D Kendall

Sunday, 15 May

As I’ve decided to study the local river more closely, I go and look at it where it curves around Old Uppsala close to my flat. The open countryside is green and soothing despite the uncertain weather and I see my first cowslips of the year. The place where the road reaches the river is marked as a bathing place but it’s bleak and uninviting. There’s no path here but it’s easy to follow the course of the river downstream. I’m curious to look at a dead straight road which crosses the river a mile or so ahead. It’s a straight line on the map for mile after mile and looks like a roman road but, of course, can’t be in these northern parts. There was, however, an indirect Roman connection as it was apparently ordered to be built by Queen Christina (though I don’t think she was planning to flee to Rome this way). The road was once the main road to the north before the motorway was built and I spend a while resting on the bridge imagining the Austins and Morrises of yesteryear chugging northwards (in the good old days before the Brits became zombie industrialists…).

After completing 11,500 steps, my body feels content and harmonious but my planned effortless switch to the life of the mind is sluggish and weakly perceptible. I work for a while translating a certificate for a private customer, sleep for a while, make food and then talk to my nephew in Somerset about some family matters, after a struggle with my mobile phone, which has become a serial autonomous muting device. But that was about it….not good enough.

I console myself that I have at least got to grips with T.M. Charles-Edwards “Wales and Britons 350-1064” which I’d almost given up on after I got bogged down in the language chapter.

I need to do some more work on this chapter but I got through it after struggling with my fricatives and plosives and the phonetic script. The following chapters on the shifting identities of the British Celtic population are fascinating. It took the Anglo-Saxons a couple of centuries to complete their conquest of what was to become England. They occupied early on the part of the then Britain which had been most Romanised language-wise and culturally. But there remained for a couple of centuries an uninterrupted Celtic Britain from Strathclyde down to Cornwall before the Anglo-Saxon victories led to them breaking through to the Bristol Channel. During these centuries, the Britons remained Christian while the Anglo-Saxons were initially pagan, Charles-Edwards discusses the extent to which the Celtic Britain retained their Roman identity after the Roman army left and discusses the conclusions that can be drawn from the written sources and inscriptions from analysing, for example, the gradual weakening and eventual disappearance of the Roman system of declensions.

Unlike the situation in France where the Gauls were more thoroughly latinised than the Celtic-speakers in Britain and fused with the Frankish invaders to speak a common post-Latin language, British Latin eventually became extinct, and the incoming Anglo-Saxons kept their Germanic language with Scandinavian influences, although with a heavy impact from French after the Norman conquest before it developed into English.

English national identity bears some imprint of its muddled origins. The Norman conquest of 1066 is a watershed year, later kings and queens are numbered from that time so that despite there being at least one Edward before the Conquest, Edward I is the first post-conquest Edward (and the royal family hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for names like Ethelred). But the incoming Normans were a thin layer of aristocrats and retainers and while they governed the country whose aristocracy was largely French-speaking for three centuries, the Anglo-Saxons continued to form the bulk of what was to become the English people.

And as English identity became stronger towards mid-millennium, the non-French part of our identity was pressed into use and some of the stories from the Anglo-Saxon period, from, for example, the time of King Alfred eventually became a more important part of England’s perceived history. There are also stories from Roman times and the Celts who opposed the Romans, for example, the victory of Vespasian in West England and Boudicca’s rebellion and the burning of Londinium. The post-Roman Celtic period is shrouded despite having been a society sophisticated enough to have institutions that could engage in complicated discussions on Christian themes. Before the Romans came, some Celtic tribes minted their own money and pottery was made in Britain, a skill that was later lost when Britain became integrated into the trading networks of the Roman Empire (as a student of India, this sounds familiar, but at least the Romans didn’t go rabbiting on about the wonderful system of roads they left for us). An interesting example of the combination of development and undevelopment that follows from being incorporated into the economic networks and interests of an empire.

