Month: May 2020

Thursday, 7 May

A cycle ride to Jädra, a hamlet a couple of kilometres outside of Uppsala beyond Vaksala, in search of a rune stone (they have numbers like u-boats, this one being rune stone U 974). It’s a fine day and a pleasant ride there but I’m a bit doubtful about this excursion as my map shows a dead end with a few buildings at the end. I imagine arriving more or less in the courtyard of someone’s house catapulting into a family gathering drinking coffee and perhaps thinking how fortunate they are in these Corona times to be away from it all in their pleasant rural environment. And then in comes David Kendall on his bike waving his map around and muttering about a rune stone. Probably not a red-carpet welcome situation.

But all goes well. There is a cluster of buildings at the end of the road including a house but no one around. Not even a doberman slavering at the thought of single combat with a cyclist. The only obstacle is what looks very much like an unmarked electric fence but I find a place where I can cross it, looking like a pedagogic illustration of the word “gingerly” for teaching English to foreigners.

It takes a stumbling while to locate the stone at the edge of one of the clumps of trees.

From Wikipedia, I learn that the runic message on the stone is:

inkulfr auk yntr litu raisa st__

iftiR inkialt brudur sin

uk sun kunulfs

þaiR

In Swedish, “Ingulf och Önd de lät resa stenen efter Ingjald, sin bror och Gunnulfs son.”

(Ingulf and Önd put up this stone [had this stone put up] in memory of Ingjald their (?) brother and Gunnulf’s son”).

Ingulf and Önd are both men’s names.

When looking at these names, I also learn the useful sentence “theonymy is a branch of onomastics”, theonymy being the study of divine proper names and onomastics being the study of the history and origin of proper names, especially personal names.

According to the information sign, the rune stone was erected in the 11th Century and is probably at its original location. It was known in the sixteenth century but then lost or forgotten about until rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century (it had apparently fallen down with the rune side downwards, presumably in the same location).

Pictures on my facebook page.

Tuesday, 5 May

Now past 50 days and I wonder whether I will reach 100 days before being able to see the people I want to meet and travel to the places I want to go. But it doesn’t take long before Tigger bounds back and pushes Eeyore aside and I start to think again about what I can do rather than what I can’t. And I very much want when all this is over to be able to have a hug me moment and think that I have used the time well and played my cards sensibly.

I decided to complete a project instead of making incremental progress on a number of fronts and finished indexing my collection of over 250 translated laws. Some of them I’ve hardly looked at before. I’m struck by the variation in quality – there were some brilliant translations where the translator had found a good solution to some problem that I’ve shuffled around for 30 years. And others, while not shoddy were far from brilliant, some of them where the translation had probably been made at the behest of a public authority and done on the cheap under the terms of some botched procurement. This project took a couple of days and I should have done it years ago.

I also decided to “celebrate” 50 days of isolation by doing my first architectural walk in Uppsala (pics on facebook). I’d postponed this through fear of not being able to multitask with photography, reading an architecture book, controlling a bike and social distancing. But I thought anyway I’d give it a try – I could always abandon it if there were too many people around and the squeal of brakes from other traffic users with unrealistic aims to use the same space became too intrusive and drowned the baroque music in my headphones. In fact, I needn’t have worried as there were very few people around and I could park the bike at each location and walk while taking pics.

I enjoy making the familiar unfamiliar with perception sharpened by a good guide. I have been amused when reading of animals like deer with their accustomed passages through the forest but I’m not so different. Passing through an area often, it soon becomes familiar and the route taken feels like part of the natural order of things, forgetting or no longer aware of the choices involved.  These architectural walks change this – I’m in an area, Fålhagen, just east of the railway in Uppsala, which I think I know well but a couple of buildings into the walk, I’m disoriented – I can see some buildings I know from afar and I know roughly where I am but there is a lot that’s strange and fresh.

