Addictive personality

I've just enjoyed the most amazing hit of homemade apple crumble and devon ambrosia custard. You can keep your drugs. It doesn't get better than that.

Sins of the father

I was somewhat perplexed the other day by the naivety of reporters and commentators alike in their comments regarding the resurgence of Republican violence in Northern Ireland. First one and then the other would express incredulity and dismay at the fact that the new radicals who spout their bile - Protestant and Catholic alike - either in chatrooms or on the street were all young, in their late teens or early twenties, and had never lived through the troubles. Surely it is blindingly obvious that this is the very reason why they have no qualms about disinterring the old factional hatreds! They haven't had to endure the strife, cope with the trauma, get worn down by it all over so many years. They've never had to get their shirts wet. To expect these young neo-Republicans to accept what is plainly an imperfect solution to the Republican dream (however irreconcilable the alternatives) on account of what their elders have come up with and resigned themselves to is as unreasonable as expecting the next generation of adolescents not to take up an all-consuming interest in sex when their balls drop, on account of others previously having done it and been there. The fact that their elders have chosen the wisest path is neither here nor there. Kids. You can't teach them owt. I blame the parents.

Show me a coloured tool

There's a mind-puzzle doing the rounds of the pal mail, which opens with what seems to be a maths exercise (take a number, times by this, divide by that, etc.), which lulls you along until you are suddenly asked to think of a colour and a tool. I didn't really play the game, because the ploy looked familiar and I thought I'd be asked to think of a vegetable (carrot, obviously). So I rapidly scrolled right to the bottom and - as you probably already suspected if the statistics claimed are true - I discover that no less than 98% of people would come up with the words "red" and "hammer".
I advisedly say "the words", since some time later I casually asked my French wife, in French, to think quickly of a colour and a tool. She duly produced: "rouge" and "marteau".
As David Coleman might once have said, "Quite remarkable!" Subsequently, upon due reflection while a'strolling in the green sward, I figured out that it might be safely concluded that the Pavlovian response to this prompt is not phonological. It has nothing to do with the way the words sound or how they trip off the tongue.This contention may be supported by the syntactic discrepancy relating to the French response, logical inasmuch as it answered a query for a colour and a tool, in that order - "rouge marteau" - yet this doesn't work as an epithetical compound in French, since the natural word order gives "marteau rouge".
So, again, we might conclude that it is not the words, but the concepts that spring to mind - whatever the language. Why might this be? Well, I would hazard to guess that like most things pertaining to the collective subconsciouse it relates to our primal instincts passed down along the line of evolution.
Why the hammer? Since it is surely the first tool ever used. Take the animal kingdom. Of the rare animals that use a tool (apart from chimpanzes using straws for extracting termites, and these aren't tools, anyway, they're straws, and you don't buy straws from a tool shop), the tool of prediliction - surely the only tool - is the hammer. Take sea otters, for example, using stones for cracking open shells. Our first ancestors would have done the same. They would have cracked open shells and other recalcitrant titbits. But they would also have cracked open heads. And that's where the colour comes in. For from the time before man had words to describe his environment, the only colour that would be guaranteed to shock, startle, terrify or delight was red: the colour of blood. The reaction being determined by whether the spurting redness came from himself, his people, his enemy or his food.