Otherwise, I find a master’s thesis on the Battle of Fyrisvallarna, a critical survey of the state of research and sources, which sounds like the kind of guide I need to help me through the tangled net of ideology and history about a major battle close to what is now the Fyris river. And thought about place names along the river and which names are based on names of Nordic gods and goddesses reflecting their probable status as cult places. I need to know more about Nordic mythology and the Nordic sagas. I will sleep with my An Introduction to Old Norse under my pillow tonight and if that doesn’t help try Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus tomorrow night to see if I can negotiate another 24 years so that I have time to complete my plans.

Friday, 15 May

This morning I woke up before 5.00 which is not uncommon. But it’s very often the case that I don’t get started on the day’s work before 10.00 or even 11.00. I’m rather curious how I manage to take five or six hours to get going. I reckon that I have about 20 morning routines. I won’t list them but it’s nothing remarkable – more or less the things I’ve always done. I’m not consciously aware of having slowed down but I must have done so and somehow transformed my matinal rituals into a northern version of the Japanese tea ceremony.

The explanation was easier today. I felt I needed to move on from Linnaeus as many of the logical next steps involve visits to currently closed indoor environments. And as the weather is improving, my thoughts have turned to the river Fyris, previously an important communication route with many ancient sites along its banks.

To begin with its name. It has ancient roots but not as a river name. I read in Wikipedia (source Nordisk Familjebok 1908) that Olof Rudbeck (not sure which one…) was responsible for the change of name from Salaån (River Sala) in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

The change of name was intended to associate the river more closely to the Battle of the Fyrisvellir in 980 between Eric the Victorious and his nephew Styrbjörn the strong which was thought to have taken place at Fyrisvellir, a marshy plain south of Gamla Uppsala “where travellers had to leave their ships to walk to the Temple of Uppsala at Gamla Uppsala. According to the sagas, Styrbjörn had sacrificed to Thor while Eric had enlisted the aid of Oden who sent a shower of arrows to kill Styrbjörn’s troops, the Joms Vikings. The battle being considered a Swedish victory only needed Olof Rudbeck to make it part of the glorious history of great power Sweden.

Early on in my Swedish life, I read through a multi-volume history of Sweden. I’ve thought for some time that I should do it again as the original reading, valuable as it was then, has faded in my memory and it would in any case, after almost 50 years of exposure to Sweden, be a different David Kendall who read it today. And I’d also like to read the sagas which describe the battle and make a journey of my own upriver from Flottsund where the Fyris pours into Lake Mälaren up towards the source at Dannemora or at least as far as my shoes will take me before they fall apart (the County of Uppsala is large – much bigger than Dorset – more like Somerset and Dorset combined).

I thought about that and about the expression “kith and kin” which I came across recently and wondered about the etymology of “kith”. From the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, I learn that there were originally three meanings of kith, knowledge or information, one’s native land or region, one’s friends and neighbours (presumably in the sense of the “known people”. Only the third meaning has survived in modern English and then only enshrined in the expression “kith and kin” with its somewhat dubious connotations. But “kith” itself is a fine old word which has reached us through Anglo-Saxon and Old German. It is also connected with the word “uncouth” which meant unknown or uncertain before being filled with associations of fellow train passengers eating hamburger with their mouths open and asking if they might borrow your comb.

I wonder whether there is a dictionary or list of such words that have only survived in special expressions like “kith”. I shall write “kith” on a piece of paper and put it in a file and start collecting them.

And after Fyrisvillir and Kith, I got started on the day’s work and wondered why so much time had elapsed since I woke.

Wednesday, 13 May

With reference to my previous blog posting

According to “The South Park Street Cemetery Calcutta” (sixth edition, 2016),

“On the 19^th October 1774, Lady Anne arrived in Calcutta where her husband Hon. George Monson had now been named as one of the Supreme Council of Bengal. Warren Hastings was Governor-General and had previously known Lady Anne. She gave good dinner parties and was “a very superior whist player.”

In her two short years in India, she made a great impression on those around her, and when she died in 1776, Macrabie wrote remorsefully in his diary “Lady Anne is no more…the loss of such a woman is generally felt by the whole Settlement but we who had the honour of her intimacy are deprived of a comfort which we shall long regret.”

