I water the tangerine in the pot every morning. A lot of young shoots came out. Last year, I made a lot of sacrifices to mandarin oranges to raise one swallowtail butterfly, but this year I would like to have it bear fruit.
Advice sought after:
I listen to and dictate BBC programs (podcasts) to deter and delay dementia. And oftentimes I come to words and phrases which I cannot catch. It would be appreciated if you can tell me what they are saying and also correct my incorrect catching in the attempted transcript.
Thanks in advance.
BBC Book Club David Lodge
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00fc3wg
1030
This is the day that Robyn Penrose, the lecturer, feminist, theorist and English literature comes to the factory for the first time. And is given a tour by Managing Director Vic Wilcox. And she is appalled by the conditions in which people are working, the dirt, the filth and the noise. And this is a little bit of conversation they had in the work's canteen at the lunchtime. And Vic really should have a Midland accent but I'm not very good at that but I do my best.
1100
“You don't want to get too sentimental about operatives, you know,” he went on. “They're a pretty crude lot. They seem to like dirt. We put new toilets in the fettling shop last November. In two weeks they were all vandalized. Disgusting it was, what they did to those toilets.”
“Perhaps it was a form of revenge,” said Robyn.
“Revenge?” Wilcox stared. “Revenge against who?
Me, for giving them new toilets?”
“Revenge against the system.”
“What system?”
“The factory system. It must generate enormous resentment.”
“Nobody forces them to work here,” said Wilcox, stabbing the crust of his steak pie with a fork.
“That's what I mean, it's the return of the repressed. It's unconscious.”
“Oh? Who says?” Wilcox inquired, cocking his eyebrow.
“Freud, for one,” said Robyn. “Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis.”
“I know who you mean,” said Wilcox sharply. “I'm not completely solid between the ears, you know, even if I do work in a factory.”
“I wasn't implying that you were,” said Robyn, flushing. “Have you read Freud, then?”
“I don't get much time for reading,” said Wilcox, “but I've a rough idea what he was about. Said everything came down to sex, didn't he?”
“That's a rather over-simplified way of putting it,” said Robyn, disinterring some overcooked fish from its carapace of orange batter.
“But basically right?”
“Well, not entirely wrong,” said Robyn. “The early Freud certainly thought libido was the prime mover of human behaviour. Later he came to think the death instinct was more important.”
“The death instinct - what's that?” Wilcox arrested the transfer of a morsel of meat to his mouth to put this question.
“It's hard to explain. Essentially it's the idea that unconsciously we all long for death, for non-being, because being is so painful.”
“I often feel like that at five o'clock in the morning, ” said Wilcox. “But I snap out of it when I get up.”
1253
