Muddy Bay Diaries (2)

The wireless network is disagreeing with me every now and then. I can't always seem to connect. Oh well.

I went exploring after posting the previous post. Lerwick is not an exceptionally pretty town. There's a fair number of new developments, and I guess it looks like any other Scottish seaside town. It has a harbour, a ferry terminal (well, two actually), a shopping centre... and nothing like Tinganes in Tórshavn to bring the average age of the buildings down by a couple of hundred years. Maybe it's also the Scottish way of not really taking very good care of your country? Lots of litter and it looked very industrial. Sometimes, through the buildings, you could see a glimpse of another island or a hill. That was nice.

They have road signs here, but I am not completely sure whether they point in the right direction. I can understand that on a pedestrian route you may have to climb a gate every now and then, but the bit where there was just grass in every direction... I must say that the water splashing in my water bottle gave really nice sound effects as I sunk down to my calves in moss. Several times. I decided to head for the athletics track (a bit of bright red in a sea of green) and ended up in the civilized world again.

There is also a little lake with the ruins of what may once have been a lighthouse or a fort or some other sort of tower. I didn't go and explore as it seemed like it was the headquarters for the local ned community.

Muddy Bay Diaries (1)

And I have arrived at the destination of my expotition: Shetland. It was quite an adventure to get here, and not everything went according to plan. Of course I was at Edinburgh Airport way too early, and I had to wait another fifteen minutes before the check-in for the flight actually opened. It had to be done at a self-service machine thingy, which turned out to be easy enough. The queues for the security control were extremely small, not at all the 45-minute trail I had experienced on several occasions before. So I ended up in the departures hall ages before the flight was supposed to be leaving. Most of the domestic flights on British Airways departed from Gate 7, so it seemed like the most useful place to sit. Of course when the gate was finally announced, it was Gate 1A so another minor trek through the airport was needed.

The airplane was by far the smallest one I have ever been on, I think I counted it could seat 37 people. It wasn't a direct flight from Edinburgh to Sumburgh, there was a stopover in Wick, probably because the fuel tank isn't big enough for the entire trip or something. We had a slight delay at departure because there were problems with the baggage handling (again, it seems to be a recurring theme in Edinburgh) but we arrived in Wick reasonably on schedule. The flight takes about 50 minutes.

"Welcome to Wick Airport." Wick Airport is a strip of tarmac with a couple of metal-plated buildings beside it. One of these actually has the sign "Wick Airport" on it, and passes for the terminal building. It also seems to be the only one with windows. Some people didn't want to go any further, so they left the plane at Wick, and others came on. Then suddenly we seemed to be one passenger short. She was found in the terminal, thinking it had been a direct flight to Shetland and that she was already in Lerwick. (Which is interesting seeing as the plane was to Sumburgh, not Lerwick...)

Meanwhile there were people on the plane talking about their how manieth attempt this was. Puzzled at first, I soon found out that in previous days, the weather in Sumburgh had not been good enough to land. "They can deal with mist, but not with [something that I couldn't quite hear]," they said. I assume that was wind from the wrong direction. For one couple it was already their third attempt to get to Shetland.

And it was looking like they needed a fourth when the plane was restarted for the final jump to Shetland and the right engine went splutter. The co-pilot went out of the airplane to fix it. At one point we heard (and felt) someone kicking the plane repeatedly. Don't know if it did much good, at least it didn't make the engine do anything else than splutter. So in the end they called in the big guns. A wee tractor with a generator on a cart and a pair of jump cables. At this point I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be on the plane anymore...

Anyway, the tractor did make the engine start up again, and we were soon on our way to Shetland. Landing there was quite an experience, the plane went lower and lower and I am sure we were still right above the sea. Then suddenly there was a bit of runway and the plane braked so as to not roll of the runway at the other end of the island. I had expected it to brake a little more but that didn't seem necessary in the end. Sumburgh Airport is bigger than Wick's, at least it has a proper terminal and I think it has room for more planes than even the airport in Vágar (but that wasn't very big either).

A taxi was waiting for me and drove me to Lerwick. On the way I got my first glimpse of Shetland. I had expected it to be a bit like the Faroes, and in a way it is. There is one headland that I could see from the taxi that I am sure I've taken a picture of in Tórshavn... But it's also different. The Faroes are more rugged, Shetland seems to be smoothed over somewhat, it's not as pointy. The fields on the way ranged from extremely stoney via a bit stoney to just grass. It wasn't as green as the Faroese grass, but maybe that's a matter of the time of year. There were sheep. Also in the Faroes you don't get red phone booths, but you do get bus shelters seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

The hotel is very nice. I have a double room with radio, tv, a bath and I thínk the shortbread on the table is complementary? They also have Wi-Fi internet which I shall pay £5 for to connect to. (When you read this, I have. This is currently being written in Notepad.) I shall also have to explore the food situation beyond the shortbread, and see if the organizers of the conference are in any way interested in my arrival and how I can let them know that I am alive and well in Muddy Bay (as the place-name sign at the entrance of Lerwick dutifully translates from the Old Norse).

Flatmate

MG can stay in the UK until somewhere around the end of April 2008. I no longer have to worry about my flatmate being deported and trying to find a new flatmate and stuff. Big relief.

Nothing

I have absolutely nothing to say.

Rephrasing your M.Sc. thesis – I’m using Norn as a case study for my Ph.D., but rather than a haphazard description I am now using a model so I need to restructure and rephrase everything – is very mind-numbing work. I wrote something along the lines of 800 words today, which isn’t too bad, but I still didn’t really work very hard.

The people on the LEL Staff and Research Postgrads e-mail lists are having a lively discussion about making new consent forms for recordings, what the purpose of them is and what they should say and all that. Seeing those e-mails come in was the highlight of ER’s and my day. I am working on Early Modern Europe, and ER’s dissertation is on breaking of Old English vowels. So those consent forms are enormously relevant.

I have been adventurous in the chips department today. (I know that is crisps for the Brits, but with WB away in Manchester I am left with ER and in South African English it is chips so I default to the Dutch chips.) I normally only eat ready salted, although I can branch out to the Kettle Chips (see, chips!) sea salt and black pepper taste. Today I had McCoy’s nacho and sour cream ridged tortilla chips (see, chips again!). Wow, they are good!

I am still not adventurous enough for the chicken and stuffing-flavoured crisps. I will repeat that. Chicken and stuffing-flavoured crisps. That is just wrong at I don’t know how many levels. They were left at our party, along with Sunday roast-flavoured crisps and lamb and mint-flavoured crisps. I don’t know who brought them (AF?) but justice will be done.

Also a lot of fizzy drinks were left at our party (along with a couple of half-emptied bottles of wine). AF brought cherryade which has a lot of chemical stuff in it, and only two calories per 250 ml serving. MG says the coloring is made by crushing beetles, so that’s where those two calories come from: healthy non-vegetarian drinks.

We also tried the bitter lemon and tonic over dinner today. They have quinine in them. I’m not sure: bitter lemon/tonic or malaria? The nastiness of the tonic almost goes away by mixing it with cherryade. I don’t think malaria works that way, so the tonic wins. Only just.

Shetland is coming closer. Read a nice quote about Foula today, it was described as ‘a peat bog on a rock’. Doesn’t sound too enthralling, frankly. I know we’re having a tour of Shetland on the Sunday, but I’m hoping we’re sticking to the Mainland. Will cope with Bressay, the ferries to Whalsay or Yell look awfully long already but I can probably do those too... but I wouldn’t be too sad to miss the peat bog on the rock.

I may have to look up the word ‘nothing’ in the OED.

Castle Cèilidh

It turned out to be dry enough to have the Castle Cèilidh actually in the castle of St Andrews this year. It definitely made for a much more crowded event than last year, but whether it was necessarily better? Dancing in your old trainers on slopey grass is only marginally better than the feat we managed at the Channel 4 dem in Edinburgh Castle last year. But above all, it was genuinely Baltic! Dancing means taking your hands out of your pockets, which means freezing your hands off. So I gave up halfway and wandered around the castle premises for a bit. Took a lot of pictures but the camera refused to cooperate while transferring them to my computer so I lost half of them. (It’d better not try this in Shetland!)

Torchlit procession was pretty from behind a wall that gave some shelter from the icy gales. The pub (which wasn’t really a pub but more something like the Human Be-In) was welcomingly warm. I survived the coach trip back only to find MG in the stairway who had managed to lock herself out. Oops.

