D Kendall

And now I live in Berlin. Memories from my first time in Sweden stir from forgotten depths. Sunlit autumnal Lund. A gentle introduction to the rigours of the north but where I soon felt disoriented. This time it’s different; a liberation from the here of Sweden and the there of Britain, the dogged half century of struggle to preserve my Englishness, release from the continual longing to be elsewhere, from the sharp break in 73, from the before and after. It helps that southerly Berlin shares the ivy clad softness of Britain. But it’s also different because I have had much to do with Germany over the years and my German is stronger than my initial equipment of very few Swedish words.

The beginning was tawdry and pointless. Excited by my first trip abroad at university, I wanted more and made for Dover, and after successfully getting away from clustered hitchhikers at Ostend, was rolling across flat Flanders towards Aachen and Cologne. Late in the day, I arrived at Wuppertal with its then exotic overhead train (tram). Stuck in a cold city, I spent the small hours in a heated street toilet before returning home in the morning, I wasn’t an efficient traveller in my youth.

A couple more hitchhiking trips at university, racing down the motorway system beyond Cologne and Frankfurt headed for Prague and later Yugoslavia. Broken fragmentary memories of standing on motorway access roads, of the cleaner’s agitated raus in response to my tardy sleeping habits, trying to talk about the GDR with a judge in need of more light-hearted evening distraction from a difficult case.

And later in search of a place to spend the night, unrolling my sleeping bag in what I thought was a quiet spot in Cologne, I was almost immediately offered five marks for my services. I politely declined without feeling threatened – but was my market price really so excruciatingly low? My fellow traveller and I retreated to more peaceful waiting at the nearby station for the first train to anywhere.

My first trip to Berlin was later, post-university, A fast motorcycle and me, helmet less on the pillion. In my memory, I had a suitcase but it must have been a rucksack. Heavy and hard to keep my balance as we speeded east, Dropped on the Kudamm in the early hours. Working for a left youth paper, I somehow managed to organise an interview with a friendly man who eventually tired of my unstructured rambling although we parted as friends. And then the night at a commune, called I believe Commune One out west somewhere. A disturbed night as the police came looking for some minor on the run from family life, who was believed to be there. Waking in the morning, confused by the first morning sight of a girl naked to the waist who was leaning over me, in practice not as laid back as I would have liked to think I was. Not sure whether there was any erotic charge but whatever attraction the sleeping adolescent may have had was rapidly dissipated by my struggle to regain consciousness and she disappeared. And later rattling away on the S-bahn near Westkreuz talking with a commune dweller and on my way to my first trip to the GDR. The start of a long fascination, how the solid familiarity of capitalism could disappear after a ten-minute train ride. No preparation, no plan but fascinated by the bookshops where what was marginal in the west was mainstream. And the different use of space when land was not priced in the western way.

After moving to Sweden, I made many trips to the GDR. In those days, travelling overland, you could buy a cheap railway ticket to anywhere in Germany. I travelled back from the UK via Berlin, went across (probably on the wrong type of visa) to Ostbahnhof and by train to Sassnitz and Sweden.

The wall interested me and I spent hours walking as close as I could come on the east side and then traversed the same route on the west side. But again fragmentary memories, helping push start a stalled Trabi, the glories of the Ishtar gate, the border guard who ran after me to give me back what I had left on the shelf at the currency exchange and visa booth. And on a later visit, standing carelessly beside a cage at the eastern zoo, when the cat rose up with a roar and I was probably lucky not to be uncomfortably close to hisher paw.

 And the contrast between New Year’s Eve in East and West where in the east all was booked for groups and we were very fortunate to obtain uncollected tickets to the Brecht theatre, dressed in my Swedish winter gear, unseemly ravishing sausages on small sticks as the Bonze brushed past, while in the West individual pizza was freely available if you didn’t mind having fireworks thrown everywhere.

Then there was my PhD, purportedly on the housing situation in the GDR, though my interest was more general and I was less than lukewarm about my topic. Not happy about the course of events in 1989, I was at least happy to part with my embryo thesis in a paper recycling container when my research object disappeared.

