Episode 186 Christmas Reading from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather

Christmas Day may be over but our Christmas readings are not! This year I'm reading an excerpt from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather. In this story Death is having to pretend to be the Hogfather (just like our Santa Claus). Here he is trying to enter a house to leave presents with his servant, sidekick Albert. Death has already visited some very rich houses so in this part he really can't understand why now, in this poor house he can't give the child exactly what they want. And we have a conversation about Death's frustration with the unfairness of life (me too mate, me too!). Vocabulary from the book outskirts - similar to 'suburbs' means the edges of somewhere plains town - plains are flat areas of land busted - broken Cartographers - people's whose job it is to make maps a mercy - used similar to 'a blessing' meaning something could have been even worse 'It's brass monkeys out here. - Albert is from the Discworld version of London (Ankh Morpork) he speaks with what is effectively a London Cockney Accent. Many of the phrases here are versions of Cockney Rhyming Slang which matches words to a rhyming word (which might be completely unrelated) and uses that instead. Others are connected in some strange (and often rude) way. This makes it a very confusing sort of coded dialect. - 'Brass monkeys' comes from the idea that (this is rude, sorry) it's cold enough to freeze the 'balls' off a brass monkey - take it to mean it's very very cold! https://www.itv.com/news/2016-03-18/origins-of-obscure-english-phrases-revealed Blimey, it's getting really parky - parky is harder to track with many ideas but nobody sure where it comes from, anyway it means 'cold'. 'Blimey' is a British exclamation meaning 'wow!' erratic handwriting - messy and unpredictable (That's a dig at religion.) - my comment, this particular line was Terry making fun of religion 'I remember when I was a nipper' - nipper means small child I had my heart set on this huge horse - idiom - to have your heart set on something means you really really wanted it cold as charity the weather was - idiom - a rarely used idiom, British people really hate charity (we like charity's - that is organisations giving to other people) that is people giving you things because you're poor. Even poor people hate it, so that's why it's cold. We didn't have a pot to piss in - slang term meaning they were very poor. In those days there weren't any bathrooms so you would have a pot under the bed. If you didn't even have that then you were very poor. please enlighten me - please explain something to me as poor as a church mouse - idiom - meaning very very poor. a beady look - staring with suspicion or skepticism You're a selfish little bugger when you're seven. - more British swear words! Dad got ratted after lunch. - he got drunk, very drunk. pork dripping - this is the fat left over from cooking pork. perturbed- confused That's about size of it - idiom meaning that's about right. felt a bit out of his depth - idiom - if someone is out of their depth then they don't know what is going on. they've got the moon and stars - a common phrase given to and said by poor people, supposed to make people feel like their poverty is OK because they can still see the stars. We'd have got a ding around the earhole for nicking them - 'ding around the earhole' means his father hit his head. 'Nicking' means stealing twangs - the sound made by elastic or in this case broken violin strings. snooty - the behaviour of someone who thinks they are better than others and look down on others jaundiced observer - this is not a common phrase, you will likely never hear it again. Jaundice is a kind of illness. In this case Terry is using it to mean that Albert has no hope and has a very negative outlook of the world and this impacts how he sees things. in that case how come so many of the rich buggers is bastards - lots of English swear words! This means 'why are so many rich people mean to everyone else'