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Alasdair has often said that someday, when he writes his memoirs, he will devote an entire chapter to “Ways in which we nearly died.” Yesterday he added another few inches of print to that future section when a large chunk of what appeared to be two-by-four (in the brief nanosecond he caught sight of it before closing his eyes and bracing for impact) smashed into the windshield of our car as he drove down the M4. Fortunately, traffic was slow and he was only doing 65, and somehow, although he did flinch pretty significantly, he managed to keep his hands on the wheel, stay on the road, and not smash into anyone else — and actually drive the rest of the way home with his adrenaline pumping.

In other news, our friend Kari makes the best cinnamon rolls in the entire world. Seriously.

Our Stake here has a grand tradition of Young Men’s and Young Women’s Camps. Each summer, they take over a farmer’s field for two weeks and each group spends a week doing their thing. It’s the highlight of the Stake Youth calendar, and for many adults as well.

About a month after the second camp ends, all of the camp leaders, Young Men, Young Women, and their parents get together for “Camp Reunion”. The main event of the evening is the screening of the camp videos that one longsuffering stake member has been locked away frantically producing for the last few weeks, and there are also awards given by the leaders of each camp and some speeches from the respective camp directors. Which means that as the YW Stake Camp Director this year, I had to share some thoughts at Camp Reunion this last Friday.

I hadn’t really prepared anything in advance, so I was rambling along, talking about what a great experience it had all been, and I started telling a story involving the high ropes course we had done on the first day. “When, I got to the top of the climbing wall,” I said, “I was completely knackered.”

The audience tittered.

I paused. “Was that a bad word?”

Affirmative answers and head nods.

Profuse apologies and a mumbled excuse about being a foreigner.

Somehow I managed to finish up and present the awards, but all I could think was, “Yes, parents — this is the person you entrusted with your daughters’ physical and spiritual well being for a week! One who uses impolite slang terms in large church gatherings!” I think/hope they forgave me on the grounds of cultural naivety, but I have a feeling I’m not going to be nominated for translation any time soon (and I was so close otherwise…).

Several people came up to me afterwards and at church today to reassure me that “it wasn’t that bad” and “there are worse things [I] could have said.” When I got home that night and told Alasdair what had happened — or rather, came in the door shouting, “You never told me ‘knackered’ was a bad word!” — he was flabbergasted.

“It isn’t!” he said. “Surely a word my mother would use in front of her mother is not a bad word?!”

So we set about on Google and found that opinions on the degree of severity of the term were varying.

Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com certainly haven’t caught any less-than-savoury connotations. And most of the sites we found referred to its origin in a “knacker” being the person who slaughters horses who are old and tired. However, perhaps I would have been better off had I studied the English-to-American Dictionary a little harder before I accepted public speaking engagements.

Although such occasions happen with less and less frequency, this thread of stopping conversation with unintentionally crude terms has run throughout my life in Britain. In the early days, it was terms that suddenly change meaning somewhere over the Atlantic — “fanny”, “pants”, “bummer”, “bugger”, etc. And now it’s British terms that I have picked up due to their wide usage but don’t actually understand the full meaning of. And the best part is that, having been re-trained for the last 5+ years, I expect it will all happen again in reverse when we eventually move back to the US. Can’t wait!

“Good afternoon; Melissa Macleod.”

“Good afternoon, Melissa Macleod.”

“Hey.”

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“Fine. Why?”

“Just wanted to call and see how your day was going.”

“Why?”

“No reason.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, well I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Does it say something about our marriage that it is completely strange to me that my husband would call at 3:45 in the afternoon to ask how my day is going? It’s not just because we both have our office blinders on for 7.5 10 hours Monday through Friday, but we both work in front of computers all day long — so if we have something to say, we tend to fire off a quick email rather than call. The only other times in recent memory when Alasdair has called me during the workday were when:

a) someone has died.
b) the car has been smashed.

This is a far cry from our dating days when we used to plan our lunch breaks at the same time so we could each find a secluded park bench to munch our sandwiches and talk about… what? What was it we used to talk about?!

And don’t ask my mother about her phone bill way back in the early, early days of our relationship — we can laugh about it now, and I think I’ve convinced her it was money well invested in a quality son-in-law, but I was not the Favorite Child there for a while (in hindsight, though, it was good for my brothers and sister to get some time in the sun — because I am totally the Favorite Child now).

Time moves on, though, and the well of new information to exchange dries up. We’ve heard all of each other’s stories (more than once. In fact, we have a rule that we can’t complain until we’ve heard a story four times), and we’ve learned all of each other’s favorite everythings. But it’s nice to know we can still surprise each other — just by calling to see how the other’s day is going.