My interest in Germany and the GDR in particular had become much more serious by then, although my inability to conceive of the suddenness of the collapse was not a sign of mastery of the subject.

But I did learn a lot, both about the workings of a deformed workers state and about the workings of my own brain (weakness of structure, inability to see the trees for the leaves, indicating that writing a doctoral dissertation was not my strongest suit).

I found it difficult to visit what had been the GDR immediately after its collapse. But in later years, as the physical differences fade and the memory of what once was becomes more and more subtle, I have forgotten and travel there as elsewhere, especially in the last decade.

A ragbag of assorted memories but a ragbag which means that Germany is not so foreign for me.

I am excited about learning about German mythology, how it relates to the Nordic, and its place in early German society. And learning more German, although my pride in being self-taught may get in the way, I want to know more about the mix of languages in the lands that became Germany, including the relationship between Celtic and German. But, of course, also about modern German politics.

Very soon now most of my books will arrive in Berlin and we will approach the tipping point, where a good proportion of the objects that customarily accompany me on my voyage through the world are here. I am looking forward to getting to grips with a major European culture. I like my extra Swedish storey from which I can see a different world but this is so much grander.

The distant muffled noise from a football stadium has quietened. I listen to Corelli, of whom I know nothing, enjoying the leafy calm of my Berlin suburb. Ancient memories of my arrival in Sweden in 1973 revive. Sunny autumn Lund where we didn’t lock the door, walking in the park with our two cats, who followed us better than I thought possible until the trees proved too tempting. Rescue by a bolder soul. Little money but life was soft with half of our three-digit rent covered by housing benefit. Wondering how much longer privately-owned grocery shops (ICA) would survive and the shame of occasionally patronising them. Life in a cradle-to-grave folk hem with over forty years of social democrat domination, confident administrators of Swedish society unlike the UK’s defensive safety valve Labour folk.

And riding my British Raleigh moped across Sweden from west coast to east, to my relatives in Kivik. Too far, too boring, too fast, ending inevitably with the accelerator cable loose in my hand, the moped in a hedgerow to be picked up by some long-suffering driver quaintance and taken to a bemused repair shop where Raleigh was not of the known world. No helmet as I was immortal then. A thin shard of soon to end youth before I became a father and the world was differently young.

And a half century on, liberated, euphoric, aquiver with visions of the possible but also apprehensive. I am very content but it would be fine to have more familiar things around me to support me on my journey to embrace the new. My Indian bedspread, my pictures of Dorset, the monks washing place at Sherborne Abbey, where I cut my hair during my passage to adolescence, the nineteenth-century flamingo vase, once owned by my grandparents, both dead before the end of the nineteenth, my Pevsner collection, and more eccentric acquisitions, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Logic, faded from its bright blue but still unmarked and unread, never understood but with me too long for a parting.

And tomorrow, IKEA’s rabbits come to erect my bookshelves, banal Billies with doors to protect my frail frame from dust. Fated to remain empty until my next trip to Sweden to retrieve more of my treasures and to reduce the unreasonable acreage of my Shurgardens.

 Five in the morning after a real night, the soft white in-between time of the high Nordic summer being long gone. My last  Uppland dawn would be an exaggeration but a summer of changes is now coming to a climax (“climax” jars but it’s old, originally from the Greek word for ladder).

My old flat in Gamla Uppsala, close by the ancient graves, is clean and empty except for a surprisingly heavy microwave oven, which my less absent-minded neighbours assure me is mine. Today’s task is to move it to my new flat, further east in the city, even smaller than my old flat, half the size.

A few luxurious moments in bed planning the day before becoming fully awake and aware of the treacherous landscape of perilously perched possessions separating me from morning coffee.

Not long ago, Gandhian simplicity with my bed, my table and a few clothes and now I have to struggle to keep in mind that this chaos is not chronic, that I can master all these objects ganging up on me.

At some mist-shrouded future time, well-organised self-storage units, the pressure on space relieved by my other flat in Berlin. But I’m still far from knowing that my biography of St Jerome, patron saint of translators, is in box B14 just by the door. Instead, a task for the future, an estimated eighty boxes of books to be sifted.

