D Kendall

Friday, 20 March

I start the day by translating a short divorce judgment. It’s very quiet just now but I have some proof reading and another little job about an academic appointment to keep me busy for a couple of days. It’s unusually quiet for the spring, which is usually a peak work period when I have to vigorously fend off other people’s endeavours to export their chaos.

I decide to cycle to my Shurgard self-storage facility to see how long it takes and to review how far I am away from being away to close it down.

It’s quite pleasant cycling as Uppsala has well-developed cycle paths. And changing my habits leads to me finding a letter box near my flat which I didn’t know existed before, which is a bonus in these times when thronging around the box at the post facility in the local supermarket is a no no.

It’s surprisingly rural following the cycle path to Gränby Centrum, but I then get on Vaksalagatan leading to the city centre, which is the wrong direction. At the same time realising that it’s a bit far for me, inexperienced cyclist as I am (and I have to get back too). So I swing around in a circle back to Löten, my area.

I decide that I am not going to try to wind up the self-storage facility until normality is restored. It’s tantalisingly close but it’s going to take a disproportionately great deal of effort under current conditions and probably involve risk situations. It feels good to have decided that and, if I wasn’t avoiding pawing my face, I would give my frontal lobes (where the executive stuff takes place) a little pat.

Back at the flat, I take an hour’s siesta and then dust my daily allotment of three bookshelves. I am working through the Indian section now and see that I now have over 120 books on India here (as well as a few jointly owned volumes in Kolkata). Vivid images from Bengal pass through my mind. It’s not long ago and it feels both close at hand and far away because of everything that has happened since. It’s a good feeling that Bengal is starting to feel very familiar. I haven’t restarted my Bangla studies yet but I will do tomorrow (come hell or high water, “liksom”).

I work my way through my papers – the UK Guardian, the Financial Times, DN and the local Uppsala paper, UNT. It seems that the Germans might also practice a lockdown which neither the Swedes nor the UK is doing.

I think about the different national reactions to the Corona crisis and national “characters”. The Swedish politicians say that a lockdown is not necessary here as people are carrying out social distancing as they should anyway and a formal lockdown would be counterproductive. I wonder whether this is because the Swedes, even at fairly modest levels of society, feel like citizens and not subjects (unlike the British where the distance between the individual and the state is greater). However, the French (who are very much citizens but with a much more confrontational attitude to the state) have gone for a rather advanced lockdown so there are other historical reasons at work too in moulding reactions.

It will be interesting too to see what effect all of this will have on the “zeitgeist”. Whether, among all the disruption, worry and sadness, there will emerge something like the “blitz spirit” in the UK in the war where people who lived through those awful times can still say that the war years, despite everything, were the best of their lives – a feeling of being members of a community with a common purpose, fighting against a dire threat together, which might be a good feeling, compared with the fragmentation, purposelessness, vague and sometimes not so vague anonymous threats and lack of social ambition of life under globalized capitalism, which has a rather frenzied feel to it. It seems almost as if Nature has slapped our faces to restore our sanity.

2020-03-19 Corona-diary-day-4

I spend the morning preparing February’s file for my accountant. It was a quiet month workwise but complicated by credit card payments in Bengal, some private and some for Anglia (mostly books and computer equipment). I’ve got a lot more systematic over the years with receipts but there’s still quite a bit of room for improvement and I riffle backwards and forwards in my files after elusive bits of paper. And I can’t print directly from my desktop computer but have to mail everything to a laptop first, which complicates things (this being the cause of the cable trailing across the floor that I fell over the day before yesterday).

i’m not quite sure why I want to do this just now as it could wait for a while. But somehow I want to get it done so that I don’t have to think about it any more. And after working together for 74 years with David Kendall, I know that rational conduct is pitching it a bit high; the way to go is managed irrationality. It would probably warm the cockles of the Tax Agency’s heart anyway that citizens were prepared to struggle hard to put their house in order, come what may…

By late morning, I’ve fixed the accounts (leaving my workroom looking like I’ve just had a visit from a friendly local hurricane). I organise the recyclables to take with me. Our house (which is brand new) has no recycling room. We are supposed to take all metal, glass and plastic to containers at a shop almost a kilometre away with no direct bus there. This building is also for the Over 55s. This doesn’t seem very green to me (do they think we all have cars?). The property company make up for it by having cheerful advice on the website about how we can live in a more sustainable way.

