D Kendall

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)!

Sunday, 22 November

I’ve regarded Anthony Trollope as a lightweight Victorian author, the favourite literary tipple of various establishment figures of dubious repute. But I’m about to start the fourth of his six-volume Barchester chronicles and have changed my mind about him. He is a perceptive observer of social relationships, especially the aristocracy with its belief in breeding and blood and their attitudes to the nouveau riche, regarded as not quite gentlefolk but whose competence and money make an impression.

His focus, as might be expected from his background, is sharpest on the lower echelons of the landowning class, the nouveau riche and the rising professionals, stigmatised by their need to earn a living. Dukes appear in his prose but are not centre stage nor  is there much focus on the “common folk”. They flit in and out, carrying things for their employers, at times serving much the same function in the narrative as Shakespeare’s comic relief scenes. It would be interesting to note systematically how these characters are handled and compare it say with Thomas Hardy’s treatment of the “lower orders” and perhaps other Victorian authors. The word “trope” is clamouring for my attention here but I haven’t integrated it in my active vocabulary yet.

I have Richard Mullen’s biography of Trollope on my bookshelf, picked up I believe in some charity bookshop and inscribed to Mama on her 86^th birthday.  It would be great if incoming books were accompanied by a provenance, to tell us about their history, the hands through which they have passed and the effect that they have had. It would be fun to concentrate the books with suspected interesting histories on one shelf of my library!

My reading of Trollope has resonated with me as I’ve recently read Philip Augar’s The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism. He describes the effects of the Big Bang on the City of London and how the traditional British merchant banks have disappeared, either taken over by US or European institutions and no longer identifiable as corporate entities, or collapsed like Barings. The opening of the City of London to foreign competition and changing the rules so that brokers could also become principals and not just agents, meant that size became much more important. The US banks with their deep resources of capital made their presence felt, outcompeting the British institutions in their ability to bear losses and risk and pay inflated salaries to attract the best folk. But Augur also points to the effect of social/class relationships in the UK as the title of his book “The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism” might indicate. The Big Bang opened up the City of London so that it was no longer the preserve of the public school educated upper middle classes. He refers to the far superior training and work ethic of the incoming American institutions.

The brokers and jobbers of  the pre-Big Bang City of London worked as agents for the principals who owned the assets. While well funded for their then purpose, they did not have control of such deep pools of capital as their US competitors. And as they were not owners,  they were not either so well schooled in the assessment of risk, especially not with regard to sometimes complicated new risk management products. The big commercial banks, NatWest and Barclays etc. could have gone some way towards filling that gap. There was potential for at least one or a few UK-owned investment banks. Some big European banks managed that – including the Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and Swiss UBS. They became established and could compete despite coming from outside without initial access to traditional knowledge and networks. The British-owned banks didn´t. Most of them scaled down their involvement with various degrees of burnt fingers.

Augur points to the importance of cultural factors in the inability of traditional City institutions to make an alliance with the commercial banks; the reluctance of the commercial banks to interfere with the independence of the brokers and jobbers they had recruited, tending to shy away when confronted by the confident upper middle class/public school ethos of the broking firms they had taken over, a confidence that was often misplaced as these broking firms had fatal gaps in their competence.

The firms owned by commercial banks which had taken over broking and jobbing firms and their staff are described as uneasy places, the different components from different traditions quite simply did not get on and it played a role in their demise.

I had this in mind when reading Trollope; the long-term effect of there not being a clear bourgeois revolution in Britain as there had been in France after 1789. How the landowning aristocracy endured, unwillingly obliged to open its ranks to those distinguished by achievement and money rather than blood and breeding. But none the less still having a huge effect on the cultural values and competence of the UK establishment, which continues to this day, the aristocracy as the Achilles heel of the British bourgeoisie, its negative effects masked for long by the power of the British Empire but much less so now.

