Month: March 2020

Friday, 20 March

I start the day by translating a short divorce judgment. It’s very quiet just now but I have some proof reading and another little job about an academic appointment to keep me busy for a couple of days. It’s unusually quiet for the spring, which is usually a peak work period when I have to vigorously fend off other people’s endeavours to export their chaos.

I decide to cycle to my Shurgard self-storage facility to see how long it takes and to review how far I am away from being away to close it down.

It’s quite pleasant cycling as Uppsala has well-developed cycle paths. And changing my habits leads to me finding a letter box near my flat which I didn’t know existed before, which is a bonus in these times when thronging around the box at the post facility in the local supermarket is a no no.

It’s surprisingly rural following the cycle path to Gränby Centrum, but I then get on Vaksalagatan leading to the city centre, which is the wrong direction. At the same time realising that it’s a bit far for me, inexperienced cyclist as I am (and I have to get back too). So I swing around in a circle back to Löten, my area.

I decide that I am not going to try to wind up the self-storage facility until normality is restored. It’s tantalisingly close but it’s going to take a disproportionately great deal of effort under current conditions and probably involve risk situations. It feels good to have decided that and, if I wasn’t avoiding pawing my face, I would give my frontal lobes (where the executive stuff takes place) a little pat.

Back at the flat, I take an hour’s siesta and then dust my daily allotment of three bookshelves. I am working through the Indian section now and see that I now have over 120 books on India here (as well as a few jointly owned volumes in Kolkata). Vivid images from Bengal pass through my mind. It’s not long ago and it feels both close at hand and far away because of everything that has happened since. It’s a good feeling that Bengal is starting to feel very familiar. I haven’t restarted my Bangla studies yet but I will do tomorrow (come hell or high water, “liksom”).

I work my way through my papers – the UK Guardian, the Financial Times, DN and the local Uppsala paper, UNT. It seems that the Germans might also practice a lockdown which neither the Swedes nor the UK is doing.

I think about the different national reactions to the Corona crisis and national “characters”. The Swedish politicians say that a lockdown is not necessary here as people are carrying out social distancing as they should anyway and a formal lockdown would be counterproductive. I wonder whether this is because the Swedes, even at fairly modest levels of society, feel like citizens and not subjects (unlike the British where the distance between the individual and the state is greater). However, the French (who are very much citizens but with a much more confrontational attitude to the state) have gone for a rather advanced lockdown so there are other historical reasons at work too in moulding reactions.

It will be interesting too to see what effect all of this will have on the “zeitgeist”. Whether, among all the disruption, worry and sadness, there will emerge something like the “blitz spirit” in the UK in the war where people who lived through those awful times can still say that the war years, despite everything, were the best of their lives – a feeling of being members of a community with a common purpose, fighting against a dire threat together, which might be a good feeling, compared with the fragmentation, purposelessness, vague and sometimes not so vague anonymous threats and lack of social ambition of life under globalized capitalism, which has a rather frenzied feel to it. It seems almost as if Nature has slapped our faces to restore our sanity.

2020-03-19 Corona-diary-day-4

I spend the morning preparing February’s file for my accountant. It was a quiet month workwise but complicated by credit card payments in Bengal, some private and some for Anglia (mostly books and computer equipment). I’ve got a lot more systematic over the years with receipts but there’s still quite a bit of room for improvement and I riffle backwards and forwards in my files after elusive bits of paper. And I can’t print directly from my desktop computer but have to mail everything to a laptop first, which complicates things (this being the cause of the cable trailing across the floor that I fell over the day before yesterday).

i’m not quite sure why I want to do this just now as it could wait for a while. But somehow I want to get it done so that I don’t have to think about it any more. And after working together for 74 years with David Kendall, I know that rational conduct is pitching it a bit high; the way to go is managed irrationality. It would probably warm the cockles of the Tax Agency’s heart anyway that citizens were prepared to struggle hard to put their house in order, come what may…

By late morning, I’ve fixed the accounts (leaving my workroom looking like I’ve just had a visit from a friendly local hurricane). I organise the recyclables to take with me. Our house (which is brand new) has no recycling room. We are supposed to take all metal, glass and plastic to containers at a shop almost a kilometre away with no direct bus there. This building is also for the Over 55s. This doesn’t seem very green to me (do they think we all have cars?). The property company make up for it by having cheerful advice on the website about how we can live in a more sustainable way.

I am tempted to write a quote from the New Testament (Matthew 7:3-5) on the rubbish shute – “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” but there isn’t room and I’m not sure it would be readily understood…

It’s not a huge problem for me personally but it’s kind of irritating that something that should take 5 minutes, takes at least half an hour and the extent of waste sorting at our house is probably low.

I have to post the accounts at the post office counter at the shop so I’m kitted up with my mask. There aren’t many people around and I can glide towards the desk with people at a good distance (in fact, although the mask is not considered as offering such good protection, people avoid getting too near to someone wearing a mask, especially a slightly weird hi-tech mask like mine, which probably does enhance its protective ability). Maybe I should get myself a bell like lepers used to have in mediaeval times to clear the way even better (preferably rung by someone dressed up as the grim reaper who is walking in front of me but I suppose creepy reapy is busy just now playing a return match of chess with Max von Sydow…).

I decide to scrap my original plan of seeing how long it took to walk to my store as I’ve already dedicated half a day to commercial activity. I find a new way back from the shop to my flat, which is very people-free (and see how tracks go off from this road out into real countryside which is even more satisfying as spring is coming). I spend the rest of the day and part of the evening reading “Courrier international” which I like a lot. It’s a French publication that translates articles from newspapers worldwide, everything from Jerusalem Post, the Washington Post, Die Zeit, MIT Technology Review and a lot more. Very satisfactory to be able to catch up with what’s happening and to improve my French reading skills at the same time.

My elder daughter comes by in the early evening and drops off a couple of bags of groceries so I’m not without a support team!

Wednesday, 18 March

The third day of my self-imposed Corona isolation.

A brief moment of euphoria yesterday when I finished the real estate company’s annual report that I’d been working on with my younger son. 150 pages to be done in nine days so there’s not been a lot of time over for hobby activities. But now it’s done and I could concentrate on drawing up a plan of what I want to achieve in the next nine days.

I started on my planned activities by vacuuming more bookshelves. The flat is, to say the least, book-laden and I need to improve the quality of the air (less dust) if I’m to spend more time here. My plan is to clean three shelves a day until I’ve worked my way round and then carry on with a regular one shelf a day (a bit like the perpetual painting programme on some bridges). All went well except that I tripped over a cable causing irreparable damage to a USB connection that put the printer out of action.

Simple problems but more complicated to work out how to solve without compromising isolation.

It’s been a drag not to be able to do things I very much wanted to do like going to a grandchild’s birthday party and a planned visit to Berlin. And it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better. But at the same time, I feel almost exhilarated by having to work out how best to play a difficult hand.

Reluctantly, I decided that I needed to go to town today to collect my post (which is at least on the outskirts of the centre). I didn’t want to use the bus so I started walking. Raining a bit so I think about how ironic it would be if I got non-viral pneumonia. I’m wearing my mask that I got for Kolkata and probably look a bit spooky. There are not many people around and the buses that pass me are almost empty. It’s a bit like being in a sci-fi story. A familiar environment that looks as it usually does at first sight and then you discover that it’s not quite right.

I get to Heidenstams torg at the same time as another empty bus and decide to hop on for a couple of stops to get past the building works, getting off at the mosque where more people are waiting to board.

The bus drivers are not checking tickets but letting people on only through the back doors. I walk the rest of the way and get my heap of post without problems.

Walking back, I pass the cycle shop, see through the window that they have some suitable cycles and that it’s empty. I went in, keeping the sole attendant at a safe distance and chose a cycle, a lock and a helmet. Unfortunately, the one problem with my facial mask is that it makes my glasses steam up so that I couldn’t see properly. And I didn’t want to move my hands to my face to do anything about it. The result is that the bicycle I bought is very fine, exactly as I wanted and a rather striking Victorian puce colour. The lock which I grabbed through the mist is far too sophisticated. The kind of lock where you would need a nuclear weapon to break it. It took time to get it out of the packet (I’m out of the shop by then) and even more time to lock the cycle). The all-size helmet promised by the attendant, who did a good job of convincing me that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, proves not to be all-size or perhaps only all-size for long thin Swedish heads not the squarer West European variety like mine. But I didn’t want to go back.

I locked the bike and went to look at Kjells which was also almost empty and went in to solve my cable problem. I thought about getting someone to deliver it but then thought that there was far more chance of a gig-economy courier going to work when not 100% than a Kjell’s attendant, apart from the hassle of trying to make sure the courier could deliver it home.

These problems solved, I tackled the journey home. The saddle of my new bike was too high, I had a heavy bag of post which I had to hang on one handlebar disrupting my balance and my glasses steamed up so that I couldn’t see where I was going in any detail. I decided to push the bike for a while until I got out of the centre and to a place where there was less traffic and visibility was less of an issue. But then I found a way of removing my mask without pawing my face, got used to the bike and even overtook another cyclist (admittedly almost stopped but it’s worth perhaps a half point).

An ambulance drove past me and I wondered whether it had been called to pick me up who’d fallen off his bike ahead (after all, the times are out of joint just now).

But I got home without incident, rather satisfied with myself. After that complicated decontamination. My idea of trying to keep my hands clean and just my gloves potentially contaminated didn’t work, at least not completely – you can’t, for example, press number pads for credit card purchases with gloves on (maybe thinner inner gloves would work). This isn’t a problem when out but gets complicated when you get home and want to disrobe without potentially contaminating the flat so I engaged in a frenzy of running to the bathroom to wash my hands, then cleaning handles, wallets and phone with soapy water and running back to the bathroom to wash my hands again.

It’s pretty obvious that it’s much easier if you are strict about social distancing and don’t, for example, get involved in purchasing situations.

I’m going to have Anglia’s post forwarded to my home address and hopefully won’t have to buy anything in future.

And now for a few intellectual activities…

Dusting my bookshelves, I come across a slim rather tatty paperback “Ships that pass in the night” by Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936) published in Newnes Sixpenny Novels Illustrated. I don’t know how this book came into my life and have been on the point of disposing of it, stayed by its atmospheric quality and not quite knowing where I could find a good home for it. This time I looked more closely and see that the front cover is signed and dated, Elsa Wolff 1904. Checking who she might be I find that Roman Rolland corresponded for a number of years with an Elsa Wolff. And I’m fascinated to think that it might be the same lady. In favour of the connection is the date and that Elsa Wolff was a woman of culture (a translator even). Beatrice Harraden was a suffragette and had a long literary career in the UK, Ships that pass in the night being her most noted book (not sure of the plot I must read it – I believe there is a romance tragically ended by a deus ex machina accident but I’m not sure). Against this being the Elsa Wolff who was a friend of Romain Rolland is that fact that she was German (with a command of French evidenced in her long correspondence with Romain Rolland). I haven’t managed to find much information about her on the net so I haven’t been able to verify her signature or find out how good her English was I shall try to check other Elsa Wolffs who were around at this time to see how hard or easy it is to build up a case that could be some other Elsa Wolff. This Elsa Woolf eventually committed suicide in 1942 to avoid being deported by the Nazis. I have been to Uppsala University library, Carolina Rediviva, today to borrow “Fraulein Elsa” which is “Cahier 14” in Cahiers Romain Rolland and contains Romain Rolland’s letters to Elsa (but not as far as I can see her letters to him). It will be interesting to see how these letters survived – did Romain Rolland keep copies but destroy her letters to him? I hope at least it will tell me something about Elsa Wolff’s reading habits and knowledge of English. I know that Romain Rolland was in England at some point around this date (perhaps later) so I wonder whether it could have been a present from him to Elsa Woolf but this is pure speculation. It’s the second time in the past year that Romain Rolland has crossed my path. He also wrote a book about the Bengali disciple of Rama Krishna Vivekananda, which I was given as a present by our Bengali relatives. Whether or not it is Elsa Wolff’s, this slim volume has to be cared for and I have to find a small box to keep it in to prevent it becoming even more tatty. And if the evidence is strong that it did belong to ”Romain Rolland’s” Elsa Wolff, it will be a very special feeling to own it.