I am tempted to write a quote from the New Testament (Matthew 7:3-5) on the rubbish shute – “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” but there isn’t room and I’m not sure it would be readily understood…

It’s not a huge problem for me personally but it’s kind of irritating that something that should take 5 minutes, takes at least half an hour and the extent of waste sorting at our house is probably low.

I have to post the accounts at the post office counter at the shop so I’m kitted up with my mask. There aren’t many people around and I can glide towards the desk with people at a good distance (in fact, although the mask is not considered as offering such good protection, people avoid getting too near to someone wearing a mask, especially a slightly weird hi-tech mask like mine, which probably does enhance its protective ability). Maybe I should get myself a bell like lepers used to have in mediaeval times to clear the way even better (preferably rung by someone dressed up as the grim reaper who is walking in front of me but I suppose creepy reapy is busy just now playing a return match of chess with Max von Sydow…).

I decide to scrap my original plan of seeing how long it took to walk to my store as I’ve already dedicated half a day to commercial activity. I find a new way back from the shop to my flat, which is very people-free (and see how tracks go off from this road out into real countryside which is even more satisfying as spring is coming). I spend the rest of the day and part of the evening reading “Courrier international” which I like a lot. It’s a French publication that translates articles from newspapers worldwide, everything from Jerusalem Post, the Washington Post, Die Zeit, MIT Technology Review and a lot more. Very satisfactory to be able to catch up with what’s happening and to improve my French reading skills at the same time.

My elder daughter comes by in the early evening and drops off a couple of bags of groceries so I’m not without a support team!

Wednesday, 18 March

The third day of my self-imposed Corona isolation.

A brief moment of euphoria yesterday when I finished the real estate company’s annual report that I’d been working on with my younger son. 150 pages to be done in nine days so there’s not been a lot of time over for hobby activities. But now it’s done and I could concentrate on drawing up a plan of what I want to achieve in the next nine days.

I started on my planned activities by vacuuming more bookshelves. The flat is, to say the least, book-laden and I need to improve the quality of the air (less dust) if I’m to spend more time here. My plan is to clean three shelves a day until I’ve worked my way round and then carry on with a regular one shelf a day (a bit like the perpetual painting programme on some bridges). All went well except that I tripped over a cable causing irreparable damage to a USB connection that put the printer out of action.

Simple problems but more complicated to work out how to solve without compromising isolation.

It’s been a drag not to be able to do things I very much wanted to do like going to a grandchild’s birthday party and a planned visit to Berlin. And it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better. But at the same time, I feel almost exhilarated by having to work out how best to play a difficult hand.

Reluctantly, I decided that I needed to go to town today to collect my post (which is at least on the outskirts of the centre). I didn’t want to use the bus so I started walking. Raining a bit so I think about how ironic it would be if I got non-viral pneumonia. I’m wearing my mask that I got for Kolkata and probably look a bit spooky. There are not many people around and the buses that pass me are almost empty. It’s a bit like being in a sci-fi story. A familiar environment that looks as it usually does at first sight and then you discover that it’s not quite right.

I get to Heidenstams torg at the same time as another empty bus and decide to hop on for a couple of stops to get past the building works, getting off at the mosque where more people are waiting to board.

The bus drivers are not checking tickets but letting people on only through the back doors. I walk the rest of the way and get my heap of post without problems.

Walking back, I pass the cycle shop, see through the window that they have some suitable cycles and that it’s empty. I went in, keeping the sole attendant at a safe distance and chose a cycle, a lock and a helmet. Unfortunately, the one problem with my facial mask is that it makes my glasses steam up so that I couldn’t see properly. And I didn’t want to move my hands to my face to do anything about it. The result is that the bicycle I bought is very fine, exactly as I wanted and a rather striking Victorian puce colour. The lock which I grabbed through the mist is far too sophisticated. The kind of lock where you would need a nuclear weapon to break it. It took time to get it out of the packet (I’m out of the shop by then) and even more time to lock the cycle). The all-size helmet promised by the attendant, who did a good job of convincing me that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, proves not to be all-size or perhaps only all-size for long thin Swedish heads not the squarer West European variety like mine. But I didn’t want to go back.