Back from these sublime heights to me, I have been pleased that I could read two of the three Trollope novels on my Kindle. I find it works very well for reading novels, which is useful as beds are poorly designed as far as having a good surface to make notes and storage of works of reference (I’m working on this problem…..).

There were some new words in Trollope.  The usual collection of words for horse-drawn conveyances. I have got as far as knowing that a barouche is a considerably larger and heavier construction than a fly. And legal words relating to land ownership; I now know that “jointure” is (was perhaps?) an estate settled on a wife for the period that she survives a husband. But my favourite new word, which I regrettably failed to note the source of, is “sesquipedalian”.  This is a word with a pedigree originating from the Latin “sesquipedalis” meaning a foot and a half, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

It now means polysyllabic, long (characterised by long words), long-winded  For me, it was love at first sight, almost as much a coup de foudre as serendipitous and I eager await the first opportunity to use it (not altogether easy in these conditions of isolation as muttering “this is a bit sesquipedalian” when talking to oneself feels a bit cumbersome).

I am making a catalogue for my library, putting it in better order and weeding out duplicates for sending to my country house or to another good home. Shelf marks would be a step too far but when I’ve finished my catalogue, I shall number my shelves and perhaps attempt to master how to make a database so that I can see immediately from any location what I have here on particular topics.

I’d like to go through the collections of Carolina Rediviva and the other libraries in Uppsala to make a note of what they have on some specific subjects dear to my heart but that’s a later project (hopefully).

I am keeping my head well down until covid’s second wave has abated, avoiding contact with other people as much as I can. The other day, shunning the bus, I walked into the city to take my influenza jab. I’ve instructed Santa to use my company box address and not my home address for any parcels, as the company post office is a peaceful place compared with the seething mass of humanity clustered around the post office counter at my local shop. I keep thinking of the mediaeval knight in Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, playing chess with the grim reaper……

And I’m preparing for Christmas at a record early date so that a motorbike from Amazon has already driven up the track to my relatives’ house in India long before Advent.

I’m looking forward to the New Year, to closing accounts on 2020, which has been a difficult hand to play. I always enjoy the feeling of being at the beginning of something rather than the end and my spirits rise after the festive season. But if Covid abates in the New Year as we all hope, the usual pleasure of the approaching spring will probably feel overpowering. I would like to be in Dorset then to travel through the round hills west of Dorchester, seeing the ancient landscape open up around me as I travel west on the A35. Then perhaps to walk up to the top of Golden Cap, the highest cliff on the South Coast and sit there early in the morning to feel that life has returned (not on a Sunday as the buses don’t run then….).

It took me a few years to realise that I could change the spacing of my bookshelf. But once I learnt to do it, nothing could stop me; not even a shelf fastened with different and hard-to-remove screws.  A few days later, there was an ominous rumble and three shelves with my India collection collapsed, spilling books all over the floor and taking half the German section with them.

A younger lateral thinking David Kendall might have thought about why the shelf screws were different, version 75 does not have that functionality…

Rather a pity as I’d spent some time arranging my books after dusting and cataloguing. All my favourite books on Bengal were in easy reach, books about Ramahun Roy, Vidyasagar and the Bengali renaissance, my collection of Tagore and Vivekananda, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novels, and my History of Bengali literature from 1911 together with Hobson Jobson. And the grim books were tucked away on a lower shelf beneath my sight line. Those that I thought it necessary to read but don’t want to focus on every day – on the unthinkingly racist British colonial communities in the nineteenth century, the horrors of Delhi after the insurrection, the massacres in Amritsar and after partition, and the Bengali famine. But now all was in a jumble and I felt like a Berlin trummerfrau in 1945 as I picked my way through the rubble (a very well fed trummerfrau admittedly).

