D Kendall

Hedengren’s bookshop at Stureplan had just opened and was almost empty. I couldn’t resist sneaking in to check what they were selling off before their move. Mostly to my relief, I couldn’t find anything I wanted so there’s hope for Hedengrens yet.. Sales where shelfwarmers are purged are rather sad as you suspect that the flogged off diamonds will be replaced by an ocean of froth. I was the ideal customer at Hedengrens – attracted by the sale, I bought one of the other books at the regular price, Robert Philip’s The Classical Music Lovers Companion to Orchestral Music (a Financial Times best book of the year!). Improving my knowledge of classical music has been on my wish list for a long time and this looks as if it could help. So after my day’s ration of 20 pages translation, I settle down to fathom the mysteries of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto (my ear is not naturally sensitive which my record as a serial abuser of foreign languages bears witness to, so I need help to appreciate)..

It’s an intensive period for translators just now- the Annual Report season. And I have ten days to get through 140 pages, 20 pages a day with some time in reserve if  the going gets tricky with a lot of new material), So far so good anyway. I’m up to page 90 but there’s not much time for anything else.

My new routine of starting the day with four or five hours of commercial work and then moving on to less concentrated pursuits has been a Circadian triumph. I am sleeping better and at the “right time”. My problem is that after four or five hours of translation, the old man in me gets militant and I don’t get much else done. I am frustrated about my slow progress with my other projects, learning about Bengal and Bengali, Dorset churches, Provencal, learning about Lyon in France, brushing up my Latin and German, developing my collection of photos of St Jerome, studying the state of the UK and not so few other things which I draw a veil of discretion over. Once I have got this annual report off the agenda, I think I shall give priority to commercial work every other day instead of every day.

I am starting to feel that it might be pleasant not to live in a world of perpetual deadlines but I’m not attracted by the reduced income of living only on a pension. My existence minimum includes rather a lot of travel, a subscription to the Financial Times, and working on my project of having a bigger library than the Library of Congress by my 150^th birthday).

I don’t want to kill the golden goose prematurely but I need to find a way a making a half golden goose a viable concept.

I have at least managed to select one notebook to jot things down. I have a horrendous number of used, semi-used and unused notebooks that have attracted me for various reasons, aesthetic, practical and nostalgic. Attempts to put them in order by designating different notebooks for different purposes failed dismally as my clutter of notebooks is now accompanied by half-remembered remnants of numerous overcomplicated systems. But now I have started from the other end, consigned the clutter to a box where the density is approaching a critical threshold. I have just  one book that accompanies me everywhere where I have noted various odds and ends that have attracted my attention as clues to worlds yet unexplored, the first entry “gallimaufry”, a medley of things, a rather upmarket alternative to bits and bobs from an archaic French word galimafree meaning unappetising dish. And I had a friend who referred to a letter I’d written as a homily. And that had to be noted too as my idea of homily was vague – something that a friendly quirky character might produce, which didn’t feel too alien. But on looking it up I discover that homily is defined as a religious discourse, a tedious moralizing lecture, which was odd seeing that I’d written about the Edinburgh police calling their campaign against vandalism on the buses “Operation Proust”: Either the dictionary is wrong or my friend shares my vague idea of what a homily is about (or I am becoming the sort of person who writes letters to the Daily Telegraph but that seems intrinsically unreasonable…).

And while searching for “homily” I find the lovely word “hominivorous” meaning (a creature) that feeds on human beings. I fantasise about smacking a Bengal tiger firmly on the nose and telling it in no uncertain terms to cease instantly its outrageous hominivorous behaviour, whereupon the tiger shamefacedly slinks away into the bushes (since they prefer to attack from behind and there are anyway no tigers within 40 km of places where I hang out in Bengal, this fantasy will probably not be realised).

The same friend mentioned another feline – Schrödingers cat, one of the many paradoxical examples of quantum theory. Wanting to do something about my abysmal low level of education on scientific topics, I start to read about quantum theory while breakfasting but quickly realise that getting to the bottom of quantum theory and translating 20 pages is an unrealistic combination for the same day,,,I also learn a new Swedish word “tryfferad” which I believe means “decorated with truffles” and read an interesting article in Dagens Nyheter about the nineteenth-century author Carl Jonas Love Almquist. I’d stopped subscribing to DN as it had become so magazine-like and timeless but have started again during the pandemic as the recognition of my existence by the outside world in the form of a newspaper arriving felt rather pleasant (I felt that I and the outside world were growing apart and wanted to do something to support our relationship).