I locked the bike and went to look at Kjells which was also almost empty and went in to solve my cable problem. I thought about getting someone to deliver it but then thought that there was far more chance of a gig-economy courier going to work when not 100% than a Kjell’s attendant, apart from the hassle of trying to make sure the courier could deliver it home.

These problems solved, I tackled the journey home. The saddle of my new bike was too high, I had a heavy bag of post which I had to hang on one handlebar disrupting my balance and my glasses steamed up so that I couldn’t see where I was going in any detail. I decided to push the bike for a while until I got out of the centre and to a place where there was less traffic and visibility was less of an issue. But then I found a way of removing my mask without pawing my face, got used to the bike and even overtook another cyclist (admittedly almost stopped but it’s worth perhaps a half point).

An ambulance drove past me and I wondered whether it had been called to pick me up who’d fallen off his bike ahead (after all, the times are out of joint just now).

But I got home without incident, rather satisfied with myself. After that complicated decontamination. My idea of trying to keep my hands clean and just my gloves potentially contaminated didn’t work, at least not completely – you can’t, for example, press number pads for credit card purchases with gloves on (maybe thinner inner gloves would work). This isn’t a problem when out but gets complicated when you get home and want to disrobe without potentially contaminating the flat so I engaged in a frenzy of running to the bathroom to wash my hands, then cleaning handles, wallets and phone with soapy water and running back to the bathroom to wash my hands again.

It’s pretty obvious that it’s much easier if you are strict about social distancing and don’t, for example, get involved in purchasing situations.

I’m going to have Anglia’s post forwarded to my home address and hopefully won’t have to buy anything in future.

And now for a few intellectual activities…

Dusting my bookshelves, I come across a slim rather tatty paperback “Ships that pass in the night” by Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936) published in Newnes Sixpenny Novels Illustrated. I don’t know how this book came into my life and have been on the point of disposing of it, stayed by its atmospheric quality and not quite knowing where I could find a good home for it. This time I looked more closely and see that the front cover is signed and dated, Elsa Wolff 1904. Checking who she might be I find that Roman Rolland corresponded for a number of years with an Elsa Wolff. And I’m fascinated to think that it might be the same lady. In favour of the connection is the date and that Elsa Wolff was a woman of culture (a translator even). Beatrice Harraden was a suffragette and had a long literary career in the UK, Ships that pass in the night being her most noted book (not sure of the plot I must read it – I believe there is a romance tragically ended by a deus ex machina accident but I’m not sure). Against this being the Elsa Wolff who was a friend of Romain Rolland is that fact that she was German (with a command of French evidenced in her long correspondence with Romain Rolland). I haven’t managed to find much information about her on the net so I haven’t been able to verify her signature or find out how good her English was I shall try to check other Elsa Wolffs who were around at this time to see how hard or easy it is to build up a case that could be some other Elsa Wolff. This Elsa Woolf eventually committed suicide in 1942 to avoid being deported by the Nazis. I have been to Uppsala University library, Carolina Rediviva, today to borrow “Fraulein Elsa” which is “Cahier 14” in Cahiers Romain Rolland and contains Romain Rolland’s letters to Elsa (but not as far as I can see her letters to him). It will be interesting to see how these letters survived – did Romain Rolland keep copies but destroy her letters to him? I hope at least it will tell me something about Elsa Wolff’s reading habits and knowledge of English. I know that Romain Rolland was in England at some point around this date (perhaps later) so I wonder whether it could have been a present from him to Elsa Woolf but this is pure speculation. It’s the second time in the past year that Romain Rolland has crossed my path. He also wrote a book about the Bengali disciple of Rama Krishna Vivekananda, which I was given as a present by our Bengali relatives. Whether or not it is Elsa Wolff’s, this slim volume has to be cared for and I have to find a small box to keep it in to prevent it becoming even more tatty. And if the evidence is strong that it did belong to ”Romain Rolland’s” Elsa Wolff, it will be a very special feeling to own it.