I was rather proud of myself for not spending half the night trying unsuccessfully to put things to rights. I retreated to bed and read Trollope for a couple of hours after clearing up the worst chaos. And in the morning, I thought about why it had collapsed, which was unusual for an olympic level dyspractic like me. I replaced the screws I’d carelessly removed, thought about the distribution of weight and how to counteract the weakness of the structure which was less taut after being dismantled a couple of times when moving and exactly how far the support screws should be screwed into the side panel. And much to my relief managed to reconstruct the shelves and get them to stay put, glad not to have try to get hold of a carpenter in these infectious times and receive a four digit repair bill.

The arrangement of the books is admittedly not as satisfactory as it was; For technical reasons (concentrating the weight in the middle and not at the ends of the shelves), Vivekananda has to share a shelf with books about British Empire, which is not ideal. I have put William Darymple between them, which is the best I can do for the time being. I’ll improve this (slowly and gingerly) but the trauma of the collapse has to fade first…..

Tuesday, 10 November

At the third attempt, I managed to download a version of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, the second novel in the six-volume Chronicles of Barsetshire. This was labelled as the classic text, the first two downloads being badly mangled rewrites. I’ve always been rather sniffy about Trollope, put off by him being a favourite of various establishment figures. But I didn’t dislike The Warden, the first volume of the Chronicles. It was very much a Victorian novel with values that I don’t share but not unpleasant. As part of my efforts to defend and develop my Englishness despite being an ex-pat, I read English authors that I’ve passed by on my wandering through life from English literature A level student to Swenglish pensioner. Hence Trollope.

Writing about the fictive cathedral city of Barchester, he takes up the mid-nineteenth century religious struggle between the evangelists and the high church Anglicans. This might be useful for my work on Dorset churches as the nineteenth Gothic revival is one of the areas I’ve identified that is less well covered. This conflict should reasonably have played a part in discussions on church refurbishment.

I’m longing to move on from churches to other aspects of Dorset, perhaps the architecture of large country houses, although I’m rather tempted by the geology of the county. But I find it difficult to let churches go until I’ve penetrated the subject sufficiently. My driving interest is not religious but an effort to learn not to switch my mind off when a phenomenon becomes familiar; churches have dense and rich architectural and historical associations and are rewarding to defamilarise.

But as I’m very much a materialist, it can at times feel distinctly overgoded. Looking at my bookshelves today, I felt that I had to expand the secular sphere and moved the religious section to the kitchen (visitors innocently opening a kitchen cupboard door may be puzzled to find texts on Kaballah but I’ll deal with that problem later).

My bookshelf is occupying a lot of my time as I’ve started to make a catalogue of my library to more easily be able to find what I have and avoid buying duplicate copies. But I have to discipline myself to doing a shelf a day and not more. I did three yesterday, my collection of books on London and it took up a substantial chunk of the day. So my do-it-yourself mini biblio-Domesday book has to be reined in.

I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made with Bengali. I can now recognise quite a few letters and am no longer phased about the Bengali habit of moving vowels before the consonant while being pronounced after. But the compound letters still lie ahead so I’m not over the hill yet (not over the mountain, I suspect). But it’s enjoyable to try.

And I’m satisfied with my project to learn more about the City of London where I understand the City’s conduct during the Brexit referendum and its aftermath much better. At least I was satisfied until today when I tackled John Grahl’s article on Dollarizing Europe in a recent New Left Review, which rapidly brought home to me how little I understand about some aspects of finance capitalism.

But I don’t get so downhearted as I once would have done about feeling lost in the mist. I’ve done it so often and eventually found my way out and try to remember that feeling confused means that you’re getting close to your threshold, beyond which lies the possibility of development.

Friday, 6 November

I’m reading or rather dipping into “The English Year. A month-by-month guide to the Nation’s Customs” by Steve Roud as my bedtime “relaxation” book; this in an attempt to structure the end of the day to avoid my sitting in front of my computer dousing myself in insomnia-provoking blue light until I discover to my surprise that it’s 2.30 am, when it was 11.00 pm just half an hour before. Having a clear marker of when to relax works reasonably well for me (scatterbrained people need orderly habits). My bedtime book has also become my early morning book when I read a chapter or two before resuming my Wagnerian struggle with existence.

