Books

Read this year:

Alexander McCall Smith, De filosofieclub van Isabel Dalhousie [The Sunday Philosophy Club]. A bit of a flimsy story about Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher, who sees someone fall down from the balcony in a theatre and then starts being way too nosy for her own good. This is why we have police. The nice thing about the book was that it was set in Edinburgh, mainly in Bruntsfield and Morningside, so it was easier to bring the story to life.

Marten Toonder, De toornviolen. A Bommel classic. Bommel wants to enter a flower contest, but his violets are nothing compared to the botanical masterpieces of his neighbour marquis de Cantecler. Until he finds an invention that Kwetal had left lying around. Bommel should know better than to use Kwetal’s inventions...

Marten Toonder, De kwade inblazingen. More Bommel adventures, this time with a garden shed that becomes a portal to another dimension (again because Kwetal can’t keep an eye on his things). It’s a nice dimension, until Super and Hieper manage to piss off the little creatures that live there and they decide to enter our dimension. Oops.

Marten Toonder, De loodhervormer. Not Kwetal this time, but a mysterious traveller that has a method of turning lead into gold. Not only does this mess up your plumbing, it also wreaks havoc for your economy once Bommel and everyone else start transforming lead.

Mark Abley, Spoken here: travels among threatened languages. A very good popular science book about endangered languages. At times it is a freak show of languages, with the all-incorporating verbs in Inuit, or the verbs in Boro with highly specific meanings (‘to fall into a well unknowingly’, ‘to love for the last time’), but it also paints a decent picture of all that threatens the world’s linguistic diversity. Too bad he’s not quite exact on his Faroese stuff.

Hans Schoots, Van Amerongen, letterknecht. A biography of Martin van Amerongen, a leading Dutch journalist and former editor of such magazines as Vrij Nederland and De Groene Amsterdammer. Nice and short, and with plenty of room for Van Amerongen’s cynicism.

Now reading:

Sybe Izaak Rispens, Einstein in Nederland: een intellectuele biografie. Well, not quite reading yet but it’s the next one on the list. A biography of Albert Einstein with special reference to his link to the Netherlands. Apparently his links to the Dutch scientific world were crucial in bringing the ideas of this German scientist to the English-speaking world during World War I.

On the still to read pile:

Armand Leroi, Mutanten. A very thick book about the human body and everything that can go wrong with it. Includes pictures of innocent things like Siamese twins and more obscure mutations of the human body. Rather off-putting.

Arthur Japin, De grote wereld. This year’s Book Week gift. I have no idea what this is about, although it seems to be a story written from a kid’s perspective. The kids on the cover are dressed a lot older than they are and have ugly teeth.

Angst overwint alles: de beste verhalen uit het nieuwe Europa. A selection of short stories and novellas from Eastern Europe. I started the first story at some point, by Marek Hłasko, but it couldn’t really catch me so I put the book aside again. Arnon Grunberg (whose own books are actually very good) should have picked another story to start this with.

Cooperative weather

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday saw the weather gods having gotten their act together, so this allowed for a couple of very relaxing but still fairly productive days. Reading the restricted-access inter-library loan in the mornings, then doing some work in the office, and then spending the last two working hours of every day in the Meadows. You do actually get quite a bit read and I only got hit by a frisbee once.

Went Dunedining on Wednesday which was nice, although my ankle seems to become less happy now. I think I’m going to have to disappoint JF and not sign up for the Japanese dem. I might be able to assist YK in calling... ヒルトヒルト１２３クル。　ヒルトヒルト１２３４。　キクキク　クル。　クルクル。At least that’s what it sounded like last year, when JM and me had her sussed.

Thursday we were at the W’s to watch old videos from Ludwigstein. BW hasn’t changed one bit in the past twelve years, but JB with short hair was quite an experience. It also looks like New Scotland has been doing the same dances on trips since forever, and everyone keeps moaning about. Stop moaning and change the dances to something you do like! What’s stopping you? (Ah, BW...)

Friday was a day of haar. I could hardly make out LG’s flat from my office window, and it was also fairly cold. So that was a day of office work. I started work on writing up the paper for the proceedings of the Shetland conference, and that seems to be going quite nicely.

We were a bit afraid that the haar would last until Saturday, ’cause LG had a picnic planned in the Meadows. But the weather on Saturday was fab. We spent the entire afternoon in the Meadows, I got a bit of a tan and improved my hand-eye coordination throwing a tennis ball back and forth with TB.