Today was a meeting with the almighty supervisor, who was very positive both about my write-up of the Postgrad Conference paper for the online proceedings and about the talk I’ll be giving in Skálavágur (as Scalloway is apparently called on the Norse place-name map of Shetland with Britain tucked away in the corner). I told her of the agony of having to read about different methods of curing different types of fish only to find out something about trade patterns. She told me about her experience of getting a book on ‘Indo-European trees’ out of the library, thinking it was about language classification, only to find a chapter on the oak, one on the birch and one on the elm.

Kind of irritating that the haaf fisheries and subsequent labour in-migration (i.e. weak links i.e. language change) starts in the 1720s, when I have already declared Norn dead as a community language. I’ll have to think of another explanation.

I should also mention that the HTML that Blogger produces is absolute gunk.

Sore loser

Italy’s biggest arsehole Silvio Berlusconi has now decided that he’s going to scare the Italian parliament away from electing a left-wing candidate for the presidency. How? By not paying taxes anymore. Which, seeing as he’s not only Italy’s biggest arsehole, but also the country’s richest one, should be a matter of a lot of money.

But why would this work? I thought there were useful instruments like court orders and jail for people like Berlusconi who don’t want to pay taxes. (And while they’re at it, they might as well check whether he paid the right amount of taxes when he was in power and could get away with anything.)

The week

A long time without a proper update. This needs to be sorted...

Work has been going alright. I’m more or less done with the theory chapter and have left it behind for now. I’m now writing the chapter on Norn, the first of my case studies. This basically involves restructuring my M.Sc. dissertation and paraphrasing everything. I also discovered that I need a bit more data, and am suddenly finding books that I never found, or indeed looked for, last year. I’m hoping I can get the chapter more or less finished early next week, before I set off for Shetland and can actually meet all the people who wrote these books and may be able to fill any gaps there still are in my research.

The word of the day game that we’re doing is also going nicely. So far we have absquatulate, buccelation, ca’canny, doryphore, egglet, foison, gilly-gaupus and hydatism. I think it’s ER’s turn for the i on Monday. It must be, ’cause I did h and WB is down in Manchester next week doing recordings.

I turned 27 on Tuesday. I suddenly feel all mature and wise. Not.

On my way to Dunedin on Wednesday, I met AK. He asked me whether I had already received the issue of Northern Studies. No... Well, he sent it to my pidgeon-hole. But I’m no longer in LLC so I have a different pidgeon-hole now. Oh well, trekked over to the Celtic building on Thursday to pick it up. They did change the page numbers on me, but there it is: my first publication...

Knooihuizen, Remco (2006). ‘The Norn-to-Scots language shift: another look at socio-historical evidence’, Northern Studies 39, 105–117.

Dancing in the Chaplaincy was okay, the floor was very slippery which led to a lot of humorous situations. MG dealt very neatly with the Panda situation, so although she and her mum will still be coming to St Andrews with us tonight, next year she’ll only be coming to cèilidh class. We’ll also give her mum the cribs for the Summer Dance – seeing the manicness of it may convince her that Panda’s not quite up for dance to corners and set, corners pass and turn, Quarries’ Jig and Muirland Willie figures, Schiehallion reels, and whatever other nastiness I managed to squeeze in. Hello/Goodbye setting, there’s that too.

Friday was my birthday party. I invited a lot of people, and although the room and hallway were full, there were still numerous people who didn’t show up. Okay, so some of them had an excuse, like being in the US, Switzerland, Cambodia – and I’ll let St Andrews get away with it as well. But others... No – focus on the nice people who were actually there. Mostly NS people, although WB (with ES) and ER did constitute a very small delegation from work.

Crisps. Lots of crisps. And there was a lot more alcohol than at MG’s party, even though it was mainly the same people. I think an entire bottle of gin was shared among four people, there was also a lot of wine – we’re left with a lot of half bottles of wine, please come and collect! – and we now have a wide variety of empty beer bottles. The party was very nice. I got an executive toy from AF, magnetic sticks and balls that you can build things with. Also chocolate (from ER and from SP) and wine (from RB). Oops. Some revelations again. Last year it was TT and MG who suddenly appeared to have gone out for a month prior, this year it’s EMcG and JH. And EMcG’s flatmate and AL became very cosy after a few G&Ts...

Nothing happened yesterday. I went to the office to pick up the book I was reading, so that I could sit outside our living room window in the grass reading, but as I was walking to the office it started to become a bit more covered, so I read a bit in the office. Went home via LG’s (and CB’s back!) for tea, read some more, played with my executive toy and with Google Maps.

Google Maps is actually great fun. The sheer size (or lack of) Sumburgh Airport still amuses me, and I’ve been looking for landmarks a bit. Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the St Peter, the Statue of Liberty, the Monument on the Dam, the Tower of Pisa, Frogner Park, etc. etc. You can lose hours and hours on there. Great procrastination device. A pity though that a lot of areas still don’t have properly zoomable pictures.

Today it’s Castle Cèilidh in St Andrews. It was raining here this morning, but AF just texted DMcL in St Andrews and apparently it’s clearing up and they have good hopes it can still be in the castle.

კოკა-კოლა

The label on my Coca-Cola bottle is in Georgian. This is strangely exciting. I also need to re-learn the Georgian alphabet, because 15 years after they first taught me it (they being two Georgians who now go through life in our family history as "the dwarfs"), I don't remember all 33 letters.

Bedtime procrastination

I really should go to bed, but also I really should update.

The weather has been nice lately, which in a way is good because it makes me happy. It also sometimes makes me sad because there is little point sitting in the Meadows by yourself and looking at other people having fun with their friends. I could of course ask people to sit in the Meadows with me, but I don't want to impose. Also, it would be nice if they would ask me. (Thanks LG!)

The shit hit the fan big time New Scotland-wise when Panda decided she was adult enough to sign up for the Castle Ceilidh in St Andrews. No way are we going to take her along! Part of the 4-hour committee meeting on Friday was spent thinking of politically correct reasons to refuse her; I think we’re going with that we cannot cater for her needs and therefore do not want the responsibility of having to do so. It will probably result in tears and temper tantrums on Thursday.

Dancebase does Dancing for Downies, but it’s not very clever that they do it when Panda is at school.

The committee meeting was very long, but actually good fun. MG got tired and snappy at the end, but other than that. Some memorable quotes that I really couldn’t justify putting in the minutes:

“JF makes strange noises sometimes.” (HP)
“JG had very wiggly hair. It made him look a bit like a Klingon.” (JW)
“I like your Super Ted.” (HP)

Needless to say that there was a JF Strange Noises imitation competition, and the hair of AG was also assessed but it wasn’t related to any Star Trek character.

Which brings us to AP, who decided to burden WB and me with her problem that she could never tell the theme tunes to Star Wars and Superman apart. I think we spent about an hour listening to the two tunes and comparing, and we went off on tangents about other tv shows from our past (most of which I didn’t know – but then again, they wouldn’t have known Nathalie, Vrouwtje Theelepel, de Fabeltjeskrant or de Familie Knots). Eventually we decided that Star Wars and Superman actually have the same theme tune. They must have.

Language in Context was cool. We had lunch first (remind me never to eat nachos and curly fries at Negociants again!), and then the talk. RL based very strong conclusions on very little data, but everyone was very enthusiastic.

Linguistic Circle was even cooler. Gong phonology in a contact situation. Gong is a Sino-Tibetan language from Thailand, with four tones (one of which has two allotones), ten monophthongs (each with three or four allophones, but they overlap so there are only 17 monophthong realisations), and three diphthongs (with allophones). It has been in contact with Thai for about thirty years now, and the resulting Contact Gong has 17 monophthong phonemes because the Thai speakers can’t apply the allophone rules anymore, five tones (same reason), and ten diphthongs. Thai, like Normal Gong, has three. So 3+3=10.

Home-made tomato soup is nice.

We are doing a word-of-the-day thing in the office. WB started it on Wednesday. Previous words of days are absquatulate, buccellation, and ca’canny. It is my turn tomorrow for D. MM sent me a list of possible candidates, and although I do like decussate and dextrorotary, I think I’m going with doryphore. Some would say it’s very appropriate. But then I will get upset and might defenestrate you, and you may end up disabled or deceased.

Next week is my birthday. Help?

