KISS MY ASH

NORDIC PRONUNCIATION OF THE ENGLISH language has always involved one particularly difficult sound that is apparently beyond the reach of Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, something which, among other factors such as melody and lyrical content, has more or less ruined my appreciation of pop songs by Abba, A-ha, Aqua and Bjork Gudmumsdottir, to name a few from the beginning of the alphabet.

THIS INVOLVES AN APPARENT INABILITY to deal with any of the possible inflections of the terminal “s” sound as it sometimes glides into a “z” or a “sh”, and, as can be seen in the list above, it extends into Iceland. I often shuddered when one of the girls from Abba sang “Can you hear the drumce, Fernando?” or “Sheece a dancing queen…”, and the obligatory pop song word “kisses” was always “kissess”. It may be that in these languages any final “s” sound is simply pronounced as an initial one, always as a double hiss, which makes one wonder how they might deal with ordering sheesh kebabs and whether they have drug pushers or sellers of hashish in these countries.

IF THIS IS TRUE, then it was either unfortunate or deliberate of Sky News to interview an Icelandic TV2 journalist, ankle deep in “ash” and holding a microphone in his hands like they used to do on British TV in the nineteen sixties, and ask him, “So tell us about your ash, Mr Gudmumsson.”

“WELL,” HE BEGAN, “OUR ASS IS EVERYWHERE, ass you can see. If I bend down,” he said, indicating the ground, “you see ass which is quite thick.” One could almost hear Sky News at Six presenter Andrew Wilson sniggering into his microphone as our Icelandic expert went on to tell us that, “We are used to ass in Iceland, but not normally such dense ass, and not usually from 10,000 metres. Our animals have ass all over them…” After the gentleman had told us that the “only way to deal with such bad ass” was for farmers to “take their sheep into the barns” I began to wonder whether I was watching a joke report, but, Alash!, it was real.

IN THE MIDST OF YET ANOTHER SAD CRISIS involving those oh-so-clever-we-had-the-first-parliament-and-the-first-democracy-and-the-first-grammar-book-in-Europe Icelanders and their inability to solve a simple problem of dealing with their volcanoes, this was one of the few things making me laugh as I looked at my printed-at-home boarding card and a map of dust floating over Britain on my computer screen.

My photo shows the volcano Gudvolcanosdottirson and its bad ash.