Pass the Danish

I know almost nothing about Greenland but it is clearly much more than the President of the United States. For instance, in a 2008 referendum, 75% of Greenlanders supported the self-government act which put their parliament on a par with the Danish parliament. So any deal to sell the island would have to be approved by Greenland, not Denmark. Therefore, Trump was asking the wrong question to the wrong country although both Denmark and Greenland rejected the “absurd” idea anyway.

Schoolkids in Greenland learn, in addition to Danish and English, West Greenlandic, which is an Eskimo language. But no, there aren’t 50, or a 100, words for snow.

But it is a polysynthetic language, where words are formed with a root, one or more affixes and a suffix. As a result a Greenlandic word can be very long and correspond to what would be a whole sentence in other languages. I love that the word for potato, naatsiiat, actually means “something for which one waits for a long time to grow up”.

There may not be many famous Greenlanders outside their own country but there’s Jesper Grønkjær who played football for Chelsea, and perhaps the most renowned, Leif Eriksson, who discovered North America 500 years before Columbus. If Leif and his band had actually stayed, rather than sailing back home with plunder, Donald Trump might be speaking Greenlandic today. Which would be about as comprehensible as his English.

Dial another one

If someone calls you from an international number saying they’re the BT technical department and that someone has pirated your IP address and you’ll be responsible for premium rate calls and the like from it, I suggest you chortle, or swear at the person because it’s a scam.

Funny old game

Ageism was blootered into Row Z during the week when 50-year-old Danny Lennon came on as a substitute for Clyde Colts against Celtic (and they won). He is the manager of Clyde and the shortage of players – or just his irrepressible enthusiasm – saw him trot on, looking leaner than his teammates if a tad wizened beyond his years (the beard and hair didn’t help). I interviewed Danny once when he was at Partick Thistle and he was a joy. During the game he belaboured Chris McStay, whose dad Paul Lennon played against, for not passing the ball to his feet. “I did,” said McStay. "What size do you think they are?” shot back Lennon. “Coco the Clown’s?”

I’m pretty sure Stanley Matthews, at 50, was the oldest player to take part in the top tier of English football, with Stoke. But auld yins are popping up all over the globe. In Japan, Kazuyoshi Miura, the first superstar of the game there, is still playing in the second division at 52. Lamberto Boranga, who will turn 77 next month, is still playing in goal for an Italian amateur side having played in Serie A with Fiorentina in the 1960s. He’s also a doctor and a poet. But the top award must go to France’s Robert Marchand who is still cycling at 107 (although he gave up competitions at 106 having set several age world records).

He puts his longevity down to a variant of the Mediterranean diet with lots of vegetables and little meat. Actually, forget the Med diet, he ought to be bringing out his own cookbook – The Marchand Method. I’m sure he’s still got plenty of time to complete it.

Horrible history

It was unfortunate timing. In the week that the BBC screened a laudatory documentary about The Day Mountbatten Died the allegation, from FBI files, that Lord Louis Mountbatten was a paedophile came out. We already knew that his wife, Edwina, was profligate in her affairs, including with Nehru and singer Paul Robeson.

I really don’t care about their sexual peccadilloes, as long as it didn’t involve lack of consent and minors (and the FBI stuff was compiled under J Edgar Hoover, so is to be distrusted), it’s Louis’s political input that should be examined.

It’s fair to say that without him there would almost certainly have been no decades of suffering by the Vietnamese people before they eventually, after the long war and massive carnage and infrastructural blitzkrieg, gained their independence.

Mountbatten was appointed Supreme Allied Commander of the South East Asia Command towards the end of the Second World War. Throughout the war the Allies had armed and supplied the independence movement, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh, to fight the Japanese occupying forces on the promise of self-determination after hostilities.

However, at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, when the world was divided into spheres of influence and control by Churchill, Stalin and Truman, it was decided that the French, who had colonised Vietnam, were to return, although, after their defeat and occupation by the Nazis, they were in no shape to do so.

The Germans had surrendered and after the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese did likewise in early September.

So Mountbatten, trying to hold the country for the French return and with insufficient Anglo-Indian troops to do so after Ho and the Viet Minh rebelled over the duplicity, allowed the Japanese armies to hold on to their weapons and fight against those who had been promised their freedom.

It’s a little-known and deeply shameful episode in Britain’s inglorious past.

But for the arming of the then enemy, it’s safe to say there would have been no Dien Bien Phu, no Vietnam War, 58,000 US soldiers would not have died and, more pertinently, more than a million North Vietnamese soldiers and two million civilians would not have perished.

This was an episode missing from the hagiographic documentary.