Reading on the bus, without a pen or with no internet connection, I often pass by new words without looking them up. But I don’t approve of this behaviour and struggle against it Below are the fruits of one such struggle.

Jejeune, rebarbative and nescient I’ve known for a long time without really grasping them, other than that jejeune was something negative. The definitions below are from the Concise OED with the exception of the phrases which are from the net.

Rebarbative: Unattractive and objectionable

Jejeune: Not intellectually interesting (derived from the Latin: jejeunus, which means fasting, barren, )

Nescienct: lacking knowledge, ignorant

Roturier: (French) commoner (not actually an English word as far as I know but I don’t mind knowing it, some of my favourite words are foreign).

A fortiori: Used to express a conclusion for which there is stronger evidence than for a previously accepted one.

De gustibus: Concerning (a matter of) taste

I found all these words in an article by Perry Anderson in “London Review of Books” on Anthony Powell.

A slang expression that has aroused my interest is “take a dekko”: I knew that this meant taking a look. It caught my attention as the word “daekha” in Bengali means to look at. Apparently, it’s similar in Hindi and according to COED, it came into English in the nineteenth century through the army. This sounds convincing although I had wondered whether there might also be a connection through Romany. When studying Bengali (studying is rather a grand word for what my 74 year old brain gets up to but I’m doing my best), the similarity between Romani and Bengali numbers struck me. I’ve just downloaded George Borrow’s “Romano Lavo-Lil – Word Book of the Romany, or English Gypsy [sic] Language” to my Kindle. According to this dictionary, there is a Romany word “Dic” or “Dico” which means to look  (Borrow gives the origin as the Sanskrit ” Iksh” meaning to look or see). I’ve found over 50 other close connections between Romany and Sanskrit or Hindi in the first four letters of the alphabet.

I wonder whether the minority/alternative status or non-recognition of Romany has led to it being neglected by the academic world as an etymological source (compared with Hebrew, Greek and Latin). It would be interesting to check what has been done! I shall start by trying to find out how often Romany is cited as an etymological source in COED (should keep me off the street for an hour or two…).

My days in Bristol are coming to an end and I must choose carefully. I’m tempted by a day in the country, to cross the Mendips to never really looked at Shepton Mallet, close to my teenage home ground. Or Wells or Bath or libidinal Frome. But I think this time I’ll concentrate on Bristol.

I decide to explore Broadmead, the shopping centre, just across the water by Castle Bridge from Finzel’s reach where I’m staying. The pre-war shops were further south and badly war damaged, their site now marked by Castle Park with its two ruined churches. Potentially pleasant although many hangaround folk keep utopia at bay, I suspect among them those that maintain the area’s old trading traditions.

I approach Broadmead in the spirit of medicine, to be endured rather than enjoyed, necessary and logical but not nice. And, of course, retail is everywhere but happily a lot more.

First, the wonderfully named Quaker Friars with its old Meeting House adjacent to what was a mediaeval friary, with odd bits of stonework here and there.  It’s a meeting house no more but the building is still there as is Merchant Taylors almhouse (now a function room attached to the garishly signed Galleries). And one of Wesley’s early Methodist churches, complete with museum and statue of the man himself, an oasis in mammon’s desert.

Finally, there is the pleasing Lower Arcade or just Arcade now as the Higher Arcade was irreparably bomb damaged. The post-war developers almost managed to destroy the Lower Arcade too, only being prevented by foresighted listing (to their despair and posterity’s delight).

After all this culture, I abandon myself to the spirit of the place at Marks and Sparks to replenish my wardrobe, adding more socks and yet another shirt to my Swedish clothing mountain. I think about whether to go to the library to rest for a while before exploring another area but eventually, in a burst of old man awareness, decide to return to the hotel to rest and plan the morn.

A week in Bristol before I meet my son, the longest time I have been in the city, familiar from my childhood on.

First in the mid-1950s when I surprised my parents by choosing Bristol rather than the more exotic Cardiff for our excursion. A few memories of the special train from the Sussex coast and being with my father on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which captured my imagination.

And later, after we moved west when Bristol was on the outer rim of familiar Somerset, visited on train spotting trips and on the few occasions I travelled north.

I have long memories of Bristol Temple Meads station, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s fine structure from 1840, curiously mock-Tudor but still redolent of the Great Western Railway.

The long platform close to the exit where the trains from Bath Green Park arrived. Walking down to the other end to see Castle, Hall, County and King Class steam locomotives parked in the south sidings.

And later, on the same platform feeling adventurous on my way to the North East, to interviews at Durham and Newcastle universities (when I sealed my fate by telling the philosophy department that I was interested in Hegel).

And academic trips to and not just through Bristol, to the university to attend a seminar on Shakespeare with other sixth formers from all over Somerset, feeling inferior in the presence of the far more fluent, wanting to shine but painfully aware of having nothing to say.

An interview at Bristol University to read English Literature. I don’t remember much about it but I remember clutching a rather fine edition of a Thomas Hardy novel in an ante-room (I don’t remember which but I’d like to think it was Jude the Obscure).

It was probably on that trip that I visited cathedral-like St Mary Redcliffe. My teachers would probably have been surprised seeing only a gauche immature teenager adorned with the fashions of youth yesteryear and missing the other stiller presence capable of awe.

To some extent, Bristol with friends too, wandering around the curiously named Christmas Steps with a schoolfriend whose parents had moved there. And, mulish 18-year-old when taken by my parents to see a pantomime (a curious choice but it would have been a better memory if I’d been generous and gracious).

And after moving to Sweden, being in Bristol with my travel sick daughter Anna, who richly rewarded the inflexible coach driver who refused to stop by ensuring that he had a longer stop than planned at the next coach station to restore order in his vehicle.  We were on our way to Bristol Zoo to see a white tiger but maybe that was another trip.

At some point I’ve wandered around Bristol with Pevsner looking at buildings, probably when I was going to visit my nephew in south Gloucestershire. And recently to see the grave of the Bengali Rammohan Roy who died on a trip to meet the city’s Unitarians and who lies in a rather splendid tomb at Arnos Vale.

I am looking forward to this week to get a better grasp of the city and tweak the past by tidying up my Bristol memories.

Sarehole Mill, one of the last two working watermills in Birmngham, well known for its own sake and for its associations with Tolkien whose early years were spent in what was then Birmingham’s surrounding countryside.

Walking through the Dingles to the Mill, then seeing the Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s new Tolkien film at the nearby cultural centre felt a natural follow-up. It met with mixed reviews and my own feelings were also mixed. It has its poignant and beautiful moments but was far too sweet for my taste and some of the magic of Tolkien got lost among the character stereotypes that passed review, Tolkien, the orphan, Tolkien, the sensitive public schoolboy among his band of brothers, Tolkien, the lover faithful to his romantic dream, Tolkien, the student of genius overcoming barriers to find his path through academia and Tolkien the soldier on the bloody Somme and his loss of the dear.

Tolkien’s name caught my attention, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. “Reuel”, friend of God or one who is intimate with God in Hebrew, a family or middle name in the Tolkien family, was given by the Tolkiens to all their children. Reuel is another name for Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, a priest of Midian and father of Hobab (sources: Exodus and the Book of Numbers).

And the name Tolkien itself, of Germanic origin, the family coming from Kreuzberg near the then Königsberg, some of its members later moving to Danzig (Gdansk) and then England.

A Polish Tolkien scholar, Ryszard Derdzinski has written about the origin of the name, related to the village of Tolkeiny, later in Eastern Prussia, its name a combination of personal name and suffix, perhaps “son of”. And “tolk” itself means (in Russian, German and Swedish at least) interpreter or negotiator, making son of “the interpreter”.

Derdzinski’s article looks well referenced and scholarly but his enthusiasm for his subject makes me wary, although his hypothesis seems not unreasonable (but sufficiently pleasing to encourage attempts to disprove it).

My upbringing, although good in many respects, didn’t prepare me well for being a parent, even less for having shared custody. Despite this, I was a devoted father, although some of my ideas about how to entertain children seem in retrospect curious.  I began to suspect something was wrong when touring the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and my elder daughter was quite clearly feigning interest in the exhibits to make her father happy. I wasn’t completely hopeless; I did make great efforts to indulge her interest in riding. It was after one such holiday that the penny finally dropped. I was reluctant but I couldn’t say no to her eagerness to walk along the coast path together for a few miles. And then I saw her joy at being in the open countryside, surrounded by hundreds of rabbits running in every direction and realised that we needed to take it easy on the pot shards.

We camped at Seatown, the next settlement before continuing inland to visit my mother in her small town. It’s an idyllic memory, the more so because not so long after she came into her teens and child-parent closeness faded for a few years.

Since then, I’ve walked all of the south-west path between West Bay and Exmouth (in many stages) but never east of West Bay until now.

All this was going through my mind as I got out of my taxi in the village of Burton Bradstock to reach the coast path and walk west to West Bay. It looked easy on the map, no closely bunched contour lines or sharp climbs up to the top of the cliff. It wasn’t quite like that on the ground. First it was pleasant, then there was an awkward passage through a poorly marked caravan park and a considerable climb that I avoided by going down to the shore.

Walking along the shore can be tricky as it’s easy in these parts to get cut off by the tide. It’s not usually dangerous but can involve a long cold wait crouched on a rock or a humiliating rescue. It’s also not advisable to walk too close to the cliffs either as they are unstable and chunks frequently fall off, especially when the winter weather brings penetrating rain and frost.

People still sit at the base of the rocks, despite the signs warning them not to and despite the evidence around them of substantial chunks of rock scattered at the cliff foot. Every so often, somebody is hurt and even killed but it is still not taken as seriously as it should be.

But high tide had just passed and the water was receding and there was a comfortable strip of dryish beach between the shore and the base of the cliff so I went on until all the other walkers had disappeared and there was just me and a desolate beach for a while before people started to appear who had walked in the other direction.

Progress was slow and you had to keep an eye open for the occasional larger wave. I managed to do this on all but one occasion when lost in thought I found myself going for a paddle with my boots on.

It wasn’t quite as idyllic as my walk with my daughter but I’m glad I did it. The next section approaches the Swannery at Abbotsbury with its almost mediaeval atmosphere and Chesil Bank, strange bank of stone and shingle parallel to the coast with a brackish lagoon on the land side. But that’s for another trip.

 

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Making use of the fine weather, after being confined to the flat for a couple of days with a cold, I decide to make for Chideock. It’s not far from Bridport, just a few kilometres on the Lyme road but it takes a while as austerity has not been kind to rural bus services. I can’t get into St Giles, the parish church, as building work is in process so, after I quick look at the outside, I walk up the lane towards the rather large Roman Catholic church beside Chideock manor.

There are a few places in Dorset where the Reformation didn’t altogether manage to crush the Catholic church, usually where a local landowner was catholic  so that services could be discreetly held in a barn or some other outhouse during the “penal period” when it was illegal.

Another such place was Marnhull in North Dorset  where my own ancestors came from. Here in the eighteenth century, the same people appear in the registers of both the Protestant church (as was at one time required by law) and of the Catholic church (presumably this only applied to birth and marriage and not death…).  Here too important members of the local gentry were Catholic.

Marnhull provided a refuge for nuns fleeing the French Revolution.

These areas seem to have survived if they were sufficiently out-of-the-way and discreet and didn’t pose any form of challenge to the authorities. Chideock has its martyrs, however, described in detail in the museum attached to the church.

There is another religious curioso in the nearby village of Whitchurch Canonicorum (Canons’ Whitchurch), where the church dedicated to St Wite (Candida) contains a shrine to the saint where visitors have left requests for the saint’s assistance. I’m not sure what the Protestant Chuch’s formal position is on this, but I believe it is very unusual in a Protestant church.

Back to Bridport after another long wait for the bus.

I’m beginning to feel sated with church architecture for the time being. I need to read more to sort my ideas out about neo-Gothic architecture. As you travel about Dorset, you realise the massive scale of church rebuilding in the nineteenth century and that there are few churches that fit neatly into the mediaeval classifications.