The life expectancy of Europeans in Calcutta at that time was “two monsoons” – “The Monsons were the first to go.” Lady Anne was buried in South Park Street Cemetery where seven months later her husband joined her.

And so ended a remarkable life, one that deserves to be remembered along with her contribution to science. As James Lee’s partner John Kennedy wrote “her enthusiasm knew no bounds and (her) liberal and fostering hand contributed more perhaps than any of her contemporaries, by her encouragement and example to the….study of botany.” Sadly none of her botanical drawings survived.

It was then her first trip to Calcutta and she made her impression on Calcutta “society” in the short period between her arrival and her decease. She must have been among the early burials as the cemetery opened in 1767, nine years previously. I was disappointed to read that none of her drawings survived as I have already been imagining a William Darymple-type excursion to the National Library in Calcuttta to look at drawings by her. Hopefully they have other material about her.

Monday, 11 May

The eastern end of the von Bahrian hedge was not so exciting. After a hundred metres, a day care centre blocked the route and the few trees continuing behind it looked uncared for. But what I really wanted to see was a monument to female botanists who had been close to Linnaeus including his daughter, Elisabeth Christina, also a botanist, who lived nearby. I don’t find the monument but I do find a path named after her which passes through old cultivated ground near where her house used to be. It’s a curious old area, at the same time wild and not wild close to Gränbystaden, Uppsala’s out-of-town shopping mall (there is a Sara Stinas torg (square) at the mall but I don’t think she’d enjoy sipping a latte there).

I like the old gnarled trees and hummocky enclosures and the instructions not to drop fish in the pond as they will eat the salamander eggs. There are information placards about Elisabeth Christina, sadly not in prime condition after the winter, but also about other female botanists, Eva Ekeblad de la Gardie (1724-86) who was interested in potato cultivation and was the first female member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, elected in 1748. Elisabeth Christina was also in contact with the Academy, and wrote an article about the small flashes which Indian cress appears to produce (much later found to be an optical effect).

And then I see a grubby picture of Lady Anne Monson (1727-76), according to Wikipedia a great grandchild of the inveterate seed scatterer [my epithet] Charles II. The placards put up by the municipality inform us that Lady Anne Monson translated Linnaeus’s sexual system into English. Wikipedia’s take is more cautious – “It was claimed by her contemporary J.E. Smith that it was Lady Anne who assisted James Lee in translating Linnaeus’s Philosophica Botanica”. Then the plot thickens as Wikipedia mentions that “Later Lady Anne is mentioned by James Lee in her letters to Linnaeus” so we have a female James to factor in  while trying to steer the frail ship of science between the drive to find the lady on the one hand and the unthinking dismissal or belittling (or at times deliberate disguise) of women’s contributions on the other. Some time I must check these sources, during the next epidemic perhaps.

Lady Monson, whatever her translation skills, was undoubtedly a serious botanist, she later married a Colonel George Monson who was in the Indian army. She travelled out to Kolkata in 1774 via the Cape where she met another collaborator of Linnaeus, Carl Peter Thunberg and pursued her botanical interests there. There is a South African flowering shrub named after her Monsonia, one variant of which is called Monsonia Patersonii so perhaps this was a joint discovery. This may not have been her first journey to Bengal as her marriage was in 1757 (I shall try to check this). According to Wikipedia, she became a prominent member of Kolkata society but died already in 1776 so that she must have a had a rapid career in Calcutta society if it was her first trip (I read in Echoes from Old Calcutta that there was a gathering at Lady Monsons on 1 September 1775, three whist tables and two chess and that Lady Monson was a fine whist player). She died in 1776, her husband not long after. She is buried in Park St cemetery and Calcutta revisited tells us that Warren Hastings was among the pall bearers. The grave was renovated in 2005 and according to the write-up in a Kolkata paper a chorus of koels sang through the re-dedication ceremony (which I believe is a cuckoo-like bird). I must visit this grave next time I’m in town. I hunted for my book with locations of graves in Park St cemetery but I think it must be in our joint Indian library in Kolkata.