I am also going to a seminar on language policy and planning by someone called Tadhg Ó hIfernáin. JW is not convinced that this is actually a name. I think it is, but I wonder what the English version of it is. I think the Irish do English versions?

I also have my flight details for the Jakobsen Conference. I am flying to Sumburgh. Airport code LSI, which I think stands for Lerwick Shetland Islands. Which is odd as a) it is in Sumburgh, not in Lerwick, and b) there is an airstrip (I wouldn’t call it an airport, although they call it Lerwick Tingwall Aerodrome!) closer to Lerwick. I say LSI is in Sumburgh – if Google Maps and their satellite images are anything to go by, the airport is about five times as big as Sumburgh. Actually, from the very detailed satellite image (it’s an airport, the satellites are primarily for military use – guess why you can zoom into Sumburgh a lot more than you can into Edinburgh...) I am not convinced there is actually a Sumburgh beyond the airport. The next farmstead over seems to actually be called Jarlshof.

MG is Beltaning until 5am tonight. I am not waiting up for her.

Good night.

Worry and relief

From Michael Flinn (ed.), Scottish population history: from the 17th century to the 1930s (Cambridge: CUP, 1977), specifically from the chapter 'The demographic influence of the potato':

The potato made it possible to feed the increasing population, and the continued growth of the population in the early decades of the nineteenth century forced an ever-growing proportion of the population into dangerous dependence upon it (p. 422).

Oh dear.

The initial appearance, diffusion and general adoption of the potato can, fortunately, in Scotland's case, be documented fairly precisely (p. 423).

Phew.

The Shetland Times

I’m in the Shetland Times! Now I just have to make sure I live up to the expectations...

The talk at the Postgraduate Conference went alright. It wasn’t the same talk as I’ll be doing in Scalloway. This was about whether it was possible to use modern models to do historical research. My conclusion was that it wasn’t impossible, at least. Everyone was really positive, which was a bit surprising, because I really did think it wasn’t that good. Especially since I basically drew conclusions from very little data, and there was a bit of going in circles going on in my argument. But MM let me live, she even nodded a couple of times during the talk. I got a few laughs when I said that I can’t do what LC does, and drive over the Forth Bridge to Fife to record hours and hours of piper kids talking, and ask them about their social behaviour – because my people are dead. The questions from HTL (MG: ‘Who has a verb for a middle name, that’s stupid!’) were answerable, those from CH actually quite encouraging. The PGC was quite a success...

Mess

MS is uncontactable so the whole merged highland thing is still a bit of a mess. And FC is in a state because I was under the (wrong) impression that there was no step class in Term 3. Yay for New Scotland. :(

Holiday

So far I have...

• bought new shoes
• bought a little present for KM
• decided on a date for my birthday party (Fri 5 May), subject to MG's approval
• showed the neighbours how the satellite navigation system in their car actually works
• finished the presentation I'm giving tomorrow week
• helped my mum buy a new printer and installed it
• watched all three Shameless DVDs from the set
• given up eating the really manky potato flavour (! - not even real potato) snacks that my mom's friend brought back from their holiday in China
• tried to download my mom's friends China holiday movie from their camera unto their computer, which is impossible without installing the proper software, which is impossible because she's managed to lose the CD

I still have to

• meet my former babysat kids tomorrow
• make sushi with half our and half my mom's friend's family on Saturday
• buy chocolate for LG
• do some cycling, weather permitting
• close the bank account where the only thing happening for years is them taking out € 3.50 every three months for a debit card that I never use

It is also looking like I'll be home around the beginning of August for my mom's birthday plus to give AL somewhere to be on holiday between Romania and Ludwigstein.

Well done Edinburgh!

Well, I made it home on Saturday as planned, only slightly later. The luggage transport belt inside the airport terminal in Edinburgh had snapped, and they didn't seem to have a back-up system at all. We were all asked to deposit our luggage at the outsize baggage desk (basically: chuck it on the heap) and it would all be taken care of manually. Of course, if they wouldn't make one big heap but already do some sorting as the bags come in, that would have been a lot easier.

Getting to Edinburgh airport two hours before departure time seems to be a good idea anyway, given the time everything takes there. Queue at check-in only took twenty minutes but the whole queuing and x-ray procedure takes ages. Why they don't just open all x-ray terminals, I have no idea. It took about an hour.

Once in the airplane, we were first told that we were waiting for the bags for a maximum of 15 minutes, then that we would leave in five minutes regardless of whether we had luggage or not, 15 minutes later we were told we were going to leave in five minutes and now half the bags were on the plane, the other half wasn't, and another 15 minutes later we finally left. With all the bags, only they never actually announced that. I found out because the people next to me had to get a connection to Budapest and were slightly panicking.

Anyway, so we left 55 minutes late. The rest all went quite smoothly. The food was even quite nice.

At home now. Very windy.

Therapy failed...

Sorry to have to disappoint AL, but retail therapy didn’t work. Maybe I’m just not good at retail therapy. I’m very bad at buying things. I must have seen at least five different pairs of shoes that I wanted to buy (some of them affordable even) and all sorts of other cool clothes, but I didn’t buy them because I somehow doubted I actually needed them. I know that is sort of the whole point of retail therapy – buying stuff you don’t actually need but that’s good to have anyway – but I’m just incapable of doing that.

So I spent three and a half hours going up and down Princes Street, and I came back with one DVD. Well, one three-DVD set. Second season of Shameless. Good stuff.

Needed it too. Doing retail therapy on your own is not fun, if all the other people are doing retail therapy in pairs. And then going into the EUSA shop in Potterow on my way back was a bad idea too. A: they didn’t have chocolate chip muffins anymore, or the Guardian, and B: there are just some people you don’t want to see with someone else. (Skidedanskere!)

So watched three episodes of Shameless from my bed with my big fluffy toy dog. And tonight we’re invited over at LG’s to watch Much ado about nothing. Am debating whether or not to take the big fluffy toy dog with me. It may not be allowed to leave LG’s again, that’s the problem.

And breathe out...

Yay, Easter break! Well, I’m taking it anyway. Version 1.0 of the presentation is finished and with no one else in the office, it’s not exactly the most motivating place to work, so I’m leaving it at version 1.0. Nothing left to do, except send some e-mails out about the Postgraduate Conference, so I’ll go to the office in a bit to do that, bring home my laptop and then really start my Easter break.

After that I’m taking AL’s advice and am going into town for some retail therapy. There’s some stuff I need to buy for people back home, and I might just treat myself to something although I have no idea yet to what.

Went to the cinema with the NS bunch yesterday, to see Ice Age 2: The meltdown. I had forgotten about the little squirrel. And about the tiger actually as well. All I remembered was the mammoth and the sloth. It was an okay movie. Afterwards back to AF’s for tea and pecan pie. Was nice. But slightly too late maybe.

Nice to know

So some time in February VP said it was better to just stay friends, ‘because I was only getting so worked up about the whole thing.’ Of course by then it was already crystal clear that the whole thing was never going to happen anyway, and there was no doubt my feelings were never in the picture... but it was a nice illusion.

So today I learned that I was only told this after VP had secured non-single status for himself. Or perhaps slightly prior, that I was an obstacle that needed cleared before he could do so. Illusion shattered.

With all the commitment issues playing in this moment’s relationships, and me lending an ear to everyone (MG, WG and VP over the course of three days!), surely that whole relationship thing is an overrated institution that we could easily do without. Not worth the bother and the mental torment it causes.

Now if I keep telling myself this, I might start to feel better...

Ideology

Mainly for MG but others can enjoy too... Sixteen possible definitions of ideology:

• the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
• a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
• ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
• false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
• systematically distorted communication;
• that which offers a position for a subject;
• forms of thought motivated by social interests;
• identity thinking;
• socially necessary illusion;
• the conjecture of discourse and power;
• the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
• action-oriented sets of beliefs;
• the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
• semiotic closure;
• the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
• the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

From Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 1-3. Here quoted from Rosina Lippi-Green, Language ideology and language change in Early Modern German: a sociolinguistic study of the consonantal system of Nuremberg (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1994), p.7.

Window

Beautiful weather yesterday, and seeing as we seem to have a little visitor of the mousey persuasion, it seemed time for some good old spring cleaning. This involved cleaning the windows, also from the outside. Our living room window tilted inside out so it was very convenient to clean. Then it was my bedroom window’s turn to be cleaned. This one refused to be tilted properly, but got severely dislocated and ended up about a foot outside the window frame. Still on the hinges though. MG and I must have spent at least half an hour, if not 45 minutes, on trying to forcibly get the window back in place. Success in the end. The rest of the windows were cleaned from the outside by jumping up and down to reach the top of the window. We’re ground floor, officially, but we’re about three steps from ground level, so just enough for me not to be able to reach the top of the window when just standing.