I’ve enjoyed living in Uppsala, both the city and the surrounding landscape, with its relatively dense population of places, each with their own peculiarities and stories, reminding me of homeland Dorset. It’s pleased me more than desolate miles of pine forest with interesting nature but less culture. But I’ve wanted to be in too many other places as well – Germany, the UK, France and India among others, to become socially rooted here. I shall continue with my Uppland projects – I want to know more about the mediaeval  wall painter Albertus Pictor who was active in these parts and about Uppland’s physical geography, geology etc but as one project among many. And the delights of big city life, a language and culture to be learnt, the exciting contours of the new, will take energy and space.

On holiday in South-West Wales, I became interested in how southern Pembrokeshire became English-speaking, so much so that it is referred to as Little England or England beyond Wales.

The Normans invaded Wales already in 1081, not to long after the Norman conquest, attracted both by the fertile coastal regions and the easy access to Ireland. It seems feasible that the Welsh were not enthusiastic about working as serfs on land they once owned especially as (unlike most of the Anglo-Saxons), they could easily flee into Welsh-controlled areas. Also feasible that the Norman were not enthusiastic about having large number of hostile Welsh on their farms.

The question then remains, which I have not yet been able to answer of who the serfs on the Norman farms were and what language did they speak?  Were they English.speaking Anglo-Saxons and, if so how did they get there. In this case, the process of transition from French to English would have been similar to that in England.

William the Conqueror granted his fellow invaders plots of confiscated land. It’s possible that the Norman knights in southern Pembrokeshire also owned land in England, which would facilitate immigration of English-speakers. Another possibility is that English speakers arrived much later after the turbulence of the Black Death in the fourteenth century.

The language situation is complicated by the presence of Flemings. According to one story, a natural disaster on the Flemish coast later led to large numbers of refugees coming to England although there is some dispute about the cause of their arrival in the literature.Some of William’s fellow invaders came from Flanders and William was married to Matilda of Flanders so there was already a Flemish connection.They presumably spoke Dutch. I don’t yet have a statistic for the number of Flemings, nor do I know what their role in the economy was, only that some number were concentrated around Haverfordwest and that Wiston castle was originally owned by a Flemish lord called Wizo, It’s hard, however, to see how this limited number of refugees could have pushed the area towards being English-speaking especially as they weren’t English-speaking themselves.

There are, of course, other possible causes that may be better at explaining the language development than conventional narratives of kings and battles. The Norman lords and their Flemish or French wives might well have employed Old English speaking staff to look after their children who in this way became speakers of English. I’ve no evidence to support this but I suspect something similar may have happened in Normandy where the Normans became French-speaking within a couple of centuries from the arrival of the Scandinavian Viking Rollo, so adept that they could spread the French language in England.

I haven’t yet seen much impact from the later Flemish immigration. A few place names and some architectural details.

As can be seen from this short summary, I lack detailed information, which may be available. It’s necessary to understand the Norman feudal mode of production and how Welsh agriculture diverged from this.  But also to have a grasp of what has been written and thought about Pembrokeshiere before in order to be able to ask the right questions.

And it’s not just what we don’t know that causes problems but what we already know or think we know.  It seems that later on after the initial confiscation of land from the Welsh that there were areas where the Welsh and Normans (English) lived close by. We have farms and plots of land which operated under Welsh law (as regards inheritance, for example, where property would be divided between the children rather than the oldest getting the lion’s share as under English law. And these legal systems seem to have co-existed side by side, despite the dominance of the Anglo-Normans.

There’s a lot to read and I am hampered by not knowing Welsh and not being familiar with Welsh attempts to explain their own history. And there is so much more happening in the world that I want to get to grips with but I shall try to pursue this project at least for relaxation.

It’s not hard to watch a webinar and apps are after all just software for mobiles.

