Was Chuck Berry from Chile?

The good people of Chile speak Spanish in a chewed-up impenetrable way, dropping letters and generally mauling their way through sentences. Como estas (how are you?) sounds like 'comtai?'. One of their favourite letters to drop is 's', which often goes walkabout if it's in the middle or end of a word. Hence, the word 'escudo' sounds like 'cudo', which is worth knowing as it's a brand of beer. When my parents came to visit a few years ago we got into a taxi and I rather stupidly asked to be taken to the street 'Carlos Antunez'. The taxi driver, incomprehension writ large across his face as I continued to ask for 'Carlos Antunez' with increasing panic, suddenly had a eureka moment and exclaimed 'carloantuni?', to which I shamefacedly nodded.

Yesterday morning the ipod threw up Jerry Lee Lewis live in Hamburg for me to listen to. It's a storming set in front of an appreciative crowd. It perked me up no end. It seemed only fitting to do the return journey home to a soundtrack of Chuck Berry, as it had been a rock n'roll day. As I got off the metro to 'Too Much Monkey Business' it struck me that Chuck was actually singing 'Too much monkibi - ni', ditching the s like someone from Rancagua. Could the great duck walker himself be chileno?

The 'Other' Four & The 'Other' 11th

Photos courtesy of Laurie 'Widerife' Crouch

It’s a bright sunny day in the New World, although I’m limping slightly. It appears I shot myself in the foot by selling my Chile v Colombia ticket to some dippy American. Last night Chile put four past the Colombians to go 4th in the south American world cup group. Not only did Chile win, but both the Brasilians and the Argies could only manage draws. Things didn’t look this bright on Sunday evening(well, it wouldn’t in the evening, what with the sun going down….) when I witnessed a 0-3 home defeat at the National Stadium, with the only highlight being Ronaldinho missing a penalty.

How could I fail to mention the ‘other’ four goals in Zagreb, and Theo’s coming of age? The two week old Amber celebrated by being sick twice in rapid succession, appropriate behaviour for some of England’s more recent performances, although not last night.

The second ‘other’ of the day is that it’s the 11th September, and in Chile this means the anniversary of the coup. It’s become a kind of unofficial holiday for anarchists, who tend to spend the evening throwing things at the police and plunging parts of the city into darkness by outing the electricity supply. It’s not a good day to go down town as the demonstrations and counter demonstrations tend to result in it raining tear gas. In leafy Providencia where we live I noticed that the guy who works in our building had failed to sweep the lobby this morning, so the whole world is obviously going to hell.

Well, either hell or a black hole. With the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider we may well all be sucked into a black hole, with the exception of the people in Tottenham High Road, who surely wouldn’t notice the difference. We had a brief scare yesterday when a colleague of mine suddenly disappeared, only to be under the desk plugging in her computer. She’s only 4ft 11’, so it could have gone either way.