Also did some work yesterday. The East German Marxist linguistics that haunts my Sorbian research reached new heights with this quote from Heinz Schuster-Šewc, ‘Sprache und ethnische Formation in der Entwicklung des Sorbishen’, Zeitschrift für Slawistik 4 (1959), 577–595:

Überhaupt ist es falsch, bei der Beurteilung des Selbständigkeitsgrades einer Sprache bzw. des Verwandtschaftsverhältnisses einzelner Dialekte von der Existenz sogenannter “Ursprachen” auszugehen. Die marxistische Lehre von der Gesellschaft lehrt uns, daß es in der Geschichte derartige “Ursprachen” und “Urvölker” niemals gegeben hat. Die grundlegende gesellschaftliche Einheit in der Urgemeinschaft war der Stamm mit den ihm untergeordneten Sippen. Jeder Stamm bildete auch in sprachlicher Hinsicht eine Einheit. Die weitere Entwicklung in der Urgesellschaft wird charakterisiert durch den Zerfall und die ständig fortlaufende Teilung der Stämme. Im Rahmen des Bevölkerungszuwachses und der territorialen Ausbreitung der Stämme zerfällt ein Stamm nach dem andern in kleinere Teile, aus denen sich im weiteren Verlauf der Entwicklung selbst wieder Stämme bilden. Zusammen mit dem Zerfall der Stammeseinheit zerfällt natürlich auch die Stammessprache, und es entstehen neue verwandte Stammessprachen. (p. 587–588)

Maybe it’s just me, but I really don’t see much of a difference between evil capitalist linguistics and Marxist linguistics. I wonder if Schuster-Šewc did...

Also thanks to LF for not changing over important things like music license and PA insurance. I got a call from the insurance company on Friday: ‘Your insurance runs out at midnight tonight. Why didn’t you renew your policy?’ Eh... because I didn’t know we had to? An update on the 60th Anniversary Preparations would also be good...

And then there was one...

Yesterday we had a farewell party for CB. She will leave for California next week, and then I’ll be the only person from our M.Sc. course left in Edinburgh. LG had organized a surprise party and CB only started to suspect something when four people suddenly turned up at the same time. It was a bit weird that CB was thrown a NS party even though work had prevented her from going to dancing ever since this summer. Also there weren’t any people from her church. Which was probably a good idea, given MG and JB’s ideas about religion and book-inspired bigotedness. I’m sure the church people will throw her a party as well.

I also got told off for omitting to mention the curry night that LG organized on Monday. Fourteen NS people in an Indian restaurant. Indian hot is slightly different from Indonesian hot, I learned, and also the Indian idea about a one-person portion of rice was slightly different from what many were used to. (And I had agreed to share it as well.) I also didn’t mention that LG, SB and AF came over afterwards to watch the DVD for Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit which I was force-lent by HO. It was hilarious. I like cartoons that have multiple layers so that they’re funny at many different levels.

I am meeting AMcM today at two. Slight clash with the DELS dry-runs but the people who are speaking there didn’t exactly seem to mind that the head of department had other engagements...

Also mustn’t forget to burn MM a copy of Holst’s Planet Suite.

More updates needed

There just isn’t enough time to experience all these things and write about them as well. And then they went and stole an hour away from us, so that was not very fair either. Oh well, I guess it’s really only borrowed and we’ll get it back some time in October.

The Highland Ball in St. Andrews was very nice, although I’m not exactly sure we got the right amount of money from everyone and into the Celtic Soc money box. I’ve concocted a little plan to make this all more streamlined next year. And days later I got my term as NS secretary prolonged by another year. Of course, immediately afterwards, ye shitte hitteth ye fanne. There was no hall for Step Class on Monday (which was because originally we didn’t plan on having classes in the last week of term so we didn’t book rooms). It also turned out we didn’t have a room for Bob and Dem Class, and even worse... when I got to the Pleasance to sort everything out, they asked me why NS didn’t turn up at the Pleasance room booking for next year... Eh... because we were never told it was on?

Then I had to find Mrs Wilson to organize Kirk o’ Field for Tuesday night. Mr Wilson, who wants nothing to do with the bookings and won’t touch the diary with a barge pole, said Mrs Wilson would be at Kirk o’ Field because it was Friendly Club. That sounds dodgy – and it was. Of course when I arrived there, everything was locked. Mr Wilson assured me that Friendly Club was 12 to 2 (although they might have pushed it back half an hour, ‘you never know with these women’). It actually starts at 1.30, so what Mrs Wilson gets up to in that hour and a half (or more: she was late for Friendly Club as well!) I have no idea. Average age there is 95, and I was told that Scottish Country Dancing is a very good pastime, especially since Scotland did so well in swimming in the Commonwealth Games. I have been known to make some weird connections in my mind, but this one is beyond me.

After that, things cooled down a bit. Dancing on Thursday was alright, although Panda is getting increasingly annoying. Feet not happy on Friday, and was dreading having to dance all weekend. MG’s party was nice. The next evening, Dunedin Assembly. Went there with GH, CA and AL. (Also found out that JB had a nasty encounter with a bunch of neds. Kill all neds. Also the ones that LC needs for her Ph.D. research, I don’t care. Neds that pipe, now that’s a paradox!) The Dunedin dance was absolutely fantastic, I had lots of fun and dances lots of great dances. Also found out that the person I thought was MG wasn’t. She was actually F (don’t know her last name). I did think she was at Dunedin a lot for someone who lives in Co. Cork...

After party at KG and AG was nice as well, they have a nice flat. Talked to J and C from Aberdeen. C is the American guy who always gets lost in dances and has the most magnificent facial expressions when he finally grasps what to do. Except he isn’t American, he’s from rural Aberdeenshire, grew up speaking unintelligible Doric and now suddenly he speaks flawless General American. Ph.D. subject in sociolinguistics in the making...

Then Sunday a Vicky League. The crowd was actually alright, they were predominantly European and therefore used to our oompa-oompa beat, rather than the Asians we normally have who just don’t seem to have a feel for Scottish music. I think we should dance a bit more and be more enthusiastic, but then again: HD took away our country dem slots and there’s only a certain amount of enthusiasm you can convey for the Military Two-Step.

Sunday and Monday also spent marking EL1 assignments. The assignment was scandalously easy, and everyone got very high marks. I guess LvB wants as many people as possible to get exemptions from the exam so that there are fewer exams to mark later on. I gained numerous interesting insights into the History of the English Language, which I shall collate into a separate blog entry at some point in the near future.

Not sure if I’m meeting AMcM today at 2pm or tomorrow at 2pm.

And Terttu Nevalainen is a woman. Nice one to find out before doing a presentation...

Eurovision

I didn’t know the Eurovision Song Contest was open to non-earthlings. Apparently membership of the Federation is enough... Silly Finns. Slightly less absurd, but still with questionable earthly origins, is Iceland’s entry. The Germans are coming with a band called Texas Lightning (‘It’s not a joke, it’s country’) which I haven’t heard but I fear is going to be country and western. Yeee-hah!

A blog entry is long overdue. A short overview of the past month consists primarily of first-year essays, my own research, baking bread, taking regular baths, going with NS to see ハウルの動く城 and staying single.

I’ve been contemplating to do something with AudioScrobbler, which automagically seems to send your ‘last played’ songs from iTunes to your blog, but I haven’t been able to figure out just quite how it works. Ecclectic collection as ever though, including Spetakkel, Мумий Тролль, Runrig and 박정현.

Tonight Highland Ball in St. Andrews. For which I really should start getting ready. Bus leaving at 5.15, and still need to take a shower, shave, etcetera.

Procrastination

Somehow, chatting on Skype with JM in Cambodia damaged my productivity and during two and a half hours of morning in the office, all I did was three pages (not even!) on the Lutheranian Reformation and the beginnings of the literary development with the Sorbs of Lusatia. Which is really interesting but it being in German doesn't help.

Things

AL thinks I should update, so here goes.