The weather today should be good enough to go out again, perhaps sit on the grass outside our flat so I can still listen to internet radio. The Netherlands vs. Serbia-Montenegro today. Serbia and Montenegro are officially two countries. I think this is incredibly unfair, two against one.

Uncooperative weather

Of course the minute I go out to sit in the Meadows, it gets cloudy and windy and cold an unpleasant. On a more positive note: one of my Inter-Library Loans has arrived. Just a pity I can’t go and read it in the Meadows...

Productivity

A good 2300 words today. At this rate I'll have my Ph.D. written by the end of August. (As if.) But I think this does allow me to knock off early today and read another chapter from the French book out in the Meadows.

The week

And again, another week has passed. Blogging is like doing the dishes: it doesn’t take that long, but if you don’t do it, the things stack up and by the time you have time to do it, the pile of things you need to write is so big that you nearly have to give up before even starting.

Sunday: I made lunch for AL and JB. Home-baked bread. It was very nice. Then JB went to get her mother from the train station, I hung out with AL for a bit, then went home with her to get her white dress that she had to bring to JF. Walked home with a bit of a detour and had an early night.

Monday: Dancing in the Gardens. I was stewarding together with AL. We managed to do one dance, and for the rest talked to some tourists although we were unsuccessful in convincing them to come in and dance. There were Australians, and a German/Spanish couple. The Australians took lots of pictures of us with our oversized steward badges and red flag and whistles and stuff. A bit over-organised, those Gardens people. Afterwards to the pub.

Tuesday: Trip practice. I danced as a lady all the time. It’s quite difficult to polka as a lady, especially if JB doesn’t quite lead. GH is better at leading. Some drama afterwards, and I’m glad AL was still in Edinburgh.

Wednesday: AL was packing, or at least trying to. I went to get her frozen vegetables, ended up chatting for an hour or so before we went out to bring her viola to NW for storage, and then I went home. A quick bite and then Dunedin. Which was nice. Walked home with SM and had a nice talk about medieval nationalism and suchlike.

Thursday: This involved a book and a bath. The book was in French and it takes ages to read a chapter, so MG was slightly worried when I only got out of the bath after a good hour and a half.

Friday: Another chapter in the book.

Saturday: Got a (drastic) haircut in the morning, then went to the Meadows to have a picknick lunch with AF and KH. We were later also joined by LG (with SB and his mother passing along as well), and also RW joined us for a bit. Then joined LG and KH again at 6 to walk to the Dunedin Dance, which was very enjoyable although a bit warm. The party at NW & RW was quiet and I was too tired to really participate.

Disappointments of the week: MR moving away and RW not being very keen to teach again next year.

Wedding

Yesterday evening I went to the wedding cèilidh for MS and EM. I went to high school with MS (she was one year below me) and ended up in Edinburgh five years ago. And now she’s married a true Scot and are they moving to Loch Tay once they finally finish building their house.

I really don’t see MS enough. I’m also friends with her sister and I think I’ve seen AS more than MS in the past year – and AS lives back in the Netherlands!

Anyway, the cèilidh of course was nowhere near the one at RW and NW’s wedding, although it was in the same venue. They had Jimmy Shandrix, and the band had the biggest trouble getting people up on the dance floor. So yes, one part of the guests was Dutch so don’t know how to cèilidh, and the others were mostly folk musicians, and they do music rather than cèilidhing. I think at one point we had three sets up but that was really exceptional. (There were 160-ish people there.)

So I managed to limit myself to two dance partners: AS and MS’s ex-flatmate F. We landed ourselves some compliments on our enthusiasm and our dancing technique. (AS is a fitness and dance instructor so has a vague idea what she’s doing; F had never done anything like this before!) The band had some weird ideas about what dances go together. After Hooligan’s Reel, which I didn’t know but turned out to be a dumbed-down version of the reel bit from the Strathspey and Highland Reel we did at SA’s highland classes, they decided to go straight onto the Highland Scottische. Ouch. I opted out of doing the Eightsome Reel with non-dancers, and was slightly worried when they ended the evening with the Gay Gordons!

All in all a nice evening, and I don’t have to feel too bad for missing the beer and skittles. Tonight a dem and then TT’s 30th birthday party.

I am also doing quite well on the eating less chocolate and stopping biting my nails fronts. The chocolate thing is only a slim succes (no pun intended) but that may have had to do with ER, BB and WB’s birthdays in the office last week. The nail thing is better. MG seems to have been in awe. Now I just need to (a) stop plucking at them so that they become a bit stronger also at the ends, and (b) figure out how people actually do things with long nails. They get in the way. How does JB work his claw...

