Scots Wha’ Ha’e
OK, forget not having anything to complain about. Financial setbacks have thrown me into a state of general frustration. People who expect a student, living on temporary benefits, to be able to cough up 2500 euros in a month need to get their heads examined. Tuition for this year is 1400, the rest is money that I received for tuition and public transportation last year that I shouldn’t have received. Fortunately Rob has some savings (that were supposed to be for a new car when he needs one), otherwise I would be completely fucked.
Life appears to be a string of setbacks at the moment. Our Chesterfields won’t be sold for anywhere near as much money as we would’ve liked. Considering that Rob once bought them for 3000 euros, getting 100 euros for them now is just completely ridiculous, but we want to get rid of them before our new sofa gets here, which should be anytime now, but we’re not even really sure of that. It was supposed to be delivered last week, but we haven’t heard from them yet. The same goes for our new table, which should’ve been done two weeks ago.
As for school… Well, I had a test today that I didn’t study for and I still scored 7.6. Next Monday I have to turn in a bunch of homework that I’ve done nothing about yet either. Thank god our new Press & PR teacher decided to scratch the assignments that would’ve taken weeks to make (and that I should have started on weeks ago, like most others did), or I might just have killed myself.
It’s not that I’ve been too busy to do homework, it’s just that my real interests tend to lie elsewhere. I’ve been spending quite a bit of the time that I was supposed to be spending on homework, teaching myself how to sound Scottish. You might not believe it, but I can sound quite American, standard English or even Australian when I feel like it. Because of my recently reinvigorated fascination with Scotland, and my intimate longing of running off and living in a cottage there, I thought it would be nice if I could sound Scottish.
Well, I’ve found that a Scottish accent is actually quite hard to acquire, even for a Dutchwoman who can already roll her r’s and pronounce “loch” with no real difficulty. All I have to go on are some videos and the occasional appearance of a Scotsman on the BBC. I keep waiting to hear new words, and I can be quite chuffed when I learn how to pronounce them, but you’ll never hear them all, will you?
I went to university to study English language and culture so you could say that I’m a bit of an aficionado, but I don’t suppose that anyone not living in an English-speaking country could ever learn to speak the language so well as to be indistinguishable from a native speaker. This saddens me somewhat because I do really have that intimate longing to run off and live in a cottage in the Scottish countryside somewhere, and when I go to town to do some shopping everyone will think I’m just one of them. This has nothing to do with some kind of identity crisis, just my perpetual need to prove something, everything, anything, to myself and to the world. Like, ha! fooled ya. I’m the world’s greatest.
On a related note, I just finished reading a book about the English language, The Story of English by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil and William Cran, and I must say that, even though it took me a few months to finish it, it’s absolutely fascinating. It didn’t help me at all in learning how to sound Scottish, but I did learn a lot from it, such as the fact that my absolute favourite word, “discombobulation”, is actually of American origin so I promise that I will never use it again. Or maybe I will.