I am anyway not likely to become bored even if I do manage to reduce golden goosery to manageable proportions,

The other day I was thinking of bits and bobs. meaning objects of different kinds. It’s a homely expression, which makes me think of my late mother. It has a 1950s feel about it and I associate it with listening to the Light Programme on the radio, stamps of George VI and the coming dynamic times of the New Elizabethans (that was the story in 1953…), the WVS doling out bottles of orange juice with blue bottle caps and aged electric trains from before the war trundling from Brighton to West Worthing.

Curious about its etymology, my secure world crumbles. Wikipedia has the explanation that I find most convincing although unfortunately without a source. “It originated from carpenters’ tool kits containing parts for a drill, with bits used for making holes while bobs are routing or screwdriving drill attachments”. The word “routing” catches my attention. It takes a while to find the meaning, the net being swamped by a tsunami of computer routers, but this router is a power tool with a shaped cutter.

I learn that a drill isn’t designed for the sideways forces associated with routing, using a drill as a router may damage its gears, whether it’s a drill press or a handheld tool. Additionally, drill press chucks are often fitted onto tapered posts, and applying excessive sideways force can cause a chuck to come loose.

According to Chris Deziel on www.hunker.com “A drill chuck doesn’t hold the bit as tightly as a router collet, and a router bit is more likely to slip in a handheld drill or drill press. Apart from the fact that this makes the tool unreliable and potentially dangerous, it can also damage the bit by creating a series of grooves on the bit’s shaft. After use in a drill a bit may not fit in a router again, or, if it does, it may suddenly break while you’re using it — imagine a sharpened carbide blade that’s spinning 500 times per second becoming airborne”.

I would prefer not to think of sharpened carbide blades becoming airborne while spinning at 500 times per second. But now bits and bobs will for the rest of my life not just remind me of my secure childhood on the Sussex coast but it will have associations with a world full of metallic threats and unknown terms, router collet and drill chuck, a world not made for me, more or less a drill virgin. Knowledge has its price; not quite as dramatic as Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden but a step in that direction.

“odds and ends” is anyway a bit more friendly originating from the 1500s and originally referring to bits left over from bolts of cloth. I’ve seen the Middle English term “bolt” before but it’s not part of my active vocabulary. But I can at least integrate it without collateral verbal damage and am sure it will pass my lips before drill press chuck gets there.

To be really on the safe side, perhaps I should go upmarket and stick to paraphernalia. Not quite the same but not so far away in its sense of miscellaneous articles per se. It comes from the Greek, and here means “apart from a dowry”, originally in the sense of the bride’s small personal possessions, which were not part of the dowry. Later broadened to the present meanings.

It’s a gap in my education that my grammar school didn’t offer Greek. It’s too big a project to learn classical Greek when I’ve attained the Parisian age of 75 but I would really love to go to a good course that picked out the aspects of the language that are important for understanding the origins of English. But there again I would love rather a lot of things and when it comes to language, I am irredeemably promiscuous, becoming infatuated at the flip of a cognate.

A few years ago I visited Tyneham on the Dorset coast, whose inhabitants were forced to move during the second world war as the area was wanted for military purposes. The promise to return was never kept and the army is still there. For years there was a campaign to make them release the village but as the still living villagers had become settled elsewhere and awareness grew that there were no caravan sites or much other development in Tyneham so that the army had, like a Hindu deity, preserved as well as destroyed, the campaign lost its passion. It had, however, encouraged more careful care of the old church and school and to allow well shepherded seasonal visitors limited access.

The children’s work from the 1940s at the old school, their detailed observations of the natural surroundings, birds and flowers struck me. They might be regarded as poorly educated with a restricted view of the world but that says as much about us, why we see what we see, as it does about them.

Here in Uppsala, the snow has mainly melted and green is replacing grey. Perhaps there will be more snow but winter has passed its peak. It’s getting lighter and the pace is quickening from the stoic trudge of the worst months. I’m looking forward to resuming my explorations of my natural environment, trying to understand, to penetrate and not dismiss what I see after a cursive glance.