It’s important to get beyond “premature closure” in order to be able to see what’s around; to be open to what’s actually there, to stop censuring the odd and divergent as irrelevant and to go beyond recognition to attempt understanding. Closure, a switching off of curiosity and awareness, is adequate species behaviour to tell us that this is not dangerous, this is OK, this is like it usually is, but it’s not adequate for observing and learning and getting beyond the frontiers of what we already know. To do this, we have to overcome false familiarity, to see the strangeness behind banality, to realise the limitations of what we think we know.

I was glad to find Tunåsen a small hill with a surprising view in this flat cycle-friendly city. It’s one of Swedish longest eskers, ridges of glacial deposits, winding under a series of names through Uppland to the Baltic.

Climbing it for the third time, there were too many virus cuddlers up there with modest social distancing skills but it was still enjoyable even though I didn’t find my lost hat. The pasque flowers were wilting but I found another yellow flower that I struggled to identify as one of the saxifrages before giving up (wrong colour, wrong time of year, wrong leaves but with a bit of flexibility and floral licence, perhaps it was a saxifrage…). Meadow saxifrage can be seen up there but these are white and later in the year. The name Saxifrage pleases me, literally “rock-breaking herb”, conjuring up visions of a plucky little plant nudging away some substantial chunk of glacial debris by sheer persistence. The herb was used to treat kidney stones but I prefer the derring-do explanation.

8,000 steps later I’m back in my flat ready for another session indexing my translated laws. I should go for a long walk every morning as it has a remarkably good effect on my humour and ability to focus.

Deciding how long I’m going to work for every day works well for me too. It’s artificial, given the entanglement of my leisure and work but it’s still beneficial to structure time in the absence of external pressure. And after I’ve done my day’s portion of laws, an hour of Bangla, some French and a chapter or so of my book on Brythonic Britain, before it’s time to cook.

Friday, 1 May

Miserable weather and I don’t go out but it was a reasonably productive day.

I spend the morning mostly working on my files of translated laws. A great deal of Swedish legislation has been translated into English, which is extremely useful for a legal translator. The translations are of varying quality, some are excellent, some not. I have collected over 15 files of translated laws but have never had time to index them properly, which I plan to do now so that I can quickly see whether I have a translation or not and easily locate it. The order in the files is not great – sometimes I’ve wrongly filed translated laws in haste after wrestling with a legal text with a tight deadline. I’m doing three files a day and should finish this project in a week or two. Satisfying to get around to as I know that I will get this time back (with interest) when it’s much quicker to find what I want.

As part of my exploration of my neighbourhood during the pandemic, I have walked down a nearby street for the first time, found a bus stop I didn’t know existed and a service centre for pensioners with library and cafeteria. I can actually see the back of the service centre from my flat but didn’t know what it was before. I had to check the name of the street, Leopoldsgatan, just to make sure it wasn’t named after a Belgian king of ill repute. It was in fact named after Carl Gustaf af Leopold, a poet and a member of the Swedish academy (1756-1829), who studied in Uppsala and was active in Greifswald and Stralsund among other places. I’d never heard of him before. The streets around my area are named after literary figures, the closest to me being Topeliusgatan, whom I hadn’t heard of either before (I now own a couple of his books rescued from the shipwreck of Alfa second-hand bookshop). I believe Topelius and Leopold didn’t get on too well and now they’re stuck with each other in a T-junction. It is very pleasing (and perhaps very Uppsala) that the streets have such names and not some stifling Blåbärsvägen (Blueberry Rd) or even worse Bandyvägen (Bandy Rd), which would cool my enthusiasm for the survival of humanity.

It’s 1st May today. Yesterday I received a broadsheet from the Left Party explaining that there wouldn’t be a conventional 1 May demonstration this year but encouraging folk to hang something red out of the window. I have to report that the level of class consciousness of the toilers of Gamla Uppsalagatan is low as there was nothing red to be seen in our block or the ones around me.