chaucer

It dawned on me while I was on my way to school 3 days back, how connected I've become with the city of Bath. I passed by a restaurant in Bath known as the Wife of Bath, which was taken from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Now I heard about Bath at about 17-18 while doing The Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chaucer for my A levels. It is a series of stories narrated by pilgrims while they were making their way to Canterbury. I did the story "The Franklin's Tale", and as the Canterbury Tales holds many stories, I actually bought the book to read the other tales within.

I remember my Lit teacher Mr Burrows*, English no less, made copies of the Franklin's Tale for us. It was written in middle English, more archaic than Shakespeare's English and for a few weeks after we got the core text, we were trying to figure out what it was saying. Terms such as "noblesse oblige" and "gentillese" were discussed, we had to understand the content in the context, genre and time frame that it was written.

Literature is a really interesting subject albeit commercially useless but still interesting subject.

Heere bigynneth the Frankeleyns tale,
In armorik, that called is britayne,
Ther was a knyght that loved and dide his payne
To serve a lady in his beste wise;
And many a labour, many a greet emprise
He for his lady wroghte, er she were wonne.

- The Canterbury Tales, The Franklin's Tale, Geoffery Chaucer

And of course then we had to do the literary critique of the story.

Anyway there was the Wife of Bath tale, which even by today's standard was risque. The stories within the Canterbury Tales all had a moral behind it. The Wife of Bath was about sovereignty of women over men, the Franklin's Tale was about chivalry, and noblesse oblige. Some stories would refute earlier ones.

At 17, I thought it was funny that a city was called Bath, and of course at the ripe old age of 31, while my mom and I went to the UK, subconsciously, I wanted to go visit it.

And then I met S, and now I am living and studying here. It's been five months since I've been to the UK. I can't believe that in 3 months' time, I'll not see many of my classmates for a long time to come. Perhaps till graduation, and this MBA deal will all be a thing of the past.

*Burrows, or burrowsaurus as he was known to all my classmates in SRJC then also introduced me to Stilton cheese with crackers, Mr Bean comedy.

-----------------------------------Rascal update-----------------------------------
I got mei a pink bag with some pink feathers on it. She was sooooooo pleased with it and carries it everywhere and tells everyone that "My yee yee sent to me". Of course she keeps telling my sis that! My sis was going - as if I don't know that! muahahhaha.

Anyway she loves playschool and for the first time day before, Mei didn't want to go to school becos my sis won't allow her to bring her bag to school. She was almost in tears. The rascals were really pleased with their gifts and happy that I remembered them. Of course I'll remember them, as if I would forget!!

On a side note - I passed my exams! Everyone paper, :) okok, I was happy till I found out others were scoring distinctions...as in "s" in plural, and I only have one. Sigh... guess I gotta work harder then.