But then I discover mid-dip that Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday used also to be known in English as Shere Thursday (Skärtorsdag, in Swedish). I find these connections between Swedish and dialect or archaic English delightful. This got me out of bed galloping past the cornflake packet towards my dictionaries. “Maundy” is said to derive from Latin mandatum, command, the command here being the instruction by Jesus to his disciples that they should love their neighbours, tangibly expressed by foot washing (I suspect that any attempt on my part to grab hold of my neighbour’s feet in a burst of bonhomie would not end well but we’ll leave that aside for the time being). Thinking this to be another example of the familiar tussle in English between words of Germanic, French and Scandinavian origin, I expected to find cognates of Maundy in the  Latin-based languages but on cursory inspection this is not the case as they use variants of Holy Thursday and I didn’t find any other examples of the use of Maundy, which perhaps came from Latin. Nor did I find any evidence for variants of “skär” in German although they may well exist; they are common in the Scandinavian languages.

“Skär” is usually given as originating from a word meaning “clean” (perhaps “scour” in English), not only with reference to the cleaning of feet but a general cleaning before Easter, both in the sense of physical cleaning and purification. It’s interesting why the Scandinavian languages use this word. Nowadays, “scour” is associated with the cleaning of objects rather than people, making me wonder whether pre-Christian habits of cleaning holy places before celebrations are lurking in the background (though maybe the word popping up in English negates this unless prevalent in Danish-speaking Eastern England

It’s important to keep careful note of sources when investigating words like this as yesterday’s inspired guess can easily become tomorrow’s dictionary entry (there’s nothing wrong with inspired guesses and they may be the best we can do but they need to be clearly labelled as guesses and not glide by frequent reference into becoming established truths).

And suddenly after flipping backwards and forwards, and thinking that I really must try to get hold of more German dialect dictionaries and a Frisian dictionary, I catch sight of my watch and see that it is 11.30 and I am still nightclad when it was 6.30 about half an hour before.

I enjoy these exercises with words and it’s a useful habit for a wordsmith, equivalent to the runner’s physical limbering or practice for pianists. But this is not bringing order to the scatterbrained. So I am going to keep a notebook by my bed to record words that take my fancy,. And have a dedicated hour later in the day when I go through the day’s harvest. Being a great believer in the organisational power of notebooks, I have a whole box of them and, if Covid goes on for a few years, I will probably get round to organising these (or possibly not….).

But I need to avoid morning footling. I should always take a walk at  the beginning of the day when there is light and colour and I can photograph with pleasure. At this time of year, the day becomes more and more northern as it wears on, the low sun casting long shadows and Munchian gloom dampening the joy of exercise. Yesterday, I went back to the old pilgrims’s route and walked in the other direction away from the city towards the burial places, the mounds, of the old Swedish kings. The pilgrims route has its origins in the story of King. later St Erik, beheaded by the Danes in the twelfth century, supposedly near Riddartorget conveniently (suspiciously) close to the “new” cathedral in the modern city. According to the story, his head rolled away and where it stopped, a spring gushed up, where there is now a pump. Erik had been active in hardhanded missions to christianise the Finns, and a cult developed around him. He is referred to as St Erik, although the reference books express doubt as to whether he was canonised (a suspected fake saint in other words). His relics were moved from the old cathedral to the current one in 1273. As part of the mediaeval cult, there was an annual pilgrimage on St Erik’s Day carrying his relics from the “new cathedral” back to Old Uppsala. The pilgrimage has been revived and a pleasant path made. It is now less ghoulish with meditation-friendly resting places with coloured stones and signs about rare beetles. There is doubt in the sources about the location of Erik’s death, which is very early as far as the modern city is concerned. I want to start making proper notes about the history of events, actual, alleged and mythological in the history of Uppsala. It’s great to live in a place with so many rich associations but it does pose challenges for the severely scatterbrained.

