How about a new alphabet

When I was a child, sometimes my Mum would say, I wish they'd invent a new animal.  Post World War II cooking in our neighbourhood seemed restricte though, not because we were short of food.  We had enough food, thanks to living in a farming community and there was always a good amount of sharing between neighbours and different members of the family.  But austerity measure were still in place.  As an aside I remember the buying of the sweet ration every Friday with the red and gold paper of Holland's toffees.

It was more because my mother's cooking had always been straightforward and plain.  And we hadn't reached the sixties then with its explosion of spices and foreign ingredients.  My Mum was in a routine with her cooking and we knew if it was Wednesday it would be some form of pork.

I think of her sometimes when I'm trying to find the right word or expression for a piece of writing.  If I could only stretch the alphabet to conjure up new syllables.  And then today I came across a Dr Seuss quote about start at Z and seeing where you can go from there.

It's easy to get in a routine of how we approach a piece of writing and the phrases we normally use.  I like things that keep me on my toes and yesterday I had to do a preface for a document I'd checked a few weeks ago.  It was a piece written in English by a Frenchman, but translated by him from his French version.

Most of it was comprehensible just stiff in places and suffering from the inevitable dislocation of tenses and sentence arrangement.  Despite the subject matter, which was medical, it was quite fun to do and although the finished version sounded English English rather than French English, I liked some of his dislocations.