I remember my mother’s cramped handwriting all in capitals as she struggled with the orthopaedic. To my shame, I don’t remember the details of her complaint  – of little interest to immortal self-centred youth. She had an ancient manual typewriter where sourcing new ribbons was slightly easier than finding the holy grail. With the wane of my self-centeredness, I made efforts to introduce her to a more modern electric typewriter but to no avail, the function keys were just too alien.

And I swore to myself then that I would not be a neophobe when I grew old. I haven’t done too badly, aided by my four children. But sometimes, the new is tiring and I still haven’t mastered the electronic entry system to my flat (in practice, a non-problem as I routinely don’t hear my mobile ringing).

But there is a thrill of achievement when I succeed in hauling myself over some new techno threshold; I am just about there when it comes to apps and webinars, which I can now watch without conveying the impression that I am making a silent Charlie Chaplin movie.

This time, it was an erudite man from Somerset, West England, talking about the history of the decline of the Turberville family.  The Turbervilles became known through Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and her alcoholised father John Durbeyfield, a plebeian scion of a once notable family. Hardy was fascinated by this theme of the old stock degenerating and being replaced by professionals on the rise (like himself). He was though, as in many other areas, a contradictory and complicated man and seemed not averse to London life where his status as a literary giant enabled him to hob nob with the aristos.

It felt fine to retreat to the Wessex of mine and Hardy’s imagination for an hour or so, away from the turbulence of the now.

I have just finished Rashid Khalidi’s “The Hundred Years’ ´War on Palestine”, which I would recommend to anyone wanting to understand better developments in Palestine and Israel from the Palestinian point of view (or at least the point of view an educated, westernized Palestinian family).

And now I’m going back to my preparations for my soon trip to Pembrokeshire in Wales and trying to think through what I would like to know more about, the difference between Norman feudalism in southern Pembrokeshire in what later became the English side of the language divide, and Welsh agriculture, the complicated impact of the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Welsh and Irish Q-celts from over the water, the Vikings and even the immigrant Flemings on place names in the vicinity of the cathedral city of St Davids. And I would like at least to be able to pronounce Welsh place names correctly. And then there’s Pevsner and the architecture of the tract. And increasingly. physical frailty requiring careful study of the terrain, contour lines, aids to mobility and how to make one’s way successfully in the battlefield of life without torturing the organic.

And every day I aim to study Bengali for an hour but I routinely allow it to get squeezed out so that I engage in crashing to fulfil my plan targets as my fortnightly lesson approaches. At least, the presence of Bengali relatives, including my recently met third grandchild fills my sails with wind.

And I want to improve my German too.

Then there’s correcting yesterday’s cock-ups, becoming a substantial part of life. Back to Arlanda to rescue a forgotten fleece at lost property; not altogether logical as the lost property office fee and the nasty Arlanda “passage ticket” ate up a substantial part of the remaining value of the fleece but I know I will forget about the money while the memory of the fleece will haunt me beyond doomsday if I don’t collect it.

And in the middle, an old schoolfriend from pre-yore tells me that he is in Sweden and would love to come and look at the kings’ graves with me, as they were covered with snow on his last visit.

And I am looking for a cheaper flat and plan to move a lot of my library into a shelved storage unit as my lungs coexist uneasily with hundreds of dusty books. This is later, post-Wales, but it requires a careful plan to avoid an overpowering mountain of jumbled books. I still remember with pleasure the look of consternation on the faces of the removal people as I explained the principles for moving my boxes of books last time and how, once trained in the swing of things, their exchanging comments on the whereabouts of box 19 or 23. One thing I still have from my years as a teacher, don’t give up, be patiently persistent, don’t accept people’s self-definition that something is too complicated, not for them.

But I need turbulence to feel well. The standard Swedish retreat to the countryside from the troubles of the world; I understand the birds, bees, flowers and gentle company with cake and coffee but it’s not for me. It makes me feel like an overturned steam locomotive with my wheels spinning uselessly in the air. And now that I am retreating from life as a translator with Wagnerian opportunities to tackle thousands of words by the morn, I have to find other sources of kindly stress. But with my ability not to see the trees for the twigs, I’m not seriously worried by the threat of implosion under the weight of leisure.