A satisfactory walk and I got home without getting soaked (spring and winter tussled today, blue sky to lift up the spirits then cool bleak cloud with spots of hail and rain).

Sunday, 10 May

Books as far as we know don’t suffer from giddiness. But if they did, the book I’m reading or trying to read “Wales and the Britons 350-1064” by T.M. Charles Edwards would be at risk.  I’ve put it back on the shelf a number of times, taken it down again and then put it back again, full of admiration for the book but defeated by the dense text on the effect on Brythonic, the British Celtic language, of Latin and French, and the later emergence of Welsh, Cornish and the Celtic languages or dialects of Cumbria and Strathclyde. Charles-Edwards deals at length with the impact of Latin on the stress patterns of Brythonic and how, among other sound changes, lenition, the feature of the Celtic languages where the initial consonant of a word changes in certain situations (softens from, for example, a plosive to a fricative sound). But he doesn’t just do this. He makes this analysis in the light of a very broad sweep of the development of the post-Latin languages in the various European countries so that Pietro in Italian and Pedro in Spanish also attract his attention. And he aims further to use these insights to understand the large quantity of inscriptions in early Welsh that throw light on Britain in this period (Dark Age is something of a misnomer as it’s not completely black but a twilight and then perhaps a kind of dawn with deep shadows and uncertain figures flitting around in a way that is hard to interpret and ambiguous but none the less fascinating).

The Celtic languages, language development in Britain and the transition from Latin are all subjects that greatly appeal to me. I want to learn more and value this book. But unfortunately, while my brain is a reasonably congenial partner to work with as far as general knowledge of European languages is concerned, it is a basket case when it comes to pronunciation. Despite having studied French for 63 years, I still mishandle quite basic things. Not to mention Swedish which I’ve mouth mauled for 47 years; I am still restrictive about making concessions to local ideas about how things should be pronounced and stressed.

When I read a book like Charles-Edwards and he gets deep into thin Ts, fricatives and voiceless single stops, I am easily overwhelmed. After a while, the book goes back on the shelf and I turn to one of my other projects and start to read “Investment Management in the UK 2018-2019” or look at my Dorset churches or my St Jerome project. But it doesn’t feel good. Charles-Edwards book is a mountain blocking my way and every time I think about the early history of the British language, there will be the mountain oppressively towering over me .

I’m affected too by the British Library’s attempts to jolly along its readers. I opened a recent message and there was an invite to a virtual party to celebrate the “birthday” (anniversary of date of birth in normal mortal speak) of “Mary Wollstonecraft” with a jolly jingle. She’s a person I admire but I’m put off by the popularising birthday song and how I imagine the state of mind of its propagators. I don’t investigate it properly and am probably being unfair or old or both (emotionally I would find it satisfying if they were prosecuted for cultural vandalism…). I long for the more serious approach to academic matters of my younger days when the mountain was there to be arduously climbed and not broken down into small gaily-coloured clamber-friendly rocks.

And bearing this in mind, I cannot give up on my Celtic opus. When things get difficult that’s when they become interesting, it’s a signal that you are approaching the borders of what you know and should be an encouragement to redoubled effort as beyond is the potential for change and development.

I have to tackle the book but preferably without it completely dominating my life for the next five years.  

Before resuming reading it, I shall learn the phonetic alphabet and the terminology for where sounds are made in the mouth which I only have an incomplete command of so that I don’t get distracted by terminology.

I’m also going to check through his sources and where they might be found. Uppsala is an excellent place to be for Celtic Studies as it’s a major academic centre in Sweden and the libraries are well equipped in this field.

Perhaps eventually either on the net or through the university I’ll find someone who can discuss some aspects of the book with me, whom I can discuss with when I get stuck.