A lot remains of the cultural Uppland but I want to understand the physical environment too, its geology, the landscape and the considerable traces of glaciation, its waterways. High on my list is a visit to Viksta stentorg, the remains of a beach where the sea is now far away. A beach where you could sit and dream without risking being struck in the head by a ball.

With friends and family in several European countries, I may not spend that much time in Sweden but I shall think about my priorities for my Uppland project as well as my other projects. And try to use the weeks that remain until vaccination makes it possible to travel to work on my first post-Covid plan, to decide what I want to read during the coming six months and where I can get hold of this literature on various topics that interest me, what libraries I might use, what I should download to my Kindle, what I should take with me.

Living in Sweden has been made me much more attentive to the signs of Scandinavia in the UK.

There are the place names where we have any number ending in “thorpe” and “by” (Swedish  torp) in Eastern England, the old Dane Law. And around the coast, in the Wirral peninsula and the islands off Scotland, where we find “Bostad” in Lewis in the outer Hebrides. And in Orkney and the Shetlands, names of Scandinavian origin are everywhere. Orkney and Shetland did not become Scottish until 1472 and the last speaker of Norn, the Scandinavian language of the islands, Walter Sutherland, died around 1850 (and presumably there was knowledge of Norn in fragmentary form after that).

Norn lives on in the Shetland dialect where, for example, “grice” means pig (gris in Swedish), “gulsa” is jaundice (gulsot in Swedish), “keek” to peek (kika in Swedish). A fluent reader of Danish or Norwegian would find many more cognates.

Further south, large areas of Eastern England, the Dane Law,  were subject to Danish law with substantial Danish colonisation in the century or so before the Norman Conquest.

Scandinavian names abound in the Domesday Book for, for example, Lincolnshire, William the Conqueror’s inventory of the loot from about 1080, Here we find landowners called Halfdan, Knutr, Sveinn, Thorulf and Esbjorn among others.

It strikes me as odd though that I have not been able to find many written traces of the Dane Law, despite a considerable number of Scandinavians having settled and lived there. The Anglo-Saxons were, by contrast, far better documented. There are gaps where the sources are thin, especially in the early period but none the less we have access to a large corpus of texts of various kinds, literature, wills, religious texts etc., in Early English and in Latin. But the Danelaw is more obscure.

I was excited to receive Cyril Hart’s “The Dane Law” (1992) from a Danish second-hand bookshop.

It looks fascinating and I shall enjoy reading it but I couldn’t find many links in the bibliography to material written during the period in Latin, Danish or English, which actually originated from the Dane Law. And not much literature in Danish at any period, while there is a lot on the Anglo-Saxons. I hope a careful reading will soften or at least explain this judgment.

History is often produced for a reason. It took a long time after the Norman conquest before a new concept of Englishness emerged which combined the history of the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans.

I should like to know more about the history of the re-emergence of the Anglo-Saxons. I presume that historians did much work on this during the rise of the UK as an imperial power, especially perhaps in the Victorian period (glorification of King Alfred, his scholarship, navy, battles against the Viking invader, burnt cakes etc).  We still only count our kings and queens from the Norman conquest – the early Edwards don’t count, even though Edward the Confessor has had a good press.

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The Danes have not been pressed into service to the same extent. They are presented as vikings, storming ashore killing monks and removing their treasures. But there is much less focus on the later period when the Danes came to stay with many named settlements. We are told about the money for peace impositions by the vikings and successful resistance and pushback by King Alfred in Wessex (the plucky underdog is a recurrent theme in British history with less emphasis on the vicious overdog…). We are told about Canute (Knut) telling the sea to behave and encouraged to agree that that was rather foolish.  The extensive Danish settlement in the Dane Law, the import of administrative words such as “soke” (socken) and “wapentake” (admittedly of martial origin but later an administrative word), and other legal words makes me feel that Vikings rushing up the beaches and silly Canute are far from the whole story of the Scandinavians in England.

I suppose this is because we haven’t needed the Scandinavians in the construction of our national myth. And our insufficient skills in the Scandinavian languages don’t help. Widespread knowledge of French and German helps us understand Anglo-Saxon and Norman history.

