..I warned you about a few things, in fact. Firstly – I had thought of a way of choosing a new name for my blog – so how do you like ‘Picnic At Asgard’?
Why?
How?
Where do recipe books come into it?
One of my favourite Christmas presents was the amazing book pictured above. Yes, the official Dr Who Cookbook 🙂 [It has delighted the grandkids too, especially after I made them Cassandra lasagne]. Well, what better place to look for a blog title I thought to myself. How to do this? So much to choose from. Ood head-bread? Extermicake? Adipose Pavlova?  Sweet Silence rated highly among the possibilities, but I had decided to pick the blog’s official ‘forever’ name at random. [I also struggle to be silent once I get going, as you may have noticed]
So, I found an online random number generator and entered the first and last pages of the actual recipes [nope, even I didn’t want a blog called ‘introduction’ or ‘index’]. The thingumma-jig gave me number 61, so I excitedly turned to that page to be greeted with the lovely pie slices in the other picture above. The name of this recipe [cheating slightly, cos it’s on page 60 in actual fact] is ‘picnic at Asgard’ and…yep…I love it. Welcome to the picnic that is my blog.Nibble on my nuttier notions, munch on my meditations, taste my tome-lets..ok, you get the idea.
If you want to make your own Dalek head noodle salad, Cybermelts or any other such delights, try: http://merchandise.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/the-official-doctor-who-cookbook-hardcover/
Now, I did say I had warned you about two things in my last post – and the second could well have turned into a small rant. However, I am going to try to behave myself and continue with decorum.
After telling you about the damp squid, I decided to investigate a couple of other sayings that make no sense whatsoever: Head over heels and Cheap at half the price. Why? Cos they’re how things should be anyway, aren’t they? Just as a squid WOULD be damp, [and that fine tooth-comb isn’t for all those times you need to comb your teeth*] one’s head is almost always in a higher position than one’s heels; and if something were half the price, well it would certainly be cheap [Private jets and Rolls Royces excepted].
Looking into this it would appear that ‘Heels over head’ was actually the original saying [ http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/head+over+heels ] so how it turned upside down itself, so to speak, is a mystery but surely an ironic one!
Cheap at half the price seems to be a little more intriguing. After reading some online debates about this, I had to turn, as usual, to every linguistics student’s best friend, the OED. There, in the etymology of ‘cheap’ I found the following definition dating to the 9th and 10th centuries:
Exchangeable commodities, merchandise, goods, chattels, esp. (live) cattle.
So, the ‘cheap’ in question looks as though it was originally not an adjective but a noun in its own right. If somebody were offering merchandise at half the price, then it would be a very good bargain indeed and rightly something to be shouted about in your very best Old English. Did I ever mention my dissertation? No? Be extremely thankful…..
*Our beloved fine tooth-comb should, in reality, have its hyphen moved, giving an enormously different meaning: fine-tooth comb. Now that WOULD be useful when searching for the ubiquitous needle in the haystack, wouldn’t it?
Picnic At Asgard 