Dan is off to the land at the other end of the globe (which is a yellow brick road kind of story) so he has been practising being upside-down and thinking about people who speak the same language but differently. Its already strange not having him around. And we are off to Scotland where they speak the same language but a wee bit differently, with an American who speaks the same language (howdy y'all) but equally differently. 'Language...' said Aristotle, 'is said in many ways...' and that is very true. In gesture, in words, expression, pictures, signs and signals, homo fabula we are the storytelling species, its how we communicate... or as Pierre Bourdieu might have said, its our way of 'making the world'. Last week I spoke about great duets - this one with Lucinda Williams and Elvis Costello is a cracker, two people sharing the same language but disagreeing and crying jailhouse tears:
