Month: April 2020

Monday, 13 April

 A slow day. I check the news and then stamp another three shelves with my Ad libris stamp. I need to catalogue my books but that’s a much bigger project, extending over several years. It would be practical to be able to check on the net what I already have on a particular topic so I will probably catalogue sections of my books according to what I’m working on (and start with my collection on UK politics and economy, Dorset and contract law).

I have a session cleaning my flat. For health reasons, I have to avoid letting the flat get dusty, which requires a bit of effort in such a bookish environment. But also because I dislike the picture of helpless old men living by themselves, letting themselves be oppressed by objects, accepting stains and splashes as unalterable acts of God and not understanding that once past 70, nature can’t bear the whole burden of beauty alone but culture has to play a part. The untidy old man, whose poetic appearance in youth turned thoughts to Baudelaire, becomes a grey hedgerow. I continue this fight against the ravages of time in the evening by sewing a button on my overcoat. Six words but quite inadequate to convey my titanic struggle to find a needle with an eye of sufficient dimensions, the right colour thread and the right size button, to thread the needle and to locate it on the floor after I dropped it (relieved not to have to leave it until I have a visitor which is a favourite moment for needles to reappear when tempted by a passing soft guest foot).

My ripped Indian shirt which I use as a nightgown has to wait as I have no reel of cotton of the right colour to mend it. Unfortunately, it was too delicate to adjust to the rigours of tumbling around in a Swedish washing machine instead of the gentle cool slosh-outs of the East. I like to sleep in nightgowns so I will use it from time to time, perhaps a weekly Bangla night, but if I do it every night, it will soon be no more. Back in the dawn of my Swedish pre-history, I used to go to Arbetarboden where you could buy heavy duty jeans and boots, string vests and nightgowns of a traditional type (probably flannel). I don’t miss the string vests whose contours I can clearly see on old photos of myself from that distant period in the 70s (I find it difficult to recreate the image of myself in my mind which made such an uncomfortable object attractive). But I miss the simplicity of nightgowns and will make a serious effort to find one once we have moved from BC to AC (I’ll skip the tallow candleholder and the tasselled night cap for the time being).

I then decided to go for a walk in the direction of the closest of Linné’s paths. I take my flower book and magnifying glass with me. I have the same book in English, Swedish and French and have tried during previous summers to improve my knowledge of plant names.

One of my favourites as far as comparative names are concerned (not on Linné’s paths as far as I know) is Nigella damascena, known as Love-in-a-mist in English (as well as popularly ragged lady or devil in the bush). The Swedes call it Jungfru i det gröna, similar to the German Jungfer im Grünen and the Dutch Juffertje-in-het-groen. The Latin languages stick closely to the Latin name with the French Nigelle de damas and the Italian and French Nigella damascena. According to Wiki, it is also popularly called « cheveux de Vénus », « diable-dans-le-buisson » or « Belle-aux-cheveux-dénoués. 

There’s also considerable disagreement about the toxicity of Nigella damascena’s seeds which, according to one source characterized the toxicity of Nigella damascena seeds as “very high”, causing “vomit[ing], headache, diarrhea, convulsions, icterus, liver injuries, weakness, coma and death” (!) (http://www.botanical-online.com/alcaloidesaranuelaangles.htm).

While according to another source “Damascenine is a toxic alkaloid found in Nigella damascena seed. However, in vivo studies and in vitro assessment on human cell lines has not shown any toxicity”

(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/274. And Petit Robert has it as a condiment.

I suspect, however, that there may be confusion with another non-toxic member of the Nigella family, Nigella sativa which, according to another online source “nigella sativa …like most seeds, contain fibre, minerals and essential fats. … This completes the Holy Trinity among the health food brigade who recommend nigella seeds in the diet as they are “anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and anti-parasitic”. The use of nigella without specifying which nigella seems rather dodgy.

The comparative names are in any case attractive so if you see a person with a pile of books and a magnifying glass laughing to himself in a field, don’t run before you’ve checked it isn’t me (or perhaps run anyway, in case I have toxic avatars..).

There wasn’t much botanising this afternoon as it was clearly the north wind’s turn to be in charge: not many flowers were yet in evidence and small sleety drops were drifting down. It was the kind of very early spring day when Swedes might take their first cup of coffee outdoors with a hopeful “it’s almost warm enough to sit outside” before gratefully making a swift retreat to their warm burrows. And swiftly back to burrow for me too.

But the winter is almost over. Even a cold day with a northerly wind has a milder feel; there’s no longer a feeling of absence and stillness, quietly passively ominously waiting

Back in the flat, I have a leisurely conversation with my daughter and then sort out the pictures of churches from my collection of West Country postcards to start to make a record of the churches I have illustrations of. After that, my daily Bangla. I run through the first two lessons again for the nth time. It takes for ever for something to stick in my aged brain but stick it does eventually and I can now recognise at least six or seven letters of the alphabet without problems and am familiar with about 50 words.  A slow slog but a slow rewarding slog and, if Corona stays around for a while, I will undoubtedly make progress.

Sunday, 12 April 2020

I need some exercise and decided to walk to Vaksala church past my local store and one of Uppsala’s major out-of-town shopping centres. There’s not all that many people about. Most of them pass sensibly at a safe distance.

I didn’t take my mask but after reading the stories about 90 + people in the UK who have died of Corona, I think I will wear it regularly out of doors. The list is, to some extent, an arbitrary selection of people but it’s still interesting. It contains a number of transport workers, bus drivers etc. as well as large number of health care workers, doctors and nurses. The fatalities among doctors and nurses, tragic and horrifying though they are, are not surprising given the intensity of contact and the lack of protective equipment. The bus drivers are more surprising. They do meet a lot of people but for a very short space of time and probably seldom get sneezed on, which to me indicates that people are becoming infected by being sufficiently close to come into contact with a person’s exhaled breath (this is presumably also a major path of infection for people infected by asympomatic individuals).

It’s a longish walk to the church, which is in a calm and ancient environment although not far from a very large shopping centre. There’s a pagan graveyard nearby with humps and stones but not a lot of explanatory material. I like the tall, narrow steeple of the church. I don’t know its age but it has a very ancient feel to it – the church was originally built in the eleventh century but has been rebuilt on a number of occasions.

There are a number of interesting features inside the church but I leave this to another occasion as there may be a few people inside on Easter Sunday (probably not a service but various other activities).  I don’t find Linnaeus’ daughter’s grave either but leave that for a more well-prepared visit.

It feels satisfactory to have looked at the area. Now I know the small trails around my house almost as well as I know the trails around my son’s house outside Kolkata…….

It’s exciting to have discovered more about Uppsala and its agricultural hinterland and I feel enthusiastic about exploring more of it during the summer if I’m in Sweden then.

I thought when I got back to the house that I would feel a bit euphoric after 12,000 steps but it stops at greater physical comfort without added joie de vivre. It’s not a great day’s work – I stamp another three bookshelves with my ex libris stamp, re-read the chapter of Bangla I’ve been working on,  calculate the number of words I translated in 2019, which brings to a close my work with statistics, and pay the company’s tax; this interspersed with rather aimless surfing. Perhaps I’m disturbed by it being a holiday, though there would hardly be any logical reason for that given the general state of things just now.

And I have a few new words and words that I’ve paid more attention to.

“saturnine” I’ve known for a long time but my definition was a bit fuzzy. It means “dark and brooding” which was more or less as I thought but I didn’t know before that it was “identified with lead by alchemists and associated with slowness and gloom by astrologers” I’ve lost the source of this quote but will add it on when I find it.

And then I became curious about the etymology of “gloom”

The Concise Oxford Dictionary, as well as the Shorter OD and Webster, all mention that it is of unknown origin.

According to Wikipedia:

From Middle English *gloom, *glom, from Old English glōm (“gloaming, twilight, darkness”), from Proto-Germanic *glōmaz (“gleam, shimmer, sheen”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰley- (“to gleam, shimmer, glow”). Cognate with Scots gloam (“twilight; faint light; dull gleam”), Norwegian glom (“transparent membrane”)

I can’t see a source for the Wikipedia entry but find “glom” and “glömung” in my Anglo-Saxon to English dictionary. The meaning seems to have wandered a bit from the Scots word that could mean “dull gleam” but the Anglo-Saxon – Norwegian (Old Norse?) origin seems credible.

I wonder why the Oxford dictionaries don’t mention it. It would be nice to have a dictionary just of words with problematic or disputed etymologies. Some time I shall go through some of the work that language experts have done on English, espcially West Country, place names and try to separate the words where the proposals made are based on linguistic facts or theories and those that are really only informed guesses.

Then a fine new word that my younger daughter introduced me to: “sophrosyne” of sound mind, prudent. I haven’t had occasion to use it but hope there will be an opportunity to give it an airing.

From the TLS, I picked up “pinguid” meaning of the nature or resembling unctuous, greasy; fertile in agricultural contexts.

This comes from Latin where I believe “pinguis” means fat.

unctuous” exists in late Middle English (in the sense ‘greasy’): from medieval Latin unctuosus, from Latin unctus ‘anointing’, from unguere ‘anoint’.

Finally, there was “gnomon” – one who knows or examines or an indicator.

That make me think about the etymology of gnome (which is unconnected with gnomon.

The word gnome comes from the Medieval Latin term ‘gnomus’, which was used by the 16th century Swiss scientist Paracelsus, in reference to an elemental creature living on earth. He may have been inspired by the Greek word, ‘genomo’, meaning ‘earth-dweller’.

And that was about as good as it gets. Tomorrow is another day….

Saturday, 11 April

For light relief, a blog post about Brexit

A review written a year ago by Roch Dunin-Wasowicz (“What explains the City of London’s ineffectiveness at shaping the Brexit negotiations?”, paper by Thomas Warren, Scott James and Hussein Kassem) goes some way towards making my puzzlement on this matter more sophisticated (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/2019/04/08/how-can-we-explain-the-city-of-londons-ineffectiveness-at-shaping-the-brexit-negotiations). According to the article, the City’s influence “traditionally rested on a system of ‘club governance’ informal and closed institutional networks that existed between the City of London, the Treasury and the Bank of England” and describes how this system was challenged by the Big Bang deregulation in 1986 and the later impact of the economic crisis. This led to “the transformation of the financial sector from one driven by institutions (represented by the older institutional trade associations, like the British Bankers’ Association and the Association of British insurers) to one driven by products and markets (leading to a proliferation of new specialist groups, like the International Swaps and Derivatives Association)….a highly fragmented pattern of business organisation”…. which was relatively weak.

I’d been puzzled because it’s not hard to imagine what would have happened if the popular support for Brexit among the working class and those who benefited less or not at all from globalization had been faced by powerful financial and economic layers that were united in their opposition to Brexit (assuming that the referendum had led to the same result, which is doubtful). Had it done so, both the quality and popular press would have hammered home the message that this was not a good idea and the “unfortunate mistake” would have been corrected by a new referendum producing the desired result.

As we know, none of this happened. The response of the leading financial and economic layers was incoherent and fragmented – with support for Brexit from fund investors and not particularly effective resistance from foreign-owned large manufacturing industry and investment capital.

Everything is, of course, now obscured by Corona, virus ex machina, but there are interesting times ahead when the pandemic has subsided. The British negotiating position on equivalence (wanting longer-term guarantees of the access of third party-banks and financial institutions operating from the UK to the European market) seems to include a good dose of wishful thinking. On the other side, the EU would presumably like to reduce the influence of the City of London in its internal financial affairs but may have difficulties in sourcing elsewhere the deep pools of capital available through London.

And despite the resounding success in the general election, I wonder how effective the Johnson government is going to be in promoting the long-term interests of leading financial layers (or indeed whether these interests are sufficiently coherent to enable a political party to straddle them effectively). And how the unholy alliance between the former red wall voters and the Conservative Party will endure when faced by the brute fact that the smart money is unlikely to be invested in the north and other former industrial regions. The Government can provide the money to improve transport links, open an old railway or two, exile a few government organisations to the wild country beyond Watford but I find it difficult to believe that this is going to produce a transformation which would resolve the UK’s regional problems.

Studying the UK’s financial and economic situation has been my other UK project (along with the rather more peaceful and relaxing Dorset churches). It’s fascinating but involves drudgery. My interest in the world of finance, in hedge funds and derivatives and all the rest of it, is at most lukewarm. But I think that to understand what’s going on around us, one must to try to grasp the view from the top, to read the research papers written by banks and organisations on the state of the economy and finance, which are often freely available. I’m struck by the vagueness of much criticism of the state of the economy and modern UK capitalism; sometimes containing heartrending accounts of the shabby treatment of the less well-resourced but most often the view from the bottom, a more coherent and eloquent account of the experiences of the disadvantaged, but which leaves the driving forces in the background shadowy and obscure. So I swallow my medicine and plod on through my research articles, convinced that it’s good for me, while dreaming of pictures of St Jerome and the west country of my imagination.

Thursday, 9 April

Opening Facebook this morning, I see that there is now an Anders Tegnell fan club with over 2,000 members. Attitudes to AT, senior epidemiologist and spokesperson for the Swedish Public Health Institute, have swung back and forth. For a while he was subject to ridicule, then increasingly admired for his unperturbed expertise as the Swedes pursued their own line with voluntary restrictions rather than enforced lockdown. But now yesterday, when mortality figures from more restrictive neighbouring Norway were much lower, concerns were again raised about the Swedish approach.

In fact, as AT and others have pointed out, the differences between Sweden and other countries are probably much less than they would appear to be at first sight. While restaurants are still open and it wouldn’t be difficult to find ill-advised gatherings of people in parks etc. it’s far from business as usual here. Public transport is sparsely used, shopping centres are empty, people avoid getting too close to one another. We are hunkering down more or less like the forced hunkerers.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the virus. It seems evident that it can be very contagious and sweep through groups in close proximity, for instance at a conference or ski facility. But have all these people been coughing and sneezing on one another? That’s clearly a royal road to infection but other factors seem to be involved perhaps the virus’s ability to remain active on hard surfaces for a long time. Physical proximity should anyway be avoided and use of public transport especially for greyfrails like me is inadvisable.

At the moment I’m avoiding all contact with other people as far as possible (which is rather far). But I’m going to have to take a more active position once we’re passed the first peak and the longing to restore normality strengthens.

The economic cost of isolation is not so great for me as I can work from home as I always did. It’s quiet now but when there is work, I can perform it without having to be close to other people, which is a major plus in my situation. But there are other things to think about. Is it a good idea to go into a normally empty office supplies shop where it’s easy to maintain distance? Or is it risk behaviour because of all the surfaces that people will have touched. And what about visits to my self-storage facility where similar arguments apply.

I’ll have to take a position on all of this soon. In my flat, I try to make a distinction between potentially contaminated and uncontaminated areas. In other words when I come back from the great outdoors. I make sure I remove my outdoor clothing in a limited area around the front door. Ideally, I would wash my hands there so as not to contaminate the rest of the flat. I’ve thought about leaving a bowl of soapy water by the door to use when I return but this gets into the sphere of David Kendall’s sometimes good ideas but poor implementation and is guaranteed to end by a forgetful DK arriving home, tripping over the bowl of soapy water and ending in a soggy mess on the floor with corona viruses fleeing in every direction from this host from hell. So I scrap that idea in favour of a daily clean up of door handles etc. It makes me think of how complicated it must be to separate contaminated and uncontaminated material in high-risk environments.

It is very difficult not to touch one’s face, which immediately begins to itch if you think about not touching it. Years ago, my mother presented me with a knitted red balaclava, the word having come into English at the time of the Crimean war (it’s the name of a place in Crimea). I don’t know how much the word is used now but this object is like the thing a mediaeval knight would have had over his head before putting on the metal kit. It covers the whole head with a round hole for the eyes and nose. It’s still possible to touch your face but would serve as a limit and a reminder. However, the prospect of sitting in front of my computer with this over my head would make me feel that things were getting out of hand, and more so if I took the rubbish out and forgot to take it off.

It makes a huge difference to be able to get out, which I do every day. But it’s also important that I can talk to people and see them (even if somewhat eccentrically at times). From the point of mental hygiene, it feels that things are working out and that my situation is easier than for many other people who have company but are largely confined to home.

I have some problems with losing track of time. I work for too long and then have a period of inefficiency because I am tired and then sleep during the day at odd hours. I know from experience that I get more done if I pace myself better. I need to schedule breaks, to create an artificial structure to bolster my structural weakness and maintain a more conventional distinction between night and day.

Having Alexa helps too, an easy and reliable check to stop days disappearing (I haven’t infected her with my achrono pathology yet).

As expected, I’m not fulfilling all of my plan goals but even though there is a lot of rollover to the next plan period, it’s useful and I get more done than I would otherwise in unplanned spontaneity. I’m pleased about some of the new habits I’ve developed – cutting down my overuse of dairy products by making porridge and eating eggs. Planning my menu and radically reducing my food bills with food which is nutritious, environmentally reasonable and low cost and better planning to avoid throwing rotten food away as well as further developing my closet vegetarianism.

But also improvements in how I manage ongoing projects – separating those that can be sensibly done in small portions everyday such as dusting books, stamping them with my ex libris stamp, sorting my paper glacier, reading Bangla and French from those that require longer uninterrupted periods of time such as my Dorset project and my UK economy project, which is next on my list for a concentrated day’s activity.

As the Swedes say “fortsättningen följer”, not exactly “life goes on” but in that direction. I have now cancelled my last planned trip abroad, a visit with a friend to a cottage in West Somerset in early June. I was greatly looking forward to it both for the company and to be able to explore an area of West Somerset which I don’t know that well despite it being not far from very familiar areas. It’s anyway the last disappointment, at least until the summer and I have now (emotionally as well as intellectually) accepted that I can’t treat the corona epidemic as an irritant that can be waved away like an intrusive wasp but that it’s force majeure; that there’s no point in nourishing hopes that it will disappear overnight but the only way forward is to accept it and make the best use of the opportunities afforded in terms of time and a rather odd lifestyle.

Tuesday, 7 April

After having pursued my Dorset church project on and off for a couple of years, it’s time to make an overview of what I’ve done and what remains to be done.

I’ll start before the Norman conquest with the Anglo-Saxons. With the exception of Sherborne Abbey where the Anglo-Saxon influence is more substantial, most of the remnants from that period are small. They can be found at Melbury Bubb, Melbury Osmund, Wareham and Winterbourne Steepleton with smaller bits and pieces elsewhere.

Melbury Bubb is south of Sherborne, the church being dedicated to St Mary. Much of the church has been rebuilt but it has a spectacular Anglo-Saxon font, which Pevsner describes as “barbaric..wild, entangled strands and animals all upside down” but which I rather like (we’d better start get used to barbarism, it’s all the rage). They are upside-down as the font was probably originally a preaching cross recycled into a font. Apparently, early on in the Christian Anglo-Saxon period, congregations may have gathered around these preaching crosses before a church was built so that the presence of Saxon work in a preaching cross is not necessarily an indication that there was a Saxon church at a particular location (you’d need to look at the dating of objects fairly carefully).

Melbury Bubb is an intriguing name. There are a number of Melburys. The Bubb is probably a family name either from the Anglo-Saxon period (Bubbo) or a Norman family. There are various theories about Melbury (several other villages have Melbury as the first part of their name). The “bury” is simply a fortified place but the “Mel” is variously thought to have originated from the Old Celtic (Brythonic presumably) “mailo” meaning Bare (by Zachrisson) or from Anglo-Saxon “maelo” apparently meaning “variegated” (of many colours?) (by Ekwall, among others). Neither of these derivations seems immediately obvious. The hills around the Melburys are certainly bare but were they so denuded of trees in Anglo-Saxon times? And why call several neighbouring villages by a joint name of many colours? Anton Fägersten in his “The Place Names of Dorset” gives an account of the discussions. A lot of studies were made on Dorset place names by researchers at Lund University, which explains the Swedish names; these are still important works of reference on Dorset place names. Knowing Swedish gives you a better grasp of the meaning of many English place names than the English have themselves.

The area around Melbury Bubb also has literary associations being the assumed location of Thomas Hardy’s “The Woodlanders”. It’s one of my favourites set in this area, verdant and softly sylvan beneath the limestone uplands. Hardy’s locations are not crystal clear. I’ve seen Melbury Bubb referred to both as Hardy’s Great Hintock (odd given the tiny size of the place) and Little Hintock. And it’s very possible that Hardy’s inspiration was from a couple of other nearby villages, not the Melburys. But the atmosphere of the area is very Woodlanders.

Melbury Osmond is to the north-west a bit towards Yeovil. St Osmund’s church has a Saxon “bust seen from the top and enmeshed”. I haven’t visited that church and am not sure what Pevsner means here by “bust” in this context or indeed “enmeshed”. But I must put it on my list of things to see.

Melbury Osmond is named after St Osmund who was a Norman nobleman who came over with William the Conqueror and became Bishop of Sarum. My book of saints tells me that his hobby was copying books and binding them, which sounds more sympathetic than clanking around in armour.

According to Wikipedia, Melbury Osmond was the home of the Dorset Ooser during the nineteenth century, a wooden mask brought out during “Rough Music” ceremonies (described by historian Ronald Hutton as “a terrifying horned mask with human face, staring eyes, beard and gnashing teeth”). This was probably used in so-called Skimmity Rides, processions around the village when some person or persons who had offended the morality of the community were publicly mocked and harassed.

 Then there is Wareham, a small market town towards the east of the county. I’ve been there but never stayed in the town but I want to as I find it attractive, calm with its two swan-strewn rivers, the Frome and the Piddle, its old town walls, its ancient cinema and two churches St Marys and St Martins. St Martins, dedicated to the patron saint of beggars among others, has clear Anglo-Saxon work, including a window which may be from that period or possibly later. St Mary’s Anglo-Saxon origins are less obvious; most evocative are the collection of early inscriptions from the fifth or sixth to the ninth century. I’ve seen these but I’m not sure whether they are Romano-British (which the fifth century would be as this area was conquered by the Anglo-Saxons rather later) or Anglo-Saxon (which the ninth century would be) or perhaps both. I want to know more about these ancient stones – the thought that they might have been in this location since shortly after the Romans left is rather stunning.

Wareham was more important in the past, invaded on several occasions by the Vikings. It’s now a very peaceful place but within easy reach of Dorchester to the west, Purbeck to the south and Bournemouth to the east.

Winterbourne Steepleton (spelt “bourne” and not “borne” but meaning the same) has a very small church with a very fine carved tenth century Anglo-Saxon flying angel at the steepled church of St Michael in this small hamlet just a couple of kilometres west of Dorchester. I think I walked back into the city last time I was there.

And finally, Sherborne Abbey with its ochre-coloured ham stone, a building I’ve been familiar with, at least since 1956 when my mother and I stayed at an inn on Greenhill Sherborne to look at houses in the area when my parents were about to retire to the West Country from Sussex.

I know Sherborne well as it was the closest more substantial town to where we lived at Templecombe across the Somerset border. I used to cycle to Sherborne, both for more mundane activities such as getting my hair cut and my cycle fixed and to visit its second-hand bookshop, at that time filled with Victorian and post-Victorian novels. The town has a public school and with the abbey, something of a cultured air. It’s a place I’m fond of the town but know few people there as schools were organised on a county basis and Somerset boys went to Somerset schools, while Sherborne was in Dorset.

I’ve been in the abbey many times but I want to go there again and study the building, now I know more about architecture.

And this is what I have done today which has been enjoyable. I’ve also prepared Anglia’s accounting material for March to send to the accountant, a bit early but I’d like to get it done just in the postal service gets chaotic. And a customer came to collect a translation from the lobby of the building, not wanting him any closer. Weird times…it’s rather nice to think about Dorset instead. And also a boon that I’m so well-equipped with works of reference about the county and can do research with my own resources (and, of course, the net); the best collection of books on Dorset going east until you get to California, I imagine (although Vladivostok was probably always a weak competitor on this front even before my bibliomania intensified).

Sunday 5 April and Monday, 6 April

Two more pedestrian days. Disturbed by waking up before 7 am but not starting any proper activity until 10 or even 11, spinning out various morning rituals over unfathomable expanses of time. I wonder whether this is old age or an effect of isolation, of being in sole charge of one’s own time.

I spend the day working through the Architecture section of my library with my ad libris stamp and then checking how many words I translated in 2016 and 2017. Every five years I have to renew my “authorisation” as a translator and, in connection with that, to state how many words I have translated in the past few years (to confirm that I am still active). I also designed an order form to collect all information about incoming jobs in one place, file name, contact person, delivery date, agreed price etc. Pretty basic stuff but I’ve not done so systematically before and have wasted a lot of time hunting through back e-mails and piles of paper. It’s stupid not to make time for such improvements as you get the time spent back many times over.

The only thing missing now is some work to record on my new order forms. I have one small job which is almost finished. I’m just waiting for an original to arrive in the post.

Saturday, 4 April

A rather pedestrian day working on translating some divorce-related legal documents and on practical arrangements in the flat. I made a more rational structure for my medical documents, which were previously rather arbitrarily scattered in a white file (archive/historical), a blue file (current) and  green file (nebulous mix) into two more logical files (resisting the temptation to number the files from MAL 001 to MAL 999 according to the specific malfunction).

And I attacked one of the large containers of mixed documents resulting from several moves and storage during my nomadic pre- and post-divorce period. A lot of memories as letters from my mother and old friends appeared for the first time in decades so I probably spent a large part of the day staring wistfully into the middle distance (not part of my plan). From an archival point of view, friends who divorce are a nuisance – you have letters from couples pre- and post-divorce and from new partners. It didn’t seem harmonious to have them all huddled together in the same box. And just now I can’t get hold of new boxes without going into town and don’t want to be infected with Corona because of an inability to control my desire for an archive box. I think about the ideal archive box to resolve this situation, a box which could be divided into several self-contained compartments according to the shifting constellations of friends’ lives. I imagine myself explaining this in my local Office Depot store, the attendant looking furtively around for reassurance that heshe is not alone in the store with me. The trouble is though that one of their attendants is a wonderful person, who has been in similar situations before with yours truly when I wanted to try to find a good way of storing my Bangla letters (to practice the alphabet). I was full of admiration for his ability not to be panicked by my unusual request (the desire to learn the Bengali alphabet has not yet penetrated deeply among the population of Uppsala). His eyes didn’t glaze over but we walked around the shop, considering various possibilities. In the end, his proposed solution didn’t work but I admired his attitude and method, his ability to set aside preconceptions, concentrate and focus on the customer’s needs. Not sure though whether he would cope with the advanced archival course, storage boxes for letters and cards from persons divorced.