I have a pile of books to read: Rashid Khalidi’s  “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”, which feels urgent and the most important; and then a pile of books on Wales, on the national question, David Ross’s Wales, History of a Nation, the Pembrokeshire volume of Pevsner’s architectural guides and various academic volumes on Welsh and Norman agriculture to help me better the understand the language divide in south-western Wales.

I know so little about Wales despite my Somerset upbringing, with Wales a few miles across the water while priority was given to filling that tousled head with the Appian Way and the Trojan Horse.

Also important but imparting knowledge of our close Celtic neighbours had not been amiss.

And a few evenings ago, tired and unable to choose the next step, I pick up Hardy’s Return of the Native which I haven’t re-read since my teenage years. I remember mostly the spectacular –  Hardy’s architect’s eye for landscape, represented here by Egdon Heath, which unlike many of Hardy’s places has no equivalent in the Dorset landscape; Hardy constructs it from various patches of gorse-strewn ground in East Dorset and makes it massive. And the caravan-dwelling reddleman, stained red from head to foot by reddle used by farmers to mark their sheep. And then there was the adder that fatally bit Clym Yeobright’s mother, as well as the dramatic death in the weir of Eustacia Vye and her erstwhile lover Wildeve.  Weirs I have had a healthy respect for since then, although not understanding why the water close to them is so dangerous until more recent watery excursions.

But other aspects of the book have only become visible to a later eye. Hardy’s description of the varying social status not just of the grand people but right down to the marginal layers of “the middle class”. And his character types that crop up in book after book; the rural working class treated both with respect and ridicule and associations with Greek choruses or Shakespearian light relief; the dedicated lover who has often fallen on hard times but overcomes adversity by strength of character and who wins his lady in the end, usually after other less worthy contenders have been killed off or sticky ended in some other way.

And the modern Victorian, perhaps from a relatively humble background, who becomes a respected professional, reflecting Hardy’s experience of becoming an architect and leaving Dorset for London.

And the female characters, from the prim to the profligate. Hardy is often praised as understanding women but only the women he writes about, those he has made up himself. I have been to Max Gate home in Dorchester where he lived in fractious disharmony with his first wife who died alone in her attic quarters unwanted and  unloved. And Hardy’s second wife Florence who found it easier to accept being the great man’s muse. Hardy was stricken with grief and guilt after the death of his first wife and wrote many high quality love poems to her after her death; the course of love was not so smooth for his second wife either. I don’t know his poetry well but must make an effort to remedy this as he was predominantly a poet for the last 30 years of his life.

My version of the Return of the Native has a long introduction by George Woodcock, who also wrote the useful notes at the back. He seems to have been both a serious anarchist as well as a  literary academic, an entertaining man whom I should like to know more about. From the notes I learn about Lammas day in early August, celebrating the early harvest, about the sixteenth century historian John Leland and the maenads, female devotees or attendants of Dionysius “celebrated for their dangerous  and self-mutilating ecstatic frenzies” which sounds refreshingly unprim. And also the transferred epithet (see tousled head in the first paragraph). And also wondered about the difference between “pagan” and “heathen”, the first from Latin and related to rural folk and the second Germanic, where unconverted pre Christians scampered around the heaths.

I couldn’t live in Hardy’s Wessex, after a long joyful stay, it would become claustrophobic and I would need to escape. But I love to be able to dip into this world, to learn more about it.

A couple of weeks ago I started to read the Bengali novel “Restless waters of the Ichhamati” by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. I made slow progress to start with, overwhelmed by the number of characters and special vocabulary. But the more I got into the novel, the more impressed I became.

The main topic is the indigo revolt in Bengal (ca 1859). Less well known than the Indian rebellion a couple of years earlier, the production of indigo, used as blue dye in the European textile industry, caused very considerable hardship to the local population, forced to grow indigo on their land instead of foodstuffs. Bandyopadhyay describes the process of how the British entrepreneur chose and measured up the land for indigo (land they didn’t own), backed up by local thugs, who didn’t hesitate to wound or even kill those who resisted (and burnt down houses). The planting of indigo was not a voluntary process neither was it profitable for the farmers. The farmers were lent money to plant indigo but at very high rates of interest, making it practically impossible for them or their inheriting children to ever escape the financial control of the lenders.