This morning there will not be a walk as I’m waiting for someone to install a new cupboard above my fridge. I´m not sure why I need this as the existing cupboard looks adequately cupboard-like but the fridge and freezer have had identity problems, swapping roles, leading inconveniently to brick-like solid milk and soggy meatballs. White goods expertise, after digital fiddling, thought a change of top cupboard would discourage unwelcome cross-functionality and booked a time to come between 07.30 and 12, thus getting me out of bed and banishing all thoughts of Shere Tuesday until I had camouflaged my kitchen to make it look inhabited by an orderly person.

So here we are again. After a few cautious steps towards normality, visiting the library to pick up or leave books, keeping an eye out for empty pharmacies, a few nervous bus journeys at odd times, visiting my tailor to have superfluous collars removed, and even a journey abroad to Gdansk and Berlin and to Marstrand, it’s back to isolation. Back to a default mode asking “Is this contact absolutely necessary?”, the answer almost always being no, keep your head down, wait, postpone.

Hopefully it won’t have to be quite as long as in the spring but I have to reckon on not being able to travel to England or anywhere else during what’s left of 2020.

Fortunately, I have plenty to do and am running through projects which can be advantageously done here. I’ve started to catalogue my library. I’m not going the whole way with shelf marks but taking a section a day to make a digital list of my books that I can access when I’m on the move, both to avoid duplicate purchases and to more easily see the gaps that I want to fill. So far I’m almost through my collection of books on West England (perhaps the best collection going east until you hit California), Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset. Slow progress with lengthy breaks to examine half-forgotten treasures. And I have my ongoing projects too – Bengali, the City of London and finance capitalism, Dorset churches, and my 90+ pictures of St Jerome, patron saint of translators, to which I want to add descriptions. It’s all rather luscious and I’d like them to have them on display but finding space for an art exhibition in a 45 square metre flat is going to require some thought.

It would feel good when the pestilence is over to know that I’d used the time usefully and managed to set the agenda for my life and not allowed it to be mangled by Covid.

I’ve been troubled by the approaching winter, concerned that it won’t be easy to cycle if it’s very cold, snowy and icy. Hopefully, the mild weather will continue for a few weeks yet but I’m not counting on that. As an experiment yesterday, I walked from home to the city centre and back, just over nine kilometres according to my i-phone pedometer (whatever it’s called). I crossed the main railway line to the north, following the track bed of a long dismantled industrial branch line until I came to the pilgrim trail from Gamla Uppsala to the “new” cathedral. I haven’t explored this way to the city before but it was all very satisfactory, car-free and crossing fields with just a short urban stretch before I got to Fyrisån and could take the riverside path almost all the way to my post box. Heartening that it was clearly doable. And next time, I shall smear my glasses with soap and wash it off (not too carefully so as to leave a slight film), which, from my early experiments does seem to prevent them steaming up when I’m wearing my mask. A high level of exercise is important for my physical and mental well-being. But it has to be exercise where I can think at the same time. Walking is ideal but things like exercise bikes bore me (I borrowed one for a while but spent most of the time trying to balance my laptop on the handlebar and forgetting to cycle). Not to mention gyms which I am seriously allergic to.

Despite the worsening infection situation in Uppsala, the locals haven’t taken to masks to any great extent. I wear mine everywhere. I get a few odd looks but no rude comments yet (which is rather a pity as I’m looking forward to being able to say “Please tell St Peter, I’ll not be coming for a while yet” and watching the oaf or oafess who is trying to be funny crumble to dust in front of my eyes (not literally…).

I haven’t mentioned T-rump. Like a lot of people, I was hoping he would follow in the steps of T-rex, becoming politically extinct rather than being hit by a meteor. A large number of ordinary Americans are still voting for him, however, and it’s not yet clear how it will end. Not that the Democrats are exactly God’s gift to the poor and dispossessed and there might be some arguments for Trump being able to stay long enough to disabuse those who think he will help them. But the thought of having to read about and see pictures of Trump for another four years is not pleasant.