This process has anyway helped me in one respect. I am extremely promiscuous (or perhaps butterfly romantic would be a more pleasant word) when it comes to languages; I fall in love at the drop of a morpheme. Scots Gaelic, Provencal, Manx, Cornish, the innumerable dialects in the French-Italian border areas and Breton have all attracted my attention without it leading to any serious relationship. My progress with the Celtic languages has been impeded by my inability to decide which one to focus on. But I’ve now decided that it has to be a Celtic language in the P-group (Welsh, Breton, Cornish) to start with and not the Q-group (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Manx) as the P-group is closer to/derives from Brythonic. Cornish is too fragmentary and Breton complicated by the relationship to French and less easily available to me, so I think it has to be Welsh (despite the romance of Scots Gaelic and Irish (I have Irish ancestors) pulling at the strings of my heart (or the tangled cords of my brain…).

This should keep me busy at least until Day 500 of the Corona crisis.

Thursday, 7 May

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

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

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

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

inkulfr auk yntr litu raisa st__

iftiR inkialt brudur sin

uk sun kunulfs

þaiR

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

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

Ingulf and Önd are both men’s names.

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

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

Pictures on my facebook page.

Tuesday, 5 May

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, 1 May

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, 29 April

My desire for exercise was rapidly quashed yesterday by cold and rain. I retreated to my burrow and went back to sleep, doing my convincing imitation of an elderly person, which I’m getting good at.

I felt much better when I woke up an hour later and carried on work on Anglia’s finances.

It’s not easy as although the metrics are available through the income statement for the first quarter, these are aggregate amounts and not altogether helpful when deciding where to cut expenses.

To my surprise, the figures were better than for the same period in 2019. No need to do anything urgently but given the low volume of incoming translation work, I have to be careful and think about which darlings I most want to keep and which are marginal darlings. And above all, to get out of the habit of solving problems quickly by throwing money at them, as my time is no longer worth as much.

Tiring of figures, I worked on a glossary of bankruptcy terms, looking at how various terms have been translated in the Swedish Bankruptcy Act and the Company Reorganisation Act. My usual pleasure when working with legal texts was enhanced by the quality of the translation of the Company Reorganisation Act, which I found outstanding.  Working with the legal aspects of bankruptcy is not so cheerful in itself but as a legal translator, I’m going to need to know my way around this area.

After my work day, I carried on looking at what there is to see in the county of Uppsala.

It seems likely that foreign travel may be restricted for a good while and this will be a good time to get to know the local area. I’ve been familiar with central Uppsala for a long time but dismissed the passage from Stockholm to Uppsala as rather boring and had a very hazy grasp of Roslagen and across the border in the county of Uppsala. But now I realise that much of this area is fairly densely populated (by Swedish standards) agricultural countryside with villages and cultural artefacts of a type that appeals to me.

As an exile, I like it when some aspect of my host country’s culture deepens and I feel  enriched by putting down roots. Living abroad, it’s so easy to get stuck at a superficial level when you become familiar with your surroundings, a superficiality that you don’t really think about any more because you’re so used to it. And Sweden, because of its small population, requires a bit of work when exploring the language or the country. You are not spoon fed to the same extent as you are in England. There are fewer works of reference and these are often less easily available so that you often need a more academic approach to understand the many things of interest around you.

I didn’t get very far yesterday in my studies– reading about the village of Storvreta just a few kilometres up the road. Opening Wikipedia’s tab on notable people connected with the village, I’m fascinated by the story of Stefan Michnik, one-time judge in Poland in the early 1950s, who came to Sweden in 1956. He lived in Storvreta and, according to Wiki, worked as a librarian. The Polish authorities have wanted the Swedes to send him back to Poland to stand trial for his activities in the 1950s. To their chagrin, the Swedes have not granted this request as Michnik is now a Swedish citizen and the statute of limitations barred prosecution on the original accusations made (this was followed by a discussion on whether he can be deported for crimes against humanity where there is no statute bar – I’m not sure of the Swedish courts take on that but I believe they still refused to deport him not so long ago). He no longer lives in Storvreta.

I must read more, about what he actually did, the Swedish courts’ legal arguments and about the agenda of the Polish authorities and the veracity of Wiki’s sources. I knew nothing about this before despite it having been covered by the Swedish press – I must try and follow events in Sweden more carefully when I’m abroad, whenever that will be next time.