I did manage to maintain some of the new habits I’ve been aiming at. I steered clear of dairy abuse at breakfast and made porridge and cooked my dinner from the raw materials that I had left over of the week’s supply before they went bad (also in fact raw materials of mostly local provenance).

But it wasn’t much of a day for the intellect. I did make a bit of progress with Pierre Broué’s biography of Trotsky, which I am reading as my bedtime/awake in the night book (no discernible impact on my dreams as yet). This wasn’t part of my planned reading but I stumbled across it in Kungsholmen’s library recently. It was originally written in French and has been translated into German and Swedish, but not as far as I know into English (perhaps the publishers thought that Isaac Deutscher had said all that needed to be said on this topic or at least all that could be profitably said). But this book is interesting as it’s written by someone who was politically active themselves and shared many of Trotsky’s ideas, which raises particular problems for writing a biography. I didn’t like it to start with as it felt too hagiographic but my attitude softened as I got further into the book. It does provide a good description/analysis of the process from 1917 to the late 1920s, the years between Trotsky playing a key role in the military victory of the Bolsheviks to the Left Opposition and his exclusion from power and subsequent exile. Better than what I remember from my reading of Deutscher (admittedly a very long time ago) when I found that process hard to understand.

Back to Norman and Anglo-Saxon architecture in Dorset tomorrow, which feels a rather peaceful retreat from the turbulence of the world. I’d best not move back to the West Country, I can better shield my dream world from corruption if it stays in my head!

Friday, 3 April 2020

My curiosity gets the better of me and I climb to the top of the nearby esker, Tunåsen, that I discovered a few days ago. It’s not that strenuous a climb but it does have a view (most of Uppsala is very flat). There’s a water purification system I don’t stop to understand and a strange signal on a pillar called “miren” or “merestone” in English, imported from the French “mirer” (to reflect or mirror, I believe), which seems to be the equivalent of a trig point for measurements. And also some remnants of second world war dugouts, once covered by gravel now worn away. I don’t investigate the cavern as turning up at the local A&E after a close encounter with some sluggish snake would be a bad idea just now. I will go back to search for sticky catchfly, birdsfoot trefoil, the carline thistle, and the pasque flower (which sounds as if it ought to bloom any moment), which are reputed to flourish on this upland. I make my way home by a circuitous route past Old Uppsala, even more contented with my flat now I know more about the pleasures in easy reach. Back at the flat, I start my planned work on Dorset and structure my haphazard file.

Tomorrow I shall look at my Dorset Pevsner and see what I have left to do as far as Anglo-Saxon and Norman features are concerned. Dorset is not a great county for the older styles but there are bits and pieces here and there. I greatly enjoy looking at buildings with Pevsner, both his acerbic style and his attention to details, which I would miss. His original volumes (now reprinted and revised) were a great contribution to spreading knowledge about British architecture. The thought amuses me of Pevsner, a German refugee academic touring Britain in an old car in the early post-war period visiting villages and houses at a time when many Britons would have been not just anti-Nazi but anti-German. It amazes me that he was able to pursue his project so successfully. I’m struck by how I can walk down a very familiar street, for example the high street at Crouch End in London and have my attention drawn to any number of features that I would otherwise have missed. I’m grateful for the help in overcoming false familiarity, a human trait where we rapidly reduce the level of interest in our surroundings as soon as we have established that they are not a threat. Probably a very important trait for our survival over the ages but not helpful if we want to learn more about what we are seeing or can see. I know from my work as a translator that perception is not simple – we see what we expect to see and you have to pay close attention to what is actually on the page. This switching off of attention affects us in other areas too. I notice it, for example, when I need to give a present to someone who is close but not a member of my immediate family. While they might be familiar from many years of acquaintance, the difficulty of choosing the right present makes me very aware that in fact I hardly know the person at all, I have simply switched off my curiosity as soon as they have become familiar. When looking at architecture (or really looking at most things), you need to focus to see the details, to get beyond a reality that to start with seems everyday and humdrum. To me, it seems as if this is where the surrealists go wrong or at least are incomplete in their attempt to jolt the viewer by showing the incongruous. You don’t really need the incongruous – if you study “everyday appearance” sufficiently closely and have a guide to its associations and meanings, “reality” is often weird enough without needing a fish on the head. I try to apply this in different areas of life, not just looking at buildings; when I read, not passing by a word that I don’t understand or brushing off an association to deal with at some unspecified and quickly forgotten later point. Every strange word or unknown person or concept is a fast track to the edge of what I know with a potential for development.