In 1859, a revolt broke out and the farmers refused to plant more indigo, much of the action taking place in what is now Bangla Desh. Tactics varied from place to place – in some places, violence was used against the entrepreneurs and their henchmen, in other places, the protests were more peaceful. And I am convinced that atrocities were committed against the farmers in this process but the scale of the protests made the customary resort to repression less effective. I’ve seen speculation that the fact that the struggle was aimed at the entrepreneurs and not against governmental forces played a part in its relative success.

I should like to know more about this and especially how the struggle in the indigo revolt related to the the suppression of the sepoy rebellion. This was the period when rule by the East India Company was replaced by ultimate control by the British government, probably a form of government preferred by large English companies in, for example, the textile industry, which needed laws to protect their access to sources and to brake (and reverse) Indian development rather than simple protection of the framework for pre-imperialist exploitation through trade of goods produced in India.  

In my reading of Bandyopadhyay’s novel, the indigo revolt is present but it feels somewhat off stage. It seems to come to an end not as a result of successful struggle but in response to the invention of synthetic indigo by German scientists at a fraction of the price for which it could be produced in India.

From the little I have read of Bengali history, this telescopes development. That was indeed the coup de grace for exploitation by the indigo companies but I believe (tentatively) that some years elapsed between the break out of the indigo revolt and the collapse of the Bengali indigo industry. In between, there was a government commission which examined conditions in the indigo industry and (according to the source on the net) drew some conclusions unfavourable to the entrepreneurs on the unsustainability of their exploitation (I have associations here with the history of the crofters in the Outer Hebrides after the First World War). I am suspicious of happy endings, of history served with honey, and want to know more about what actually happened during this period.

The greatness of Bandyopadhyay’s novel is not just  his social realism but his cast of characters reflecting rural Bengali society as it was at that time and his description of the attitudes of the people, the complicated rules affecting relations between castes and above all village women, whose behaviour was not just regulated before marriage. I haven’t read as much Balzac as I would like but that was my association.

Bandyopadhyay’s name is derived from Sanskrit meaning (I believe) friend of the teacher. It is also referred to as  Banerjee. I thought that this abbreviation was the work of the Brits but (as far as I understand) it is common among the Bengali themselves. In fact, Bandyopadhyay is not as fearsome to pronounce as it looks, if you remember that  the first “y” is not clearly pronounced but affects the quality of the preceding “d” and that the “h” after the second d indicates aspiration.

I am going to read this novel again and also to make myself a reading list on the nineteenth century history of Bengal.

To a translator’s conference at the weekend, at least one day of it. The agenda was probably attractive for those new or relatively new to the professions of translator and interpreter but of less interest to me approaching the end of my career. I’d hoped to meet some of the translator acquaintances I’ve made over the past 30 years but there were very few familiar faces. I’m not sure why – the translation organisation is recovering now from a turbulent period, which I believe has caused some people to leave or at least become more passive. And, of course, I’m over a decade beyond the formal retirement age so that many of the people I knew are now doing other things  (perhaps a message I should listen to…).

I did go to the session organised by a trade union, not with any intention of joining but out of curiosity to see how aware they were of conditions in the industry and what kind of response they received. It’s undoubtedly the case that conditions for the independent translator have deteriorated over the past 20 years. There has been a pronounced downward pressure on prices; unlike many of my colleagues, I haven’t lowered my prices but I’ve not raised them either for a very long time so in real terms I’m charging less than I used to. And I have largely priced myself out of the agency market. Working conditions have deteriorated too with translation agencies attempting to compete with very short deadlines (without express surcharges). Prices are at times very low bearing in mind that independent translators often work through their own firms and pay their own social security contributions. The additional premium once made to independent translators to cover the risk of running a company has in many cases become thin. Some translators are in or perilously close to a gig economy situation, where agencies collar the premium but shoulder little of the risk, having no commitment to the translators they use beyond the current project they are engaged in. If the benefits of being an independent contractor become too thin, posts as employed translators could become more attractive.  And perhaps some agencies will experience pressure to employ more translators. We’re still a long way from that situation, however.