Lots of things have been happening, but then again, not really. Sounds paradoxical, but that’s how it feels. There’s disagreement over a complaint letter to EUSA about the ceilidh fiasco, we moved AF’s belongings up four flights of stairs in Tesco carrier bags (skip!), and the joint New Scotland and Dunedin team won the display at the Newcastle Festival. Probably because I was injured and couldn’t participate.

I had an ‘aargh!’ session at Language in Context on Wednesday, and it seems like they didn’t understand why I needed to go ‘aargh!’. I have my topic, I have my case studies, I have my hypotheses, I have my methodology, I have an idea of my sources – what was I complaining about... I guess I needed people to tell me what I needed not to focus on. Fair enough.

The Olympics have started and so far have been going relatively to my liking. Generally the nice people win, the not-so-nice people don’t. I got a wireless card for my laptop, not quite with the purpose of being able to watch the NOS’s live streams in the office, but it’s a nice extra. It has the nasty habit of kicking me off a couple of times during the day but I can deal with that.

In between all of that I’ve been trying to sort out this humongous feelings thing. The whole MG and TT thing may not have helped much in that department, there’s been a lot of theory input that I’m not sure about. MG’s theory about liking being a spontaneous feeling but loving being a conscious act may be supported by the θ-roles required by the Faroese verbs dáma and elska, but I’m not sure it is that simple. Then there’s the thing MG said to me a couple of weeks ago: I deserve someone who’s going to make me the centre of his universe. Yay! I would like to be the centre of someone’s universe. But doesn’t that implicate that I have to make that someone the centre of my universe? I don’t know that I have the attention span to do that. I guess that’s what MG means by loving being a conscious act. On the whole, I’m a bit worried about the whole idea of ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’. I’m not confident I will be able to do enough.

On a more abstract level, I just don’t know what all these things that I feel mean. (How MM’s quote that hangs over my desk as a reminder to not just take any explanation for given, gets additional meaning here...) But maybe I shouldn’t want meaning and should just go with what I feel. But will I ever get past dáma then?

WB left a copy of the novella Brokeback Mountain on his desk in the office, so I read that during ice prep breaks on Sunday. After the movie hype, I found it a bit disappointing. I guess if you expect a lot you let yourself no other option than to be disappointed. I think the biggest downpoint was that the whole thing again started with sex. Oh, it’s cold, well sod those sheep and come into my sleeping bag, they shag. I just don’t have that drive and constantly getting messages of physically initiated relationships makes me feel inadequate. I liked Willem Melchior’s De onhuwbaren so much better. Sure, there was this physical side there as well, but it was much more about the emotional and mental side. Of course it is also ten times as long as Brokeback Mountain so more space, my expectations weren’t as high, I gave it my full attention and was probably in a better mood when I read it. Gosh, it sounds like I hated Brokeback Mountain. I don’t... It just doesn’t portray my feelings. (The movie’s got Heath Ledger in, so possibly better than the book.)

I had a Skype chat with JM this morning. Don’t remember exactly what she said but it supported me a lot in what I was thinking. I need to figure out what I want to happen, and then try to make it happen. (JA told me something along those lines last year with the whole DJ thing, and it isn’t as easy as it sounds.)

Jag hoppas att du havt något att läsa... men nu måste du tillbaka till ditt arbete! :)

Quotes

From Alexander McCall Smith’s The Sunday Philosophy Club, translation by Annemieke Oltheten — chapter 4, p. 49.

Het was misschien eenvoudiger, peinsde ze, om jezelf niet toe te staan verliefd op iemand te worden; om gewoon alleen te blijven, immuun voor pijn die jou door een ander wordt aangedaan. Er waren een heleboel van zulke mensen die tevreden leken met hun leven – of misschien toch niet? Ze vroeg zich af hoeveel van deze mensen vrijwillig alleen leefden, en hoeveel er alleen waren omdat er nooit iemand in hun leven was gekomen die hen van hun eenzaamheid af had geholpen. Er was een verschil tussen een berustende acceptatie van een eenzaam leven, en een bewuste keuze om alleen te blijven.

The (tacky 1980s) chorus from Freiheit’s Keeping the dream alive (1989).

The hopes we had were much too high,
Way out of reach but we had to try.
No need to hide, no need to run,
’Cause all the answers come one by one.
The game will never be over
Because we’re keeping the dream alive.

Time flies...

...when you’re having fun. Seeing as a week has gone by since the last update you’d think time had flown, and maybe it has. Or maybe I’ve just been too busy and too preoccupied with other things to notice that time hasn’t exactly been flying at all.

Some time ago I read on the news that the past week would have seen the most depressing day of the year. (I can’t find the original article but this’ll do.) Not sure if this psychologist guy picked the right day, but it’s certainly been the right week. Drama for me over the weekend, not a weekend filled with happiness either for MG. MvD said she didn’t have a good weekend. ZB topped the list with a dead cat, another cat diagnosed with aids (no shit) and her granddad in hospital. LG was buried in work for all of the week. And finally, AL needed support on Thursday because her boyfriend had fired a range of clichés at her. It wasn’t her, it was him – she deserved to be with someone who could spend more time with her, etcetera.

I think AL summed up the situation quite nicely. ‘It was nice, I liked nice, I want nice.’ Although I’m sure she experienced a more intense degree of niceness, I can totally relate to that. Big bits of what didn’t happen in the end were nice, I liked nice and I’m sorry nice didn’t happen. I’m glad we’re still okay together though.

I managed to get out of the Newcastle Festival dem. I didn’t want to be in it in the first place, but JF seems to have problems interpreting negation particles in his own native language, so suddenly I was on the dem team for both New Scotland and Dunedin. Then came Dunedin on the Wednesday night and a most painful experience dancing Bubbles in the Pond with RW. Her diagnosis was shinsplints, and the only remedy is rest. So I didn’t dance on Thursday, and also at the Annual on Saturday I only did four dances. Garry Strathspey (with GD) was maybe not the best choice, seeing as it was a strathspey and involved Highland Scottische setting. Ouch. The two fast dances I did – Kelpie (with YK) and Fiona’s Party (with AL) – were easier to stomach (or shin, whatever), and waltzing with MM resulted in dizziness rather than sore shins and ankles. Anyway, injury is a good enough reason not to have to commit to the Newcastle Dem. And incidentally, it also gives me a lot of sorely needed spare time!

My dad’s in hospital after falling in the bathroom. Apparently he damaged a disk. My mom says I needn’t worry. So I won’t. But it adds to the most fantastic week ever...

So yeah, the only really good thing to come out of last week – apart from still being good friends with VP – is... Swedish sociolinguistics! (Warning: messy story coming up, but it makes sense in the end.) WB is doing this course called ‘English Language, Society and Culture’ and they were talking about language planning. Homework for that course, at least for the undergrads, was to read a random book on language planning from the library. WB picked a book by Wardhaugh (1987), Languages in competition. Sounded interesting, so yes it is now on my desk but still on his loan. But anyway, I decided to take a look at that particular shelfmark in the library and found a book called Språkbyte och språkbevarande (by Hyltenstam & Stroud, 1991). It is genuinely the best introduction to language shift I’ve read so far, and not coloured by irritating RLS stuff like Fishman’s books. They also mentioned a model for describing language shift that no one’s picked up before. Quite possibly because it was developed in a Swedish study of the Swedish-to-Finnish language shift in Finland (Tandefelt, Mellan två språk, 1988). Took out that book as well, but I haven’t gotten to the chapter on the model yet. (Reading several books at once to maintain sanity.)

Oh, I also got an e-mail from CT. I lost his e-mail address before so it’s nice to hear from him again. Quite a typical style, very enjoyable. Apparently he sees a future for a Tocharian rap group. Must remember to send a more lengthy e-mail back in the very near future.

Zieleroerselen

(Use Babelfish for a vague idea and a good laugh at the pitiful standards of computer translation.)

Ik ben aan’t bijkomen van de wervelwind aan emoties van de afgelopen week. Wat er nou precies gebeurd is, weet ik niet; wat ik ervan vind weet ik al helemaal niet. Het begon allemaal in de nacht van zaterdag op zondag vorige week, toen ik op MSN zat met VP. Op een gegeven moment kwam het hoge woord er dan uit: ik vond hem eigenlijk best wel leuk. Een echte uitspraak of dat wederzijds was kwam er niet, hij wilde me eerst beter leren kennen. Dat hebben we toen eerst maar afgesproken. Eng was het wel, want wat als ik nou de verkeerde keuze heb gemaakt? Hoe zeker was ik er nou van? En als het fout ging, hoeveel zou er dan kapot zijn?

Maandag dan samen geluncht en een beetje in de Meadows gekuierd. Ja, lief lachje en zeker knuffelbaar. Dinsdag na dem class vlug die kloterige cd-speler thuis afgeleverd en naar de Human Be-in gegaan, waar hij was met de mensen van de Asian Friends Society. Een beetje gemengde gevoelens hier. Hij was nog steeds zeker knuffelbaar maar dat initiatief moest wel van mij komen, denk ik. Jammer alleen dat er nogal veel in het Chinees gepraat werd. Maar goed, dat hoort er vast bij, dat is het doel van die hele Asian Friends Society. Op het Chinees praten na was dit toch wel een fijne ervaring, de enige domper was dat ik naar huis liep met iemand die blijkbaar ook in VP geïnteresseerd was.

Woensdag was er een vergadering van de organisatie van de Postgraduate Conference, waar VP ook bij was. Naderhand in het keukentje van 14BP nog wat gezeten, maar dat was weinig diepgaand. Ik denk dat ik toen op zoek was naar het gevoel van dinsdagavond, maar dat kon ik niet terugvinden. Wel MG op de hoogte gebracht, die nog in Amerika zat en die avond op het vliegtuig terug naar Schotland zou stappen. Na Dunedin vlug naar huis in de hoop dat er nog wat te MSN’en viel, maar hij was niet meer online.

Donderdag met de lunch in geuren en kleuren verteld aan MG wat er speelde, en ’s middags na een saai college afgedaald naar VP zijn kantoortje. En weer die gemengde gevoelens. De persoonlijke aandacht was fijn, de gesprekken over het werk lieten ook zien dat we genoeg dingen gemeenschappelijk hebben, maar toen hij minutenlang zijn Japans ging oefenen met een van de Japanners op zijn kantoor, was er toch weer de twijfel. Is dit onbeleefd? Zelfs als hij sorry zegt? Of was het positief en probeerde hij juist indruk te maken? Het engste was misschien nog wel dat er vlagen bij waren dat er geen vonken over sprongen. Hoort dat erbij, bij verliefd zijn? Periodes van warme wind die om je oren stormt afgewisseld met gevoelloze leegte? Hoe moet ik dat nou weten, ik heb dit toch ook nog nooit eerder gedaan... Toch ’s avonds bij New Scotland nog maar aan MG gevraagd, en die vond het geloof ik wel normaal.

Vrijdag dan een eerste echte date. Of zoiets. Naar de film met een hele lading van zijn vrienden. Opdat het niet helemaal een uitwedstrijd zou zijn, heb ik MG en TtT ook meegevraagd. En dat MG mee was, was maar beter ook. Gedurende de hele film (en zo goed was de film nu ook weer niet) heeft hij niet één keer naar me gekeken, en de hele avond schonk hij meer aandacht aan zijn Chinees sprekende vrienden dan aan mij. Op zoek naar een pub of club om uit te gaan, zijn MG en ik er maar vlug tussenuit geknepen. (TtT was al weg.) Vanaf de bioscoop tot Chambers Street, waar we ons afscheidden van de groep, was het ook één en al Chinees wat de klok sloeg en was het tussen MG en mij vooral stil. Na Chambers Street heb ik de tranen nog tot het festivaltheater weten binnen te houden.

Pas binnen keihard janken. Maar waarom? Omdat de liefde niet wederzijds was? Omdat de liefde eigenlijk bij mijzelf ook niet aanwezig was en ik een stomme inschattingsfout had gemaakt? Omdat er aan de eenzaamheid geen einde kwam? Omdat ik dit hele verliefd zijn-gebeuren niet onder de knie heb? Omdat ik geen idee heb waarom ik hem nou eigenlijk leuk vond en wat ik nou eigenlijk van hem wilde? Alles. En niets. De leegte.

De volgende dag eerst niets aan mijn moeder verteld, maar er later toch maar een e-mail aan gewaagd. Het lieve antwoord dat daarop kwam is misschien nog het beste dat hieruit voort is gekomen.

Maar nog steeds is er dat verlangen. Naar de lieve lach, naar de genegenheid van dinsdagavond, naar het gevoel dat alleen zijn niet hoeft. Als ik dit alles rationaliseer, denk ik dat VP en ik allebei naar hetzelfde op zoek zijn, en dat we dat verward hebben met naar elkaar op zoek zijn? Niet iedereen past bij elkaar, en dat hebben we maar te accepteren. Vervelend is het wel, maar wat niet is, is niet. (En toch is-ie leuk.)

Nou is het oppassen dat ik de muren om me heen niet nog hoger en sterker opbouw, maar dat ik mensen toelaat. Ik ben benieuwd hoe dit afloopt.

(Misbruik van deze informatie zal leiden tot zwaar fysiek geweld.)

So...

At least the Annual crib books are going to look absolutely fantastic.

Weekend!

It’s unbelievable how quickly this week has gone by. Suddenly it was Friday already, and I don’t have the feeling I did anything near what I should have done in the course of a week. It seems like more people are having that feeling, so maybe it’s just the holidays that have messed up our ideas of what is a normal amount of work to do in a week?

I handed in a piece of work on Wednesday. It wasn’t anywhere near good, and there were a lot of gaps, but it was driving me crazy so I decided that handing in what I had was a better option than going crazy over trying to perfect it. LC was saying that it’s actually pretty normal to maybe not quite know what you’re doing and trying to find out which way to go. Meeting with AM next Thursday so we’ll see what we can come up with.

Honours courses are alright. Historical linguistics is nice but I’ve done it before, Linguistic reconstruction and language classification is interesting but maybe not particularly relevant and depending on the amount of work I’m supposed to do for it, I may not come to every class and only take the ones on contact. Another downside is that most of the courses seem to be turning into the DC show. Apart from the fact that I find his appearance and the sound of his voice extremely annoying, he constantly butts in with all these only distantly relevant comments. The undergrads may be impressed, but I wish he’d just shut his face and let AM and RC get on with their lectures.

Two great tutorials on Friday, especially the last one. The goal was to get some discussion going on what is a language, what is a dialect, how do you define them, etc. GT had dropped a bombshell in the lectures by saying that “English does not exist”. One girl was almost in tears, ‘cause if English doesn’t exist, how come she was studying English Language? So I went a bit ahead of schedule and explained that maybe there are no linguistic criteria to define English language, but there were social criteria and that was the whole point: English as a social construct.

The other good bit was talking about prototypes. They had to define Cockney, also by social criteria. Once they’d been told they did not have to be politically correct, there was a nice list of words associated with Cockneys. East London, East Enders, Del Boy, dodgy deals from the back of a truck, Burbery, chavs, uneducated, male, Tottenham Hotspur fans, short-fused... Good thing there weren’t any Cockneys in the group. But I think all the things about social constructs, identity conveyed by language etc. hit home. Bounce!

I did forget to tell them about this essay writing course the university is having for undergrads. Unfortunately it’s only one day before the deadline for the EL1 essay, but I may tell them about it anyway. Somehow somewhere some of them seem to have picked up the idea that vomiting out a bit mush of long words is a good idea. That’s going to bite them in the back when I’m going to have to mark their essays.

Spent most of yesterday evening online chatting to VP, which was nice. Apparently my name in Cantonese is 嵐歌 which translates as ‘the song of the wind in the mountains’. Very poetic. I also got invited to go to the cinema on Sunday but unfortunately I can’t go because there is a NS committee meeting that night. Expletives suppressed.

Only nine weeks left as NS secretary. And after saving the Annual (I hope) earlier in the week, I also saved the Student Festival cèilidh. It seems like we’re now part of Rukkus which is some form of charities’ night in Teviot. I also hope that RK managed to get us involved in that cèilidh on the Society Oscars night, otherwise we (read: RK) will have upset a lot of people and gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. I wonder how heated the meeting tomorrow will be; that’ll kind of depend on the newlyweds’ attitudes to power and leadership. We don’t have MG there to be the counter-alpha female so we’re going to have to try to fend for ourselves....

Passed the test!

My EL1 marking got approved. A big sigh of relief, because I really wasn’t looking forward to spending another 20 hours reading bad English and overt lack of insight into the grammar of English. The one student I suspected of having copied pieces from a book – he suddenly changed register spectacularly – got away with it, as they haven’t had proper plagiarism warnings yet. Oh well...

New Scotland is slowly getting started again. BW’s class yesterday had no beginners, there were like seven old people. Dem class wasn’t much better and after having had to do BW’s class, I can’t say we were all too attentive or motivated. I managed to book AK for the Student Festival cèilidh. He’s upped his rates again, but it’s short notice so I decided we should go for it. Also called James Gillespies again, as I hadn’t heard from them. Turns out they’d sent a confirmation ages ago, that I didn’t receive. Good thing I called, ’cause they had us down for the wrong date! Major disaster narrowly avoided...

It’s lonely in the house without MG or TtT.

Back to work

Okay, I am recovering from the amazement at RK and AI’s wedding plans. This came as a massive surprise not just to me; disbelief seems to be the most common reaction among everyone I’ve been speaking to.

I finished the last bit of the EL1 marking. I still had some comments to write on some of the scripts. These were the first scripts I marked, when we were still told (erroneously) that we weren’t supposed to write on them. So I made little summarizing comments on a notepad while marking that I now copied onto the scripts. I think there may be some minor inconsistencies in the marking, but no more than two points and if need be I can take those two points away somewhere else...

Also been working a bit on a first write-up, but not very much has been happening on that front. I have lots of bits and pieces, but it’s yet to be transformed in a flowing story. The goal is to have it finished by the end of the week; with EL1 and some honours courses to do I’m not sure how viable that goal is, but we’re going to try.

I also seem to have acquired another flatmate in MG’s absence. TtT came yesterday morning and hasn’t left. It’s actually quite nice and we’re having a nice relaxed bit of Netherlands in Edinburgh.

Current reading: Wijdlopige, brede en waarachtige beschrijving van de ongelukkige reizen van het schip de Visstick en haar gezagvoerder Kapitein Iglo (‘Wide-ranging, broad and truthful description of the unfortunate travels of the ship the Fish Finger and her commander Captain Birdseye’) by, among others, Windig & De Jong of Heinz fame. It is as good as it sounds.

Oh my god...

AI proposed to RK on top of the Eiffel Tower!
Gasp.

The phatic function of communication

...is communicating for the sake of communication. Like when a child says, "Mum?" - "Yeah?" - "Nothing." The whole point of this is just to keep the channels of communication open. This is a phatic blog entry. Nothing happened that is noteworthy.

Net nei it Hearrenfean hjoed

The planned trip to see the skating in Heerenveen has been cancelled. The KNMI has issued a weather warning, and although it should be no problem to get to Thialf, it's not entirely likely there'll be trains back. According to the latest weather predictions, the ice storms won't hit the North before midnight so technically I should be okay, but JH has to go back down South which is likely to be impossible from about 9pm onwards. JH had already left but came back just before I was supposed to leave. And I would only be leaving because I'd told him I'd meet him at Thialf at 3. And he doesn't have a mobile, of course...

So we're going to do the same thing as we did the past couple of days: watch it on tv and discuss it on MSN. It's actually more comfortable and much easier to follow what's going on, but you miss the experience of standing in a crowded stadium and freezing to death. Better luck next year, maybe...

Holiday

Boxing day was spent at my aunt's in The Hague. She had organized an afternoon programme, I think mainly because my uncle (her brother) likes the after-dinner party drinks and will then drive back without any problems. Anyway, the food was good: an old-fashioned Dutch Sunday meal of rollade, Brussels sprouts, green beans, potatoes and gravy. Ice for dessert; my mom had brought back a Christmas pudding from Edinburgh when she went to my graduation, but I think that was outvoted in favour of ice, so the pudding will have to wait until some other time. They appear to have use-by dates in the very distant future anyway, so dessert for Christmas 2015 is all settled.

Between the main course and dessert we went on a little walk through the dunes to the beach boulevard of Kijkduin. They had some sort of artsy exposition there, with large milky-glass balls with paintings on, that were illuminated from the inside. They were supposed to be gorgeous. They were okay, but not exactly a life-changing experience. The sea was much nicer.

The train ride back the next day was problematic. Between Gouda and Woerden we had to go really slowly because the tracks were slippery from the snow. Then just after Amersfoort there was another slow stretch because someone was spotted walking along the tracks. After a while we sped up again and they said the person had not been found. A couple of stations on, the same thing. This time we did see the guy being picked up by the police. I wonder what the idea was behind building all these mental hospitals in the woods right next to the railroad tracks...

Today I had to go to the bank. They called yesterday, because apparently I don't qualify for a student account anymore, because they spotted that I no longer receive money from the government. The Bank may need to wake up, cause I haven't received that money since 2001! I now seem to be a young professional, cause that's the package they offered me now. They did say you needed at least €900 a month 'feeding' into your account. Too bad, but I did change the contract to 800 before I signed it. Banks are evil corporations that you really need to keep an eye on. After my mom's problems with her credit card while she was in Edinburgh, they are seriously considering moving all their money away from this bank -- then see how nice they suddenly are...

Radio 2 is currently doing their mammoth Top 2000 broadcast. The best 2000 songs ever as voted by their listeners. It's the seventh year in a row that they do this, it all started in 1999 as a run-up to the new millennium. A chart that runs from midnight into Boxing Day until midnight New Year's Eve, with really a lot of good records! (Currently a very bad hour actually, numbers 965 to 952, the next hour will be better.) After six years with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody at #1, it's now Boudewijn de Groot's Avond which has rightly clinched the top spot. Either way, it's a lot better than turning on the tv to any of the music channels. We have three -- TMF, MTV Nederland, and The Box -- and at any given time, at least one of them plays a Robbie Williams song.

A good thing on tv these days is the Dutch qualifying tournament for the Olympics in speedskating. Two days down, two days to go. It's very exciting, they're going really really fast and the results so far are just perfect: enough nice surprises and unexpected results but it's all safe bets that qualify for the Olympics. I'll be going to Heerenveen on Friday with JH and EvL to watch it in person (1000 m ladies, 1500 m men [that's going to be murder!] and 5000 m ladies). Should be good.

Oh yeah, the Christmas present books: three Bommel books by Marten Toonder (De toornviolen, De loodhervormer and De kwade inblazingen), Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosophy Club (in Dutch; set in Edinburgh), and a book with short stories by Eastern European authors with names with hacheks on the S and dashes through the L.

Sunset

Yuletide posting

An amazing amount of melted cheese in my stomach, the idea that it's not necessary to eat ever again, and really no good movies on tv for the rest of the night. Time to catch up then on the events of the past couple of days.

The Museum of Falsified Arts is quite nice. Really it's like a stand-up comedy show. We were entertained first by a guy who told us his whole personal history and how he and his wife -- whom he had met in the photocopier room of the high school they both worked at -- started collecting art, how they were conned into buying several pieces of falsified art, and how they decided to start a museum with these. The art was maybe not the most inspiring thing of the museum, it was more the stories surrounding it; how they knew the painting wasn't made by the original artist. They also had some non-falsified paintings, among them a drawing by Queen Wilhelmina and an oil painting by 'B. van B.', which everyone knows is Beatrix.

The other museum I visited with my family was the Hunebed Museum in Borger. Hunebeds are neolithic rock graves. The museum was re-done last year and I hadn't been to the new version yet. The old museum was kind of old and boring, really an old-fashioned museum that didn't "talk" to the visitors anymore. The new one is much more of an "experience", and personally I was impressed by their graphic art (although they should have made sure the notes actually stuck to the exposition cases...). WW took a lot of notes because she found a lot of good ideas for three visitor centres she has to set up in Egypt. One is about the Abapta, a nomadic people; the other ones I think are in Berenike and the Fayum, but I may be wrong.

I've also been marking EL1 assignments. Seventeen down, thirteen to go. Overall, they seem to have been made slightly worse than the first exam, but that one I may still have overmarked slightly and in this one I may be a bit too strict.

I have also been watching a couple of movies, or rather, I've made some halfhearted attempts at watching movies. There is definitely a load of bad Christmas movies out there. Harry Potter II in German is quite a different experience (Harry, hol schon mal den Wagen!) and why is there no channel among the 31 I have on cable that is broadcasting The Sound of Music over Christmas?

Home Sweet Home

And we're back in the house I grew up in. The travels on Tuesday were fairly painless. It did involve getting up at 5.30 am, getting out of the house at 6.30, taking an airport bus at 7, arriving at the airport at 7.30, then waiting for my flight at 9.30. The flight seemed to be slightly late, but we arrived in Amsterdam on time so I guess there must have been favourable winds. There were no queues to speak of at passport control, and the luggage arrived with whizzing speeds. I hardly had time to get a train ticket from the machine before I could pick up my suitcase and leave. Of course, even with the trip going so smoothly, you arrive in the terminal about 3 minutes after the train has left, so that means another 57 minutes to kill at the airport.

Reading materials for the trip were the latest issue of Time (the English edition, the one with the best news pictures of 2005), the latest BBC History magazine, and the Christmas issue of HP De Tijd.

So far it's a weird mix of work and holiday. I do have a big load of EL1 tests to mark (13 down, 17 to go - and then to compare marks for consistency and give final marks), and AMcM seems to expect a first chapter of some sort somewhere in the first weeks of term. But other than that, I also have enough time to watch television. I have a television, and 31 channels!

Next term I am planning to take two Honours courses just because they are interesting. One is Historical Linguistics, the other one is Language Classification (or something along those lines). I found out one of my class mates for the Historical Linguistics one is going to be SN. That could be interesting...

Today we're going to the Museum of Falsified Arts. It'll be me, my parents and my mom's best friend (partly as a translator, cause the guides there seem only to be able to speak dialect, which is totally unintelligible to those from outside the area). And there we will meet my aunt, my cousin and his wife. They (HB and WW) live in Los Angeles and are over for Christmas and New Year's. They'll be staying with us for the next couple of days, so that should be good.

Thought of the day: It's okay that there should be a prize for the best television commercial, but I don't exactly see the need for a two-hour live televized gala. Also interesting that I knew exactly none of the nominated commercials. Living abroad without a telly may have something to do with that...

(My computer is still on British time though:)

Omissions

I also meant to say... well, I think I should explain what ticked me off on the whole ‘British Christmas culture is weird’ thing. It’s giving Christmas cards to people you see every day. Or every other day. Or at least very frequently. On my desk I have 11 Christmas cards. All of them were given to me in person – or in one case thrown vaguely in my direction (thanks CA!). And they all say something along the lines of ‘Dear Remco’, pre-printed Christmas greetings, ‘Love, X’.

They become even more personal if you realize that e.g. JW was writing names on already sealed envelopes during the New Scotland Christmas party. RW was a bit more personal, but she went into the hallway every time a new person arrived to write them a Christmas card.

So what’s the point of giving Christmas cards if you can just wish people a merry Christmas in person? Four of them were for charity, maybe that’s the point? (All of this doesn’t go for MM, who has gone through the bother of embroidering something and writing a personal message that goes beyond ‘Dear Remco’.)

Christmas party
The other thing I should have said was about the Christmas party. There was also a highlight while we were still there. This involved HC having rung for a taxi, and when the taxi man arrived, NM (who was already very drunk) answered the buzzer with ‘N’s Sex Services’. I wonder what the taxi driver would have thought of HC.

Travel preparations

Closing up for Christmas is a very complicated process. It seems to take several days and comes with a variety of food and drink substances, and above all a large amount of ritual. For someone who hasn’t grown up with the British Christmas traditions — even with a tradition where Christmas is definitely subordinate to the much more important feast of St Nicholas, the original Santa Claus — it takes a bit of getting used to, I guess.

Thursday morning was a meeting of the prospective organizers of the LEL Postgraduate Conference, which is to take place in April. It used to be TAAL (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) but after the merger and the creation of the One Big Happy Family of Linguistics and English Language, it’s now LEL. I think we’re quite nicely divided among the subject areas. Anyway, I seem to be the only one comfortable enough with computers, so I got myself involved in doing website stuff and making the abstracts look nice on paper. KM and I were surprised at the absence of VP, very unlike him.

Thursday evening was the final night of dancing for the year. Extended social, with a lot of the year’s favourites. I had some difficulty calling Hooper’s Jig from the Green Book — which ones are the squares again? — but I did Midnight Oil perfectly so that made up for it. ZB’s English dance was manic, even at half speed, but can we please do that again? RK was slightly stressed throughout the night, for a variety of reasons: [a] she had exams the next day, [b] her reason for living chose the Big Monkey Movie over her, and [c] CI had buggered off to Romania without notice. Quite interesting to keep my cool and calm and pretending to be saving the day...

Friday morning was another chapter in Benedict Anderson’s Forestillede fællesskaber, after which lunch and some general tidying in the office. Friday afternoon from 3 was the departmental Christmas party. Organized by MB, the tech support guy, who really put his heart and soul into it. This involved a treasure hunt connected to pass-the-parcel, and an attempt at the world record shortest Strip the Willow. I think a bar and a half of music and not even getting beyond the spinning bit qualifies as ‘world record shortest’, but maybe not as ‘Strip the Willow’?

Friday evening was departmental Christmas dinner, organized by the postgrads themselves. Well, by LC and AP really; quite impressive as they had prepared this after the undergrad lunch on Wednesday, which for the two of them involved drinking from half noon to 2.30am. We went to Buffet King for dinner, all you can eat Chinese for £13 — but they charge for tap water?!

Saturday was the New Scotland Christmas party at TtT’s. The themes were Y and H, which bonus points for combining the two. It was impressive how inventive people were at combining Y and H as an excuse not to dress up. The reactions to the salmiak were interesting, especially YK’s face, but in the end it was about 50/50 positive and negative reactions. The After Eight Game — work an After Eight from your forehead into your mouth using only your facial muscles — was amusing. Congratulations to JW for getting at least three or four of them into her mouth without any problem!

MG seems to have caught a stomach bug from one of the little ‘snot monsters’ at Cameron Toll. They should be glad to see Santa, not infect his elves with nasty little viruses! Food came out of pretty much all holes, not pretty; and we narrowly avoided CM vomiting by-proxy.

The most memorable event seems to have occurred after we left, when JH (in clearly intoxicated state) swapped costumes with NM (also not quite sober, we can assume). There is photographic evidence which was obtained from LF via AF, but for obvious reasons it seems wiser not to publish that here.

Yesterday consisted mainly of playing nurse to MG, who could hardly keep in water. Buying the rehydration drink thing was difficult, as pharmacies aren’t normally open on Sundays. Later in the afternoon I got a visitor, so I spent some time with LG before she went to church. And finally today is a matter of cleaning up, tying up the loose ends, packing etc. I brought out a load of paper for recycling, done most of the ironing (except for the bits that aren’t quite dry yet), and with this also the item ‘update blog’ can be stricken from the To Do list.

Tomorrow morning is the cheap Easyjet flight home. Get up at 5.30am to be home by 4pm. Then it can start snowing.

Food update

Decent platter of meat (kruwa je luba), chocolate cake for dessert. Not bad. Not bad at all.

We were too late for the fish-eye milkshake. Can’t say I’m too bothered.

Celebrate!

Today was the Date of Dates for MG, the date that’s been hanging over her head like a Damoclean sword for the past months. In other words, thesis due date. But with the deadline met earlier today, stress is over and peace and tranquility can once again take over this household.

It’s really not been that bad. The period from fourteen to seven days ago (ish) seems to have been the one with most stress for MG, and I was afraid that as doomsday neared, the stress would only get worse. Instead, she seems to have gone through a period of intense worry and suddenly, about a week ago, all the pieces of the puzzle shoved into place and it was really just a matter of finishing the product.

I got to be a font nazi yesterday and helped MG decide on the layout for her thesis. Although I did proofread the thing and as far as I can judge human ecology, it all seems to make sense and is presented in a logical way, never mind the contents – at least it looks good. Body text in a 10-point Minion (kudos to Robert Slimbach!), headings in something else that MG had herself and that actually looks quite classy in combination with Minion. That came out very positive, and once MG was done with it, also very purple.

So tonight MG, TT and I are going to celebrate. Dinner in The Apartment. It didn’t get very good reviews in the media, but TT had food there recently and was quite positive so we’re going to give it a go. On the way there, MG is going to pop into Meadowood to get one of her Chinese fish-eye milkshakes. Shudder.

Thought of the day: «Zelena kruwa kupa w ćopłej wodźe.»

Salmiak

MG and AF object to Dutch candy.

Salmiak (NH4Cl) is ammonium chloride. There are several ways of producing salmiak. One of them is that it is what is left over after making fertilizer.

Prompting MG and AF to state, “It’s not even good enough to be crap. It’s a by-product of crap. It’s a by-product of substitute crap!”

Such disrespect for non-Anglo-Saxon culinary cultures!