The blog of Steve Root

  • Rotary – Club visit 8 to Chestfield

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    It’s true to say my rate of posting to my blog has diminished of late, but that’s simply due to being so busy with other things. While it’s fresh in my mind I must just post about this mornings visit to the Rotary Club of Chestfield.. The last time I visited was a special evening meal and presentation though I’d decided to go during that same day. This time, I decided to go less that 24 hours before hand too, partly to spread the word about our club ‘Outdoor Skills Day’ (more another time on that).

    Although it’s been a while since I’ve visited another club (having been so busy), once again it was time well spent. They had an excellent speaker talking about how to implement successful, sustainable water projects in the developing world. The speaker (who spends 3 months in America and 3 months in the UK for her work in this field.. or perhaps lake seeing as we’re talking about water) clearly understood the issues involved in not only delivering an aid project, but making it sustainable. She’s also worked with Rotary in the past, including at the Rotary International level and explained some of the RI logic in allocating the international charitable funds. For example, RI wont support a project to put a well into a village unless there is a justification this is the best of all systems for that village. She had a photo of an RI person at a well in a village that was very overgrown. The well worked fine but the locals didn’t use it, they were happy to drink the water from the river not aware that it caused disease. For that particular village, a different solution would have been a more effective investment of resources.

    Summary of things learnt at this meeting:

    • Rotary International is careful about how it spends funds collected for the international projects
    • Even a single Rotary Club can call upon the skills of experts working internationally
    • All daffodils are Narcissus*

    *Thanks go to President Andrew for that fact, they were selling flowers, I think to raise club funds.

  • Learn french in 10 days…. assuming you don't need sleep?

    My French prof runs an email list of… well, a mixture of humour, observations and such, the sort that many people forward to your email. The good thing for me is that a lot of it is in French and try as I might, I often have to really work at reading it.

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    If I don’t understand a word, I’ll open google and translate it. If I still don’t understand it, I’ll translate a sentence. One word in the last email was “entuber”. Google didn’t know the english translation so I search the web. Entuber = to con, apparently commonly used though colloquial. The web site I found the answer on had an advert to “Learn French in 10 days”. Well, clearly I’ve not been trying hard enough. I followed the link to find out more (always looking to improve, to think I’ve spent years trying, on an off, to `parler en plus francais` [Sic]*) so I had to find out more.

    The course contains a very comprehensive ‘More than 200 hours learning’…. Well, I’ve learn’t enough maths to know that 200 hours / 10 days = 20 hours per day of learning. Clearly I’ve been limiting myself by requiring more than 4 hours per day for sleep, eating, washing and such.

    *[sic] because I know the grammar is wrong, the spelling is wrong, but that’s how I’d say it. Full marks for effort, ‘nil point’ for grace 🙂

  • Perelandra (C.S. Lewis) and That Hideous Strength (C.S.Lewis)


    Part 2 and Part 3 of a trilogy I started in the summer with “Out of the Silent Planet“. I loved the first book, giving it a Rootie rating of 5 out of 5, surely these would carry the trend, may be drop to a 4?…

    Perelandra sees our character visit a different planet. This planet is almost entirely covered by sea and floating islands made of plants. The description of the environment was great but for me the story dragged more than if I’d had to read it as part of my English Literature lessons at school. I really can’t say I enjoyed this story, just forced myself to continue turning pages. I give it a Rootie Rating of 1 out 5 and hope the third part of the trillogy is better.

    That Hideous Strength is different from the first two. Hmmm, how to describe the difference; instead of traveling to another planet, the whole story happens on earth. It links into early medieval history and the time of Merlin the magician. It has a clever set up where people are used by others to control the media and alter the perception of society. For all that, I found this story very hard to read through. This trilogy started so well for me, but I can only give this part a Rootie Rating of 1 out of 5.

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