And recently there has been a further rather dramatic deterioration where the volume of translation work on offer has decreased markedly, which must affect the translation agencies as well as independent translators, and make them more risk averse. The bulk of the work on offer has been low paid post-editing, reviewing translations created by various kinds of translation software/machine translation, checking and bringing them up to usable standard. The spread of knowledge about how good translation software has become, combined with a sharper focus on costs has had pronounced effects.

I see that one German translation agency is now in administration and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a major shake-out with a number of bankruptcies of organisations whose reserves are too thin to weather the storm if indeed the storm can be weathered, and individuals who leave the industry.

The trade union representatives presented what they had to offer to independent contractors – legal advice and various kinds of insurance, among other things. I’m not aware of the details but it didn’t seem superior to the customised insurance that many independent translators already have  (also with legal advice available). They also talked of being able to do more if they recruited more people in the industry. This seemed vague to me as traditional trade union activities such as wage negotiation and collective agreements don’t sit at all easily (or at all) with an industry where many of the weaker participants run their own small companies (and collective agreements would presumably  conflict with legislation on competition and risk accusations of collusion to hold up prices). It could be that their offering makes more sense for interpreters than translators.

In economic history, producers have not managed to retain all of the benefits of productivity improvements over long periods. They have had to share these benefits with customers and the same will apply/already applies to translators where the use of translation software has speeded up our work. And talk about the weaknesses of machine translation and the need for human checks, while true is fighting a losing battle against rapidly improving software and AI.

If translators are to survive, they have to find a commercial model which integrates these productivity improvements and offers the customer something more, otherwise we will go the way of the hand loom weavers, digital cameras and the yellow pages.

We have to offer an attractive level of expertise that integrates the new, to become, for example, lawyer-linguists or other specialists,  offering post-editing by legally qualified translators or specialists in particular branches (medicine, financial etc.), hoping to create a niche market with higher prices than the bulk mass market product offered by the bigger agencies.

But for me, way beyond retirement age, the time for empire building is over. Translation has served me well, rescuing me from the (for me, at least) dubious pleasures of school classrooms, and giving me over thirty years when I haven’t needed to worry much about liquidity. But now the party is over.

I’m already doing a fraction of the work I used to and have no shortage of occupations, quirky and serious, to fill my time.

But without wanting to be callous towards my younger colleagues, who are facing a tough period, I am more than a little relieved that I didn’t have to make the decision myself to kill the golden goose which has of its own volition become thin, worn and anaemic, almost a lame duck in fact.

Exploration of the word

archaeoastronomy self explanatory but rather fine

boondoggle, its etymology variously given as unknown, or coming from the boy scouts meaning product of simple manual labour but it has also come to denote an unnecessary wasteful or fraudulent project which continues to exist for political or extraneous reasons Also supposedly coined in the mid -1920s by Robert H. Link of Rochester, New York as a nickname for his infant son. Unclear how it made its way to the modern meaning, hopefully Robert H. Link wasn’t using it in that sense.

I’d heard this word before but swept past it.

caviste – a French word but it does exist in English in  the appropriate environments (where folk have access to professionally run wine cellars).

vintner someone who sells or makes wine.

jacked  (slang) well developed muscles. I am definitely unjacked and like it this way.

listicle a piece of writing presented wholly or partly as a list. I don’t feel attracted by this word.

nocebo effect

placebo is better known when a patient feels better despite the medicine applied having no established scientific effects.

nocebo is the opposite when someone feels worse from, for example, replacing a brand medicine with a generic medicine, despite it not being possible to identify any medical reason for this.

tergiversation

evasion of action or a clear-cut statement, desertion of a cause, position, party or faith

(source: Merriam Webster dictionary site). I was vaguely aware of the word.