I’ve read some material on the Scandinavian influence on the English language (I can’t remember the title but it may have been from researchers at the University of Oslo).

Swedish researchers from Lund and Uppsala were very active in the twentieth century in working on the origin of English place names and the foremost studies of the place names of Dorset for example, are Swedes. I’d like to know more about these researchers.

As we have at least access to a good selection of Scandinavian personal and place names, it would be interesting to look at the principles that governed selection of place names – the proportion of place names based on geographical features (Dalby), those named after gods and goddesses in the Asa religion. How do these vary over time and can we learn anything about gaps (for example, a cursory look at the material it seems that Thor is often used while Oden/Woden, (becoming perhaps, for example, Wednesbury) is less frequent). Distinguishing names of  Scandinavian origin from Anglo-Saxon is difficult – the Anglo-Saxons were pagan for a rather longer time than the settled Vikings. But comparing Christian Anglo-Saxon place naming with what happened in the Dane Law also seems interesting (what was Christianity like in the Danish areas – if they were Christian, we might expect names of places after saints important in the Nordic world etc.).

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It would be great to find a book on the various aspects of the Scandinavian influence on England – political, legal, administrative, religious, cultural, language-wise etc.

Despite having lived in Sweden for over 40 years, I still find new links between the English and Swedish languages from time to time. These have often come about through Old English (Anglo-Saxon), the language of England before the Norman Conquest. Both Old English and Old Nordic had common Germanic roots and the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons would have been able to understand one another after a fashion (and misunderstand one another as may be evidenced by the tortured tangle of “shall” and “will” in English, which lead a much calmer life in Swedish as two neatly separated verbs).

I’ve recently acquired “The Place Names of Wiltshire” by Gower, Mower and Stenton, I caught sight of the derivation of the name of the small village of Zeals on the county’s western border with Dorset (and with Somerset not far away). I’ve always thought it a strange name, giving incorrect associations to the word “zeal” meaning enthusiasm from the Greek zelos. This Zeals, however, has a different etymology and comes from the Old English “sealh” (sealas in the plural) meaning a type of willow tree, We have “sälg” in Swedish with the modern English equivalent “sallow”, used for a low, shrubby willow tree, I must check to see whether there are still any willows around in Zeals next time I’m there. The western English dialect has made its presence felt in the spelling of the village’s name, leading the s sound to be pronounced and written as a z.

The philologist and antiquarian William Barnes and his wife Julia ran a school in nearby Mere, a slighter larger community. He had a grasp of a great number of European languages as well as Sanskrit and Hebrew and I believe even Hindi. I’ve no record of him learning Old English but I suppose he must have known it. The Barnes ran a school in Mere from 1823-35 before moving to Dorchester, where Barnes later knew Hardy. Barnes became enthusiastic later in life on stripping the English language of words of French origin and replacing them with alternatives based on Old English so that, for example, Social Science as a school subject might be renamed “Folk Lore” in William Barnes’ English.

It pleases me to think of this serious community of educated and self educated in Dorchester in mid Victorian times. Hardy, Barnes and the Moules, well versed in the Bible and Classical Rome and Greece, with some of them having a command of Hebrew and great knowledge of the local Dorset dialect and the history and culture of the area. It’s a much more pleasing thought than Hardy’s death in 1928 when he wished to be buried in Stinsford churchyard where his family had lived. But he was regarded as too much of a national treasure to escape Westminster Abbey, After a few shillies and shallies, a nightmare compromise was achieved whereby Hardy’s heart was removed to be buried in Stinsford while the rest remained in Westminster Abbey. I think this was and remains a horrible ghoulish solution – perpetuating the split in Hardy’s life between Dorset and London high society, where the Hardys were drawn to hob nob with the rich and fashionable during the season.

 It’s probably apocryphal but there is a real Hardyian twist to this story as a cat is supposed to have interfered with the container in which Hardy’s heart was being transported to Dorset.

I think the solution would have horrified Hardy too but he would have been amused by the cat.

The EC and Astrazeneca are disputing about the meaning of the term “best efforts” in the vaccine supply contract.  This has a special resonance for me as I’ve recently read  Kenneth Adam’s “A manual of style contract drafting”  where he advises against the use of the term “best efforts”: I agree with his description of it as a rhetorical flourish. It tells one contract party that the other party wants them to believe it will do its best but is otherwise ambiguous.