Inter-Library Loan Moan

So GT finally managed to dig up the Inter-Library Loan vouchers from his desk of horrors, and armed with five vouchers and five Inter-Library Loan forms I went on my way to the library. But unfortunately, I had the wrong vouchers! These were £3 vouchers, and they had been replaced last December by £4 vouchers. When I wasn’t entirely jumping at the chance of paying £5 extra – if the department pays for Inter-Library Loans, then wrong vouchers are the department’s problem and not mine – I got told by the library woman that I was unreasonable because the Inter-Library Loans were heavily subsidized anyway as they cost £20 to process.

If they cost £20 to process, they might as well buy the book!

In the end, it got sorted because I just went and collected more vouchers from GT. Now all I can do is wait. In my imagination, how an Inter-Library Loan is processed is as follows. Library bod in Edinburgh reads form, sees that I have already written down which libraries possess this book, sends e-mail to other library. Library bod in Oxford (which is the other library) sees e-mail, prints out e-mail, looks up shelfmarks, walks to shelves, picks up two books, picks up two journals, walks to photocopier, photocopies three articles, puts journals back on the reshelving shelf, walks back to desk, shoves books and photocopies in envelope, puts envelope in outgoing mail. There maybe some filling in forms involved but library bods are allegedly literate so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Envelope gets sent to Edinburgh. Library bod in Edinburgh opens envelope, sends me e-mail, I come pick up the books straightaway. Really this should be possible in two, maybe three days.

I’ve never had an Inter-Library Loan within four weeks.

Rant over.

Yindyssagh

...which apparently means 'wonderful' in Manx.

I went to a talk on Manx in the language politics and language planning series yesterday, and this morning they had a Manx lesson that I went to. I felt a bit lost between all the people who obviously spoke Gaelic to some extent (although I guess I speak Gaelic to a certain extent as well: I know agus means 'and'), but it was quite enjoyable and you pick up quite a bit. Although I wouldn't know anymore what 'sit down', 'stand up', and 'I dislike Douglas' are.

Have also been speeding through my new book, Peter Burke's Languages and communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Relevant to what I'm doing, but not so relevant that it renders my own Ph.D. unnecessary. I bought it at lunchtime yesterday and am over halfway.

Last night we had a committee meeting which was good. We decided that we do not think NW is planning to be injured, that asses, donkeys and mules are different animals, and llamas are just another story entirely, and we discussed the most space-economical way to bury people on beaches or in graveyards. SP's Greek candy thing tasted like carrots.

Muddy Bay Diaries (7)

Two more photos from Shetland...

Earl Patrick Stewart’s little pied-à-terre in Scalloway.
(By the way, not this one.)


The new inhabitants of St Ninian’s Isle.

Logging back

So it took me a week to write everything about Shetland. And now I’m once again a week behind. It’s probably a good idea not to go to trip practice tonight – I’m not going on the trip and I need to get away from the image of «perpetual volunteer» – and continue writing blog entries.

I got extremely frustrated at work last week, because I was writing the same stuff about Norn for about the fifth time. I had a little way out by working a bit on Sorbian, but until I get new articles and books in through Inter-Library Loans (which involves getting Inter-Library Loan vouchers from GT, who has to dig them up from his «desk of horrors») there is little more I can do with the limited information that I have. I did go into AM and ask what I had to do, and she suggested to work on Breton. Yeah, as if there’s any information on Breton... My postgrad conference article is apparently publishable if I add more than one case study – so that has to wait until I have enough data on Breton and/or Sorbian.

I also talked to CH who suggested I take some days off, but that would only make me feel more guilty about not doing anything. I also had lunch with VP which killed a couple of hours and was quite nice.

Then of course the big event of the weekend was the Summer Dance, for which I’d written the programme. I knew it’d be alright, but it seemed like many people were sceptical because they didn’t know half the dances. (I say – blame LG, AG and random Dunedin people for making me do them in dem class, inters or on Wednesdays; I honestly picked them up from somewhere!) But by the end they were all very positive and NW passed on loads of compliments on the programme, with exactly that type of reaction: didn’t know anything but it was great! The one chance find (Cousin Jim) turned out to be quite nice, and once RW and NW had figured out how the bizarre Three-Cornered Hat worked, it was actually quite nice. Still needs a better strathspey bit though.

After party was at ours, and lasted till 3.30. I had danced every dance except for the first one, so my feet were completely knackered and