Lost in translation (or something)

Last night I was ‘saved’ at the last minute from having to go to the gym – even after I had changed into my sports kit for the purpose – by Janis, the Ukrainian who runs my local general store

[I’m still not sure, or have forgotten, whether his name is pronounced as written or whether it should be ‘Yanis’ – which is the reason why, wherever possible, out of embarrassment, I avoid using his name in his presence].

Earlier I had popped long to see him about three electrical problems I have in my flat. He had explained that, although he had earmarked Tuesday evening to visit me, there was a chance that the fellow he was booked to see after closing his shop last night would not be able to get home in time for 6.00pm, in which case he could come and see me 24 hours earlier than planned instead.

At 5.00pm – having heard nothing from him in the meantime – I made a call to him just to double-check that he wasn’t going to come and visit me 24 hours early, i.e. while I was way at the gym. I was somewhat surprised therefore when he replied to the effect he was on course to be with me by 6.00pm because his other client has confirmed that he was unable to get home in time.

Hence my opening statement above.

Upon learning the news that Janis was coming about 50 minutes after our phone conversation, there was no way I could high-tail it to the gym and get back by 6.00pm … and so changed back into my civilian clothes ready to receive him.

When he eventually arrived at about 6.15pm, he immediately set about mending the downnlighters in the kitchen and bathroom (the first two of the three ‘dead’ lights I’ve been suffering from for the past eight months) and then later found that the remaining offender – dealing with the uplighters in one-half of my open-plan front room that were not working – was a bigger job than he had imagined in advance and therefore he was going to have to go away and order some parts before he could return another day to do the necessary.

None of the above is the subject of my posting today.

Janis is a hard-working, clubbable, fellow. Last night we fell into a ‘bits and pieces’ conversation – as two people tend to do in order to be sociable when one of them is working for the other in the latter’s home.

At one point a piece was broadcast in the background upon the subject of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on my television during the BBC Six O’Clock News.

The story was that scientists were warning that the effects of climate change were threatening its very existence – already they had caused large parts of it to lose its often remarkably vivid colours.

Upon hearing it, Janis offered that he had recently been on his first-ever holiday to Australia, a fortnight spent out there with his girlfriend, visiting Sydney and then Queensland. At one stage he and she had gone snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.

As the conversation meandered – having asked for further and better particulars of their trip, at one point I leaped several incongruous furlongs to talk of my son’s trips to Australasia and his snorkelling and scuba diving adventures there, all adjuncts to his career in the marine industry, and then also my own seven months there as an eighteen year old recent school leaver (along with a peer) all the way to the wilds of the north of Western Australia where we worked as labourers upon a rock-blasting site upon the unlikely-named East Intercourse Island – we found several perceptions in common.

Janis mentioned that, glorious as the landscapes of Australia were, he and his girlfriend (I don’t know whether she is also Ukrainian, or English, or a national of any other country of origin) had found the native Australian – and by that term I don’t mean the indigenous population Aboriginals, but rather your average ‘Okker’ Caucasian Aussie as stereotypically immortalised by Barry Humphries with his characters Barry McKenzie, Dame Edna and Sir Les Patterson, the Australian ambassador to Wherever – somewhat of an acquired taste.

I immediately connected with this. During my time in Australia as a teenager I found the bulk of Australians to be ‘in your face’ to the point of near-rudeness – and that was when they were on their best behaviour. And yet there’s a certain enveloping charm in a nation that doesn’t just call a spade a spade, but actually describes it as a “bloody shovel”.

On East Intercourse Island, where in my youth I had earned good money over fifteen weeks, conditions had been sufficiently rough and ready that only the sturdiest of souls would seek employment in the environment.

My ex-school pal and I had arrived as innocents, having no idea at all what to expect and therefore – if you wished to look at it this way – we were ready for anything and everything. Had we known in advance what the conditions were going to be like, we might not have bothered to go – but, looking back, I am glad that we did.

The bulk of the workforce were either Australians who were running away from their wives, alimony or the law, or alternatively young Kiwis seeking to benefit from the then advantageous currency rate between Australia and New Zealand.

Let’s just put it this way: most of the Aussies on hand in 1970 were direct, blunt, loud and boorish.

In comparison most of the Kiwis, just as hardy, were far less ‘showy’, quieter and more civilised.

As Janis and I talked last night and I relayed to him the gist of the above, I gradually realised that the conversation was leading towards an opportunity to deploy on of my favourite jokes:

QUESTION:

“What is the definition of a well-balanced Australian?

ANSWER:

“A man with chip on both shoulders.”

Sadly, the humour-impact of this cracker upon my companion last night was muted. Although his general command of Ukrainian-accented English is highly impressive, unfortunately he had no experience or understanding of the English idiom “to have a chip on one’s shoulder”.

I fear last night his mind had been producing for him an image of some Aussie wearing a bush hat bedecked with wine corks hanging on string all around it, also for some strange reason sporting a French fry upon each shoulder.

Still, that’s the way things go with my jokes.

I’m sure it’s partly “the ways I tells ‘em” (as Northern Irish comedian Frank Carson used to say in my heyday) – and not in a good way – but in addition it’s definitely the increasing degree to which people I come into contact with don’t understand what I’m talking about.