The problem of the term “best efforts”, which, unlike reasonable efforts, is also used in ordinary speech as well as contracts, is that it is unclear how far a contracting party has to go to perform the contractual undertaking. It has sometimes been regarded as a synonym for reasonable efforts but often as a term on a continuum where best is something more than just reasonable. In other words, your best effort might involve you in having to undertake unreasonable actions. If, for example, raw material to produce the contract product is only obtainable at exorbitant prices, then reasonable efforts might release you from your contractual obligation but best efforts perhaps require that you acquire the raw material despite it being economically extremely disadvantageous to do so. This would make the term unworkable in contracts; according to Adams, US courts have overwhelmingly rejected that best efforts represents a more onerous standard than reasonable efforts.

The use of reasonable efforts excludes some of the uncertainty of “best efforts” but, of course, the court still has to decide what reasonable efforts consist of  (commercially reasonable?).  If the EU wanted to say (as they claim now) that the term meant that Astrazeneca was released from performance of the contract provisions if the vaccine had not been approved, then it might have been better to state this carve out explicitly and leave efforts out of the picture altogether. If it goes so far, a court will have to decide whether “best efforts” extends so far as forcing Astrazeneca to break other contracts.

The problems with the term best efforts are not new. It’s interesting that the EU. with access to any amount of legal expertise should lay itself open to a tussle on the meaning of this term (and also what Astrazeneca had in mind by use of the term).

Sweden’s divergent approach to dealing with the pandemic has attracted a lot of international attention. But I’ve seen nothing written about the Swedish form of government, which differs from arrangements elsewhere in Europe (I’m not sure about Finland). Government agencies in Sweden have much more autonomy and even power than those in, for example, the UK, where a government minister can and will intervene in the day-to-day work of agencies subordinate to the ministry.

In Sweden, such intervention would be unconstitutional (see Chapter 12, Article 2 of the Swedish constitutional document Regeringsform). Ministries in Sweden, with few exceptions, have a small number of employees and are predominantly policy-making bodies, while the government agencies perform the everyday work in their sphere.

Thus in the UK a government minister might resign (at least in the old days…) if there was some spectacular inadequacy in an agency subordinate to hisher ministry. This wouldn’t happen in Sweden – the Director-General of the agency might go but not the minister.

The government can influence the agencies by its power of appointment and dismissal of the senior figures in the agency, the Director-General and his assistant. It also sets the budget for the agencies. And can engage them in dialogue if it considers that the agency is straying from the adopted policies but it in principle doesn’t intervene in the day-to-day work of the agency (or has to be rather discreet if it intends to do so…).

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I suppose the ideological justification of this would be the division of powers where the legislative and the executive are separated. However, it’s also interesting from the point of view of the influence of the electorate over the government in universal suffrage (shielding activities of government from popular influence).

International commentators have remarked on the apparent hands-off conduct of the Swedish government in the pandemic, where the Public Health Agency has been in the forefront of attention. This may have suited the politicians (trust the experts) but it’s not just a political wheeze but part of the Swedish way of doing things.

I haven’t seen much, if anything written about this in more popular sources but there is an interesting article by Lars Jonung “Sweden’s Constitution Decides its Covid-19 exceptionalism” (June 2020). published by the Department of Economics at Lund University (Working Paper 2020:11).

Apart from dabbling with the Swedish constitution, I have been fine trimming my organisation of time, with a regular (4-5 hours) session of commercial work or work on one of my projects, the afternoon spent on working with languages and exercise, and the evening on lighter reading. My plan is to repeat this structure every day (inspired by Trollope of all people…). My aim is to counter my tendency to drift away from commonly accepted notions of time (uphold the Circadian rhythm); and to use time more efficiently.

Among my new word acquisitions for the week are “ligature” and “endogamous”. I  knew the binding and connect meaning of ligature but didn´t know that it was the formal word for “joined letters” such as the “ae” written together in Danish or conjoined letters in Bengali.

And “endogamous” as the practice of marrying within a specific social group (endo (within) + gamous to do with marriage). Rather obvious just that I hadn’t reflected on it before.