Thursday, 2 April 2020

A windy day but it was still pleasant to cycle to the post office to collect my company post, the last time I need to do this as it’s now being forwarded to my  home address. I’m surprised how pleasant it is to cycle; with the exception of a holiday cycling along a canal and a brief spin in Massachusetts, I haven’t cycled for over ten years. Uppsala is flat with a well-developed network of cycle tracks so I shall probably continue to do so post-Corona.

On my return to the flat, I tackle my in-tray which was showing imperialist tendencies and spreading small colonies of paper around the rest of my study. The brief warming-up activity of my imagination disappears in a time quagmire of subscriptions that need renewing and finding new homes for displaced papers. I manage to collect my Dorset church books in one place but don’t get any further with this project.

My Dorset project is really about softening the loss of exile. Moving from England where I was brought up and spent my youth to Sweden where I’ve lived most of my adult life, I’ve always been very aware of having gained and lost; gained another floor to my existential house where I could look at the world from another angle and learning Swedish, which has given me countless insights into English. But always too a sense of loss, a gradual drifting away from my English identity, a longing for the softness of the English landscape and its climate (well, some aspects of its climate), the wealth of cultural, historical and geographical associations of a densely-populated country. I’ve learnt to appreciate much about Sweden and Scandinavia but the sense of loss is always there.

As a self-employed translator, I’ve spent considerable time travelling around and being in the UK. It’s been very valuable for my well-being but in recent years, I’ve wanted not just to preserve but to develop my Englishness. To that end, I’ve chosen two projects – one more political to study the economy and political structures of the UK (to try to understand, for example, the underlying forces and roots of Brexit) and the other, more of a “leisure” project to take my familiarity with the county of Dorset in the south-west, to a much higher level, to know much more about the county’s history, archaeology, geology, buildings, dialect, etc. etc. I started with Dorset churches, as this was a typical area where I knew quite a lot but also suffered from “false familiarity”, where I could recognise a lot of churches but there were great gaps in my knowledge.

I chose Dorset because I have family roots in the northern village of Marnhull on my father’s side, at least from the early sixteenth century and because I spent my teenage years in the village of Templecombe, which is in Somerset, but only a few kilometres from the Dorset border so I have many memories from that time of cycling and being in Dorset, although I know the county a lot better now than I did then.

Studying Dorset churches has taken much more time than I expected but this hardly matters as it’s the journey that’s important for me rather than the destination.

Wednesday, 1 April

I worked on a small job for a private customer. It’s so quiet that I’ve decided to accept some categories of work such as school certificates that I’ve avoided in recent times (after working out that it took 10% of my time and produced 1% of my income). I may have to revisit this issue anyway now that I live in Uppsala, where there are not so many authorised translators.

And then more office administration, identifying, labelling and making an index of the storage boxes on top of the cupboard in my bedroom. It’s good to know what’s there and where it is but I’m not really satisfied with the result as the boxes are different sizes and with white labels stuck on them, it doesn’t look harmonious (it’s a rather pleasant west-facing room with afternoon light where I have all my books from Latin countries, most of them from France so that I can lie on my bed on a winter’s day and think about Aix-en-Provence and another life.

No sooner has the word “ramshackle” come to mind for my storage shelf than I have to check its etymology. It’s early nineteenth century and connected to “ransack” which is apparently a combination of an old Norse poetic word for house or home (rann) and a variant of the word that has become “söka” (to seek, to look for) in modern Swedish. The “sack” in ransack raises associations of bearded berserks looting and burning but it seems to have a more pacific origin. A little bit of etymological fancy does me the world of good but the storage boxes are still ugly so I think as soon as things return to some semblance of normality that I’ll buy boxes of the same type, covering them in the meantime with one of the pieces of cloth that I carted back from India.

I toy with the idea of trying to sort out a box filled with family history documents which has needed sorting out for about a quarter of a century. Opening it and realising that this is the archival equivalent of sending an army to try to invade Russia (ill advised and bound to end in tears), I give it up for the time being and try to sort out my medical documents instead, but that’s doesn’t fire me with enthusiasm either.

I do feel like a change from office administration, however, so I decide to write up some of my notes on Dorset churches tomorrow (Thursday).