From the Latin verb tergiversari meaning “to show reluctance” and coming from a combination of tergum meaning back and versare meaning to turn.

theodicy vindication of divine provenance in view of the existence of evil.

This sounds shaky to me and when I answer St Peter’s questionnaire in life’s quality follow-up (or the other department, mutatis mutandis), I shall state that it is highly unlikely that I recommend life to a friend.

toerag according to Collins dictionary, a despicable or contemptible person. I’d just about guessed this from the context I saw it used in.

toposcope, also known as topograph: the explanatory table or illustration at, for example, viewing points. I’m very glad to make its acquaintance and think I will use it (rather than toerag, which feels out of character)

Exploration of the world

Fitzrovia

I knew vaguely where it was and it is vaguely between Oxford St and Euston Rd on the S and N and Tottenham Court Rd and Great Portland St in the East and West. Viewed as a desirable area to live in and I wouldn’t mind at all if a flat here fell into my lap. I now also know that Rimbaud and G.B.Shaw lived there but doubt whether they met in a local tavern to play dominoes.

Travertine often referred to as Travertine marble but in fact a type of limestone. Burghausen castle in Bavaria, said to be the longest castle in the world, is made from it. If this feels over the top for a study visit, it can also be seen at the old London Transport headquarters in St James Park. Travertine also has the advantage of being porous so that if you wish to weep copiously at the sad saga of TFL vacating its traditional home for Far Eastern Stratford, it shouldn’t leave a stain on the floor.

Trespa cladding

A brand name. From the net “Everything you need to know about HPL Trespa:

The HPL panels consist of a wood fibre core that is compressed under high pressure giving the core the same properties as hardwood. The outer sides of an HPL sheet are finished with a  phenolic resin top layer, which is rock hard and virtually unbreakable”.

What these scientists get up to…..

Curious about the expression “You’re not exactly a shrinking violet”, I find from a reticent source on the Internet that it is believed to have first appeared in a saying from Leigh Hunt in a magazine The Indicator, published in 1820: There was the buttercup, struggling from a white to a dirty yellow and a faint-coloured poppy; and here and there by the thorny underwood a shrinking violet.

Leigh Hunt’s name has hovered on the fringe of my attention a number of times and it was clearly time for him to take his place in my personal panorama of early nineteenth century England. He was born on my birthday (but in 1784 not 1945) and died on my mother’s birthday (1859 not 1910). He attended Christ’s Hospital school near Horsham for which I had an unsuccessful interview (possibly stymied by my lack of knowledge of Pontius Pilate).

Otherwise, according to Wiki, Leigh Hunt was an English critic, essayist and poet, who co-founded The Examiner, a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the “Hunt circle”. He died in Putney and I hoped that he was buried in Putney Vale cemetery to give me an added reason to visit (I want to go there and see how Kerensky is getting on, who seemed to have had problems getting buried in New York where he had lived and ended up in Putney Vale). But Leigh Hunt is in Kensal Green, one of the magnificent seven (to my shame I  have only visited three of these cemeteries to date: Kensal Green, Highgate and Nunhead).

Leigh Hunt was a major cultural figure in his time and important for the introduction of Keats, Shelley, Browning and Tennyson. He also made enemies, among them Blake.

He is famous too for his appearance (with Byron) in Louis Edouard Fournier’s painting of Shelley’s funeral on the beach at Viareggio on the Tuscan coast (not on Italy’s east coast as I’d previously thought). This painting is in the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, giving me another reason for a visit to Liverpool and Birkenhead (I want to visit Port Sunlight too).

And now a pile of invoices awaits me to be listed, arranged and copied for my income tax return where I shall endeavour to reduce capital gains tax to a manageable amount; these from the time when I was involved in building a mediaeval cathedral on an island in Mälaren (it was a one-room extension actually but I didn’t get the impression that the builder was a man prone to undue haste and there was surely room for a flying buttress or two in his impressive sheaf of necessities to be paid for). It’s so much more pleasant to float around on the net filling the odd gap in knowledge than grubbing around with filthy lucre but such is the way of the world.

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