And I made a small step towards improving my disastrously low knowledge of things natural and scientific. If the answer sheet to an exam paper for entry into the Uttar Pradesh civil service is correct,  dew does not form on cloudy nights (as heat leaving the earth is radiated back by the cloud). I haven’t thought much about dew before and it´s nice to be able to think about that when wandering around early in the morning after a cloudy night…

I’ve known the meaning of synonym at least since I was in the early years of secondary school. And somewhere along life’s passage, I’ve picked up antonym.

But I’ve been foggy about homonym until the other day when I checked it.

It started well. Homonym is a word that is said or spelt the same as another word but has a different meaning, for example write and right.

And the sub-categories homograph and homophone, easily identifiable as “same spelling” and “same sound”, “Minute” (time) and “minute” (record of a meeting) are therefore homographs while “new and “knew” are homophones.

Easy, peasy but then what about “heteronym” and “heterograph”. I learn that a heteronym is a homograph with a different pronunciation.  Looking back at my definitions, I see that a homograph is a word that is spelt the same but not necessarily pronounced the same. Some homographs then are heteronyms and some not.

And words that sound the same as other words, but are spelt differently and have different meanings are heterographs. At this point, my head begins to spin. What was supposed to be a quick two minute check of the meaning of a word is taking on alarming dimensions and eating up my morning work session.

I abandon the search but as it’s irritating to allow the weeds of unknowledge to flourish in a corner of my brain, I can’t resist going back for more.

Then I learn that a heterograph may also be referred to as a homophonic heterograph.

The categories interpenetrate but I’m shaky on the heteros. I also make the acquaintance of polysemy – words with the same pronunciation and spelling but with different meanings, such as mouth (rivers and facial orifice). And capitonym, a word that changes its meaning when capitalised such as Polish and polish. And that a language can be more or less heteronymic, for example, English, which is littered with heteronyms.

Having muddled through for many years accompanied just by synonyms and antonyms, I decide to let the matter rest.

I’ve also been attracted by a nineteenth century lady with the first name Euphrosyne. To start with I thought it must be biblical but the “euph” should have made me suspect a Greek origin, which proved to be the case. The name originates from Euphosyne, one of the Charities (Graces in Roman times). According to Wiki (quoting Jennifer Larsson (2007), Ancient Greek Cults), she was the goddess of good cheer, joy and mirth (merriment).

According to Hesiod, Euphrosyne had two sisters Thalia (the joyous one associated with abundance) and Aglaea (goddess of beauty, splendour and adornment), together the Charities. They are usually depicted dancing together and I have seen them often in Botticelli’s well-known painting Primavera without realising who they were.

The Greek poet Pindar states that these goddesses were created to fill the world with pleasant moments and good will. Usually the Charites attended the goddess of beauty Aphrodite.

A heavy responsibility to go through life with the name of “merriment” but perhaps more fun than being called Chastity even if harder work than Faith or Charity. These names called after personal attributes amuse me and I fantasise about people called Melancholy or Tepid (or even Schaden, the black sheep of the Freud(e) family, published under poetic licence….).

Wiki also tells us that there is an asteroid named after Euphrosyne and much more curiously a family of marine worms (I wonder why – was this the act of some researcher with impaired hearing looking for a name for a merry worm?), I’ve mislaid the source now but one of the distinctive features of this family of worms is the relative length of the notochaetal prongs. My grasp of marine worm terminology is a bit shaky and, for once, I am happy to let it be.

After a struggle with my conscience, I have invested in a source of direct heating as my flat is so cold at night that it interferes with my sleep. It’s probably environmentally logical to turn the central heating down then as many people like to sleep in a cool bedroom. But for a 75-year-old with somewhat wonky circulation, it’s not a great solution.

I get up at the crack of dawn, or at least 07.30 (perhaps the chasm of dawn…) to collect my acquisition from the local postal point, relieved to find that it’s a neat rather small package and not the elephantine encumbrance of my worst fears. I can get it back on my shopping trolley and don’t have to risk playing Russian roulette with Covid on the bus.

