets. Why? Everyone else calls them speakers, so why "cabs"? And, apparently, they "chuck out" sound. For example: "You'll need a decent pair of 15 inch cabs to chuck out two mikes and a keyboard, obviously".

Obviously.

My francophone African friends have it just right when they refer to them as "baffles"!