Month: May 2022

Living in West Sussex, I went to Chichester, the county town at the age of 12 for an interview for a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a private boarding school. It went well until we came to the inevitable (see the school name) religious question and I had no idea whatsoever who Pontius Pilate was, my relationship with the Bible being somewhat chaste at the time.

This PP guy has a lot on his conscience. Two thousand years after his death he prevented me from donning yellow socks and mediaeval kit. On the other hand, had I known who PP was, I would never really have moved to the West Country but largely remained a Sussex boy, and that would have been a loss. It’s a moot point whether it would have been easier in future job interviews to say that I’d gone to Christ’s Hospital instead of Sexey’s School (founded by a sixteenth century royal auditor who splashed money around on charitable causes. I don’t know how he got his name.).

But this time I only passed through the fine cathedral city of Chichester on my way to Selsey (Seal Island) although none were in evidence on my visit). It’s wonderfully quiet here with an absolutely deserted beach with not so much as a dogwalker to be seen. No buckets and spades, no candy floss, no penny in the slot machines, no obesity maintenance joints, no ice creams on sale apart from at a once Polish owned shop, none of the customary clamour. It’s an almost Swedishly unspoilt beach. Chilly but bearable lying with my back against a windshielding rock looking at the rough sea. After intensive relative-focused days and a business day in Dorchester, I felt I needed the sea and am glad I found this little townlet, whose existence I knew nothing of until recently, out of the way on the oddly named Manhood Peninsula, the most southerly part of Sussex, ending at Selsey Bill, which, like Portland Bill was once just an odd name for me.

According to www.etymonline.com, there is an Old English word bill “bill, bird’s beak,” related to bill, a poetic word for a kind of sword (especially one with a hooked blade), from Proto-Germanic *bili-, a word for cutting or chopping weapons. Used also in Middle English of beak-like projections of land (such as Portland Bill)”.

My respite here will be short as I’m looking forward to meeting daughter and grandson on his first trip to London at Gatwick tomorrow. But I shall come here again when I need to clear my head or hide away for a while or just to practice being a pensioner luxuriating in my west-lit room where there is not only a bath but a bathroom with a window for a sunset wallow.

My plant recognition program is quite determined not to collaborate with Facebook so I have no picture to show of common comfrey (also known as quaker comfrey), shining cranesbill, hawksbeard (sacred hawksbeard or holy hawksbeard), red campion (adder’s flower or devil’s flower), greater stitchwort (adder’s meat or star of Bethlehem), wall barley (wild barley) and garlic mustard (Jack-in-the-bush). The program is a delight; the identifications are perhaps not always right but it’s much more reliable than feverish flicking back and forth in a flower book squinting at leaf shapes. I’m amused by the names and alternative names, hawks with holy beards and adders here and there. And astonished that I have been familiar with wild barley since callow youth but never thought before to ask its name (better late than never). The program gives no source for the alternative names so it’s hard to know whether they are usages from other English-speaking countries or dialectal. A dialect dictionary of plant names would be fun and some time I will have a Shetland buttercup project.

I’m now back in the city or at least in Dorchester, the 20,000 befolked county town, watching my step after my Strasbourgian tumble. According to net findings, elderly people often fall because they shuffle and I am told by reliable sources that I do so (and, according to one source, have always done so). A shuffling foot that hits the ground obliquely, at an acute angle, will more likely stumble on a minor level change than a foot firmly planted at a right angle. Hence to avoid injury, I must change my gait and lift my feet properly. It feels weird as if I’m auditioning for a part as the man from the department of silly walks in a Monty Python film but perhaps I’ll get used to it. The alternative of dressing in protective gear like the Michelin man so that I can take the odd tumble in my stride (or not in my stride..) seems an even greater threat to whatever shreds of human dignity I have left.

This morning I used the word “palaver” for the first time in a long age (a propos the passport chaos in Sweden with long overnight queues for emergency passports). According to net sources, “palaver” comes from the Portuguese word “palavra”, which is given variously as sailor’s slang and a word used for talk between tribespeople and traders. The origin of the Portuguese word in turn is the late Latin “parabola” comparison (hence parable)  and this is given as an example of metathesis, the transposition of phonemes (as in crud and curd). It is also related to the word “parole” in Latin languages. All very satisfactory. A taxi and a funny walk later, I was explaining the intricacies of my hearing aid to a man whose essential role on my life’s stage was to lease me a self-storage facility (we got there in the end after a quarter of an hour’s deaf bonding). A visit to the museum’s dumbdowned bookstall, added a bio of Valentine Ackland “A transgressive life” to my Dorset collection, and I found a guide to the National Trust’s Kingston Lacy in some charity bookshop belonging to the friends of some unremembered body part, ready for the day when I’m done with Dorset churches and start to look at country houses.

And tomorrow, I’m heading east, not all the way to Gatwick but to Selsey, on the Sussex coast, where I’ve never been before and where I’ll spend the night at a seaside hotel, which tells me that fresh English and continental desserts will compliment my meal (flattering words from a crème brulée, not bad!).

It’s fortunate that I will soon be on holiday as my laptop keyboard is giving way and letter after letter is failing to respond to my increasingly insistent tapping. Translating will become more and more like Scrabble when I have to construct meaningful words using just j, q and x, which is going to be a stretch. But in a day or so, I will unlock the golden chain and savour the rare delight of just being.

Bourton, North Dorset, a village I cycled past in my youth on my way from the water-poor chalk uplands to the verdant Blackmore Vale where I lived. I noticed the three counties close to one another but not much else. Now I’m a more careful tourist and I’ve explored the back lanes and ferreted the net.

There’s no sad brown tourist sign or explanatory board but Egbert’s stone stands alone and unexplained on the golf course. Egbert was the Saxon King Alfred’s grandfather and the stone marks the point at which three counties meet, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. Such boundary stones were important then as the Anglo-Saxons had only recently broken through to the West of England.

Two of these counties have names of Anglo-Saxon origin, Wiltshire earlier referred to as Wiltunscir, being the people who lived around Wilton (the “scir” later “shire” being instantly recognisable to a Swede where “skära” means cut). Somerset comes from “Sumortonsaete”, the people dependent (or living around) Somerton. The name Dorset, however, is of earlier Brythonic Celtic origin, probably from the tribe the Durotriges or later from the Roman name for Dorchester, Durnovaria.

The boundaries from Egbert’s stone are of ancient date. The stone is also said to mark the rallying point of King Alfred’s army, reformed after being defeated by the Vikings, in the preparations for his subsequent success at the Battle of Ethandun (Edington) when Guthrum and his Viking army were routed and driven out of Wessex back to Mercia and East Anglia.

Not far away is King Alfred’s Tower, a triangular folly, actually built to commemorate the end of the Seven Year War with France and to celebrate the accession of George III. It was built in the 1760s by Henry Hoare, of the banking family, who owned nearby Stourhead. There’s a statue of King Alfred there;  the reference to King Alfred because the history of the Anglo-Saxons was reintegrated into the British national story in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before then (as it still is to some extent), the Norman Conquest in 1066 was a sharp break. Those still intact of the defeated Anglo-Saxon aristocracy fled or faded away and the elite in England was Norman French for the best part of three hundred years. The Kings (and what Queens there were) were numbered from 1066, not including any pre-conquest Edward. Almost three centuries passed before the English re-emerged in culture with Chaucer among others and with the first English-speaking monarch. Interest in the Anglo-Saxons I suspect was modest, Shakespeare was not tempted to write about a play about King Alfred, as far as I know.

This changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a number of books were written about King Alfred and stories spread from Asser, Alfred’s ninth century Welsh biographer. And now Alfred and his victories over the Danes are identified as English in a way that, for example, Boudicca, the Celtic British Queen who badly shook Roman control of Britain is not. Nor do the English identify to any great extent with the Durotriges, the West England Celtic tribe, who were defeated by the Romans under Vespasian at what is now known as Maiden Castle. It is a useful reminder that history is not just there, unchanging and objective, but that it has been produced, often for a purpose, and that the selection can be arbitrary and can change.

For a village that now numbers 800 inhabitants, Bourton has had a remarkable industrial history in the days before the rise of Yorkshire and Lancashire. There was a flax mill here for long centuries, an iron foundry that employed 250 people at the end of the eighteenth century, a large waterwheel said to be Britain’s largest, tanners and brickmakers and even a factory that made Mills bombs, a type of hand grenade, during the Second World War (somewhat tastelessly commemorated by a pair of columns topped by model stone grenades). I’d like to read more about industry in the west in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century . A lot has been written but much in small pamphlets here and there.

I probably won’t pass Bourton on my bike again but more likely flash past in a car on the A303. I now have some more interesting associations to think of.

Arriving in Strasbourg from Germany, the first thing I do is to fall over. I was lucky I didn’t break an arm or a wrist, probably thanks to my reactions being so slow that I never managed to extend a protective arm. I’ve done this on a couple of occasions and it irritates me; it’s the kind of thing old people do, not silver tigers like me. And, of course, it’s potentially dangerous although this time no worse than a scraped arm, a few spots of blood on my shirt and a confused couple of minutes while someone helped me reassemble my scattered possessions and get back to the vertical.

There was nothing particular about the ground and I couldn’t work out why it happened. These new versions of David Kendall from 70 onwards do require a bit of tinkering to operate. There are some good new functions but you really do have to keep your eye on what they’re doing. You can’t just let them deal with the boring bits on autopilot and dream about etymology as you could with the earlier versions…..

But apart from this spatial dissonance, all has been well. A fine week in Berlin where, among other things, I’ve learnt about the German version of the Garden City movement, visiting one area east of Berlin and the more well-known Falkenberg, a very attractive verdant area with its flowers and flowering bushes  not at all far from the dense stone city. I’ve been interested in William Morris for a long time but have more recently visited Welwyn Garden City and read about Ebenezer Howard. These strands were more concentrated in Germany, perhaps because of German industrialisation occurring at a later date and at a faster pace. I found an interesting doctoral thesis on the net which takes up the various strands which made up the movement, social-democratic reformists focusing on trying to improve working class housing within a capitalist society, more mystical elements wanting a different kind of life, involving dances and other cultural activities beyond my pain threshold for the excruciating, and the dark Germany longing back to a vanished sense of community and culture untarnished by the growth of the industrial metropolises (no prizes for guessing which section of the population was blamed for this development..).

I also wanted to enhance my knowledge of German literature and focused on Tucholsky, who had lived in the area north of Berlin at some time before fleeing from the Nazis to Sweden and the perhaps more well-known Theodor Fontane. I’ve read Effi Briest in translation but have now also bought Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (auswahl), which I’m going to try to start today on the train to Paris. I acquired this on a brief trip to Neuruppin, the so-called “Fontane Town” where he had lived and which is full of Fontane connections; it’s on my list for a more leisurely trip to the area another time I’m in Germany, as well as a trip to the castle of Rheinsberg with its associations with Tucholsky (echoes of the lakeside castle of Mariefred in Sweden where he lived his final days and is buried there, his grave a site of pilgrimage for lovers of German literature).

I love learning about a culture by drawing on a thread and seeing where it leads me. Some imes the author or whatever the thread is proves less interesting but it still enriches my relationship to the culture. I’ve practised this over many years in Sweden where I’ve wanted to avoid fastening in a superficial familiarity which can easily be the fate of exiles and others living for a long time in a foreign country.

My German reading is coming along nicely but my comprehension leaves a lot to be desired. And, as usual, I make few concessions to local prejudices about pronunciation.

I’m reluctant, however, to enrol for a formal course as to date I’m wholly self-learnt in German, which I find amusing and satisfying. But German will have a place in my work for the rest of 2022 and for my plan for 2023 with the aim of being able to understand news programmes in German and improve my ability to follow what people are taking about within a year.

Wednesday, 4 May

I’m now in Köpenick, a small town to the east of Berlin, not quite a suburb and not quite an independent town.

Berlin has fascinated me since I first visited the city in 1969, arriving there after an overnight journey, involving a perilous pillion ride to Helmstedt on a fast motorcycle, without a helmet but with a heavy rucksack making both man and machine unstable. There have been trips since then. In the old days when I travelled mostly by land between Sweden and the UK, I often made a detour via Berlin, crossing to the East to get the train to Stockholm (Neutral Sweden had less taut transport connections and we travelled to Sassnitz on special coaches attached to normal DR trains and not the special corridor expresses).

I was in Köpenick in the old days too or at least passed through on my way to the Muggelsee.

I was travelling from Athens to Luleå in northern Sweden, an almost American distance. I’d stopped overnight at the then somewhat tense Greek-Yugoslav border, fending off the attentions of a dubious couple of men  full of expressions of brotherly love who wanted to take me for a drink and I suspect keep my wallet as a small souvenir of our encounter. And then a walk around Skopje and a long bus ride to the outskirts of Belgrade with an elderly lady who was recruiting guests to her B&B “just around the corner” (kind and pleasant but truthfulness about location wasn’t her strong card).

Half awake on the early morning train, I abandoned thoughts about breaking my journey in Dresden and continued directly to Berlin. A longing to immerse myself in water and wash the travel stains away brought me to an FKK beach, probably on the Muggelsee, the scruffy westerner with his rucksack exciting discreet curiosity from the other bathers.

I’m staying in a second-hand bookshop which is also an hotel, a wonderful combination where every room is named after an author. I’m in Octavio Paz with Pablo Neruda just next door. Poor Tucholsky whose suicidal grave is by the lakeside castle of Mariefred in Sweden has his room down the corridor. I’ve never read Paz but now know a little more about him after cursory internetting. It would have been nice to have pictures of the authors in the room and some more information. There are a couple of his books and a few others by Christa Wolf and Brecht, and strangely a book about a football championship in 1974, which Germany won, although I don’t know whether there was a Paz or a Mexican dimension. It’s odd as the book is too big to have been dropped off by a casual guest and the hotel is otherwise respectful to literature and not the sort of place to dump unsorted heaps of books here and there.

I probably won’t get a chance to comment on this as I have booked directly and will not be subject to exhaustion marketing, where every last drop of opinion is squeezed from my almost lifeless body.

I am continuing to read Pagnol but also the Bengali author Saratchandra Chattopadhyay. One of the main characters in the novel is a woman who, according to the blurb, “lives and travels by herself, has relationships with various men, looks poverty and suffering in the face, and asserts the autonomy of the individual being, In the process, she tears apart the frame of the expatriate Bengali society in Agra, where she lives”. It’s full of discussions about issues in Bengali society and culture. To start with, I felt that the discussions, although very interesting, weighed down the book. But the more I get into it, the better I like it. It’s remarkable for a book written in 1931 and I’m not surprised it caused turbulence then. Next time I’m in Kolkata, I will try and find reviews and comments on the book from that time if they will let me into the big state library again.

There are lots of threads to follow in the book to understand Bengali society better. I’ll read it quickly through and then do a plod reading following up the use of tharkurpu, boudi, babu (and kakababu) and the Vaishnavas, and getting my ashram, bramachari, Brahman and Brahmin in the right place. (I am already at least half educated about the waltz around apni).

When it comes to things Bengali, I am like a child who has discovered a stairway to a new floor at hisher house, rooms full of interest and fascination. I would like to get a grasp of the Hindu religion, not for religious reasons but simply to understand. I’ve read two substantial volumes but am only at the beginning of comprehension where some of the terms become more familiar. But I’m still a long way from being able to link ideas within Hinduism about the duality or non-duality of the universe with the Greek tradition and how some of the fault lines and debates within Hinduism relate to the somewhat tortured history of Christianity in relation to the nature of divinity and the trinity and all the rest of it.

I am really a family of individuals who don’t always rub along too well. There is the Dave Kendall of the world, anxious to understand what’s going on around us and eagerly reading political history and studying the nature of imperialism. And then there is the Dave Kendall, who seems to want to be some kind of intellectual mid-nineteenth century Anglican bishop, who could perhaps feel at home in the pages of Trollope. Bishop Kendall won’t be happy until he has mastered Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Sanskrit, knows his bible, is a dab hand at the history of religion but probably has a collection of rocks as well to satisfy his thirst for geological knowledge and is not averse to botanical excursions. Is he a man of the eighteenth or the nineteenth century? Perhaps there are two David Kendalls hiding here too.

There are minor avatars of Dave Kendall as well, the Dorset David Kendall steeped in local knowledge and well within the tradition of William Barnes and Thomas Hardy. Perhaps he could engage in unity talks with Bishop Kendall if Bishop Kendall agreed to drop this Bishop nonsense and become an intellectual village priest (I write priest for lack of a suitable hook – I don’t think any of us David Kendalls want to splash water on babes or offer homilies to the devout, We just want to hold fine leather-bound volumes in book-lined studies with French windows leading to green sunlit gardens tended by someone else, Mållgan perhaps).

The political Dave Kendall shakes his head at all this nonsense, where is this luxury parasite Bishop Kendall’s sense of responsibility to his fellow humans? In earlier times, he would probably have muttered pshaw or humbug in best Dr Johnson style.

Being the man in overall charge of this family of ill-sorted individuals makes me feel like that I am directing the movements not of a pantomime horse but a pantomime centipede, struggling around taking awkward steps in every conceivable direction.

There’s very little help from the community available for this kind of problem. Asking for family therapy for what appears to the superficial eye to be a single individual is not going to end well.

I guess I just have to muddle through as best I can – until the muse of memory and the patron saint of lost causes stand wistfully together by my grave with its epitaph “He came, he looked confused, he went” and saying to one another as they float together through the cemetery twilight “he was a magnificent failure”.

Monday, 2 May

The first day of travel

Tired and out of sorts after a booster Covid jab surprisingly obtained on 1 May, the unmasked multitude presses in on me on the train. Three babies are on duty in varying states of disintegration; noisy despite one mother’s heroic efforts to calm her offspring by a Guinness book of records rocking session. I’m annoyed with myself for being disturbed but I have forgotten my earphones (along with my toothbrush) to be duly noted on my quality assessment for this departure.

I manage to start seriously getting to grips with Pagnol’s La Gloire de mon pêre. I learn that Pagnol believes he was of Spanish descent as his ancestors were referred to in the records as “L’espagnol”. It sounds neat and explains the name that I reacted to as odd without delving further. But were they so late to adopt surnames in Spain?

Pagnol was born in Aubagne, a town I’ve flashed past when travelling by coach from Aix-en-provence to Nice. So now to get to know better another area after Giono’s Manosque.

I follow up Pagnol’s references to the Roman general Caius Marius, famous for inflicting a crushing defeat on the Cimbri and Teutones at Aquae Sextius (later Aix) in the first years of the first century BC, after Roman forces had previously suffered humiliating defeats Wiki tells me that the Cimbri and Teutones were Germanic tribes and I wonder what language they spoke. Cimbri sounds distinctly Celtic, while Teutones sounds suitably German but was any language knocking around at that time that could be called early German? I know very little about the early language history of northern and central Europe. I know that Celtic languages were widespread then but how did the development of German fit into that?

Pagnol refers to Mont St Victoire near Aix, made famous by Cezanne and I wonder what victory it refers to? Could it be the massive Roman victory? While, of course, I knew about the invasions from beyond the Rhine that brought down the Western Roman Empire, I wasn’t aware before of how shaken Roman might had previously been by invaders from the north.

I want to know more about Provence and this part of southern France and love to follow threads like this, where one piece of information leads to another and another.

And somehow as a digression in my wandering around in the weak light of the ancient past, I get into the word “gob”, slang for mouth and preserved in gobstopper. My guess would be that it was of Celtic origin and various sources seem to bear this out. I don’t have the exact source but “gob” seems to have been an Irish word for mouth in 1540. And further back there is Gaulish “gobbo” and “gob” for beak in Gaelic. It seems to have some kind of relationship with “gab” and “gift of the gab”. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it’s not in dignified use, but I’m unclear whether this applies to gab or gob or both (I think gob is the more likely candidate as “gift of the gab” could more easily make its entrance into polite society).

I’m fascinating by such ancient “outcast” words that survive centuries unloved, Caliban words.

And at some point in the mist of history, I fall asleep surfacing briefly in Östergötland and the Småland highlands before I wake properly in Eslöv in Skåne. Now in a territory full of memories from my first period in Sweden when I lived in Lund, I look for Felix food factory where I taught English. There I muddled my Gert-Inges and Ingegerds, struggled with Sweden’s compound nouns and integrated my dipthongs into my version of Swedish, which makes few concessions to the prejudices of folk north of Hässleholm but goes down a wonder with the Danes.

And finally to the great brick hall of Copenhagen station with its memories of my first trip to Scandinavia in the early 1970s with my then English girlfriend. We arrived in Copenhagen late and slept on the street in a cul-de-sac (we were still immortal then). And later in the day, to the central station to get more cash from England to cope with coffee at what seemed astronomical prices (and this long before the invasion of the purveyors of fake coffee). The following day we also slept outdoors in some quiet corner alongside the Öresund and looked at the lights of Sweden across the water, before buying clogs in Helsingör and making for the ferry and setting foot in Sweden for the first time in the little square outside Helsingborg Ferry Station, that historic spot probably long gone now.

This time I slept in comfort at a hotel in Copenhagen. I’ve rather gone off sleeping in odd places, although I had quite a tradition of doing so in my rural youth, curled up in telephone kiosks on my way home from some libidinous excursion when the means of transport died out in the wee hours.