Having extracted it from its casing, I immediately take to it when I discover that the manufacturing company has its UK headquarters in Malmesbury in north Wiltshire. A fine little town around the historic Malmesbury Abbey, where, according to Wikipedia, there is a Daniel’s well named after a monk called Daniel of Winchester, who “is said to have submerged himself in cold water every day for decades to quell fiery passions”. The article also refers to the historian William of Malmesbury (1095-1143), who described how another monk, Eilmer, flew a primitive hang glider from a tower for 180 metres before landing and breaking both legs. It’s not clear from Wiki what his motivations were but presumably not to quell the passions.

After this diversion, I get to grips with the accompanying 70-page Book of Babel, telling me in a slew of languages all the horrible things that can happen to me if I mistreat my heater. It’s not too bad – after a deep breath, I feel calm enough to discover a few words of English tucked away in the manual and even manage to clip the apparatus on to its stand without either breaking it or having this problem dominating my life for a couple of weeks.

I will test run it tonight. It is sufficiently sophisticated that it has a timer (if I can get my head around this in the accompanying Book of Babel), the plan being to run it for an hour or two until I’m properly asleep and then let it shut down.

08.30 on a Sunday morning and, to my surprise, it’s getting light as I try to get to our local Post Office/Shop before Corona does. My cautious purge of my wallet, taking only my ID and one credit card, is a step too far as nothing sinister emerges from the shadows on my kilometre walk.

The post office is almost empty and yesterday’s aerosol virus will now be reclining on the floor like Chatterton although, unlike Chatterton, shrouded in colourful paper offering discounts on broccoli.

My packet contains a book on Gunnar Leche, Uppsala’s city architect from 1920 to 1954. Collecting it is against my principles for self-isolation according to which any contact with the outside world should be strictly necessary. But it’s too frustrating if every consoling project of the mind is blocked until after covid so I allow myself an exemption on grounds of mental hygiene, masked and with disinfected hands nowhere near my face (and avoiding using plosives when talking with dogs).

Gunnar Leche was responsible for a large number of buildings in Uppsala, especially in (what are now) the inner suburbs of Fålhagen, Kvarngärdet and Luthagen. His production extends from the last days of the National Romantic period through the classicism of the 1920s to functionalist architecture, although, according to Carl-Erik Bergold (‘Gunnar Leche – en stadens och folkets arkitekt’ in Uppsalas arkitekter och arkitekturens Uppsala, 2002), ‘Leche blev aldrig renlårig’ (literally “never became orthodox” in the sense I take it of clearly and exclusively adopting a particular architectural style).

It was perhaps this lack of orthodoxy that led to the criticisms made of two of his later projects Tuna Backe and Sala Backe. He is, however, now appreciated in architectural writings on Uppsala. I would like to know more about this but this will have to wait until covid has abated and I can spend time at the local history and newspaper library.

My explorations of my new home environment have been subdued with the onset of winter.  I find it most rewarding if I can read and explore in the real world at the same time, one without the other not feeling satisfactory. Probably the best use of time is to identify what interests me and what access I need to pursue these interests, to avoid becoming a jumble of unsorted poorly sourced anecdotes.

Otherwise, as far as the life of the mind is concerned, I have now read the six novels of the Barchester Chronicles. I’m pleased to have done so although my planned relaxation reading before sleeping has at times spread beyond its allotted slot and taken up time during the day. After six novels, I am weary of the woman meets man, spark of liking, the course of true love never runs smooth, problems eventually overcome, marriage and the happy ever after. Trollope, however, is much more than this, a greater writer than just a purveyor of romantic tales. I’m wondering whether Trollope wasn’t also tired of the commercial requirements for a happy romantic ending as he rebels in the Last Chronicle of Barset and Lily Dale remains single. Trollope rose another notch in my respect for avoiding a tired, stereotyped ending although I was already impressed by the range of well-drawn characters struggling with many life situations unrelated to romance. The swirl of ideologies also fascinates me, mid-nineteenth century conservatism and liberalism (whig) against the background of the fractured British ruling class, which still casts a long shadow over the UK. I don’t think I would have enjoyed going on a long train journey with Trollope, however (probably not with Hardy either in fact, although I would have found it easier to talk to Hardy, preferring chatting about the Dorset dialect to small talk about hunting).

Trollope was an unplanned diversion but I don’t regret it and I have become more adept at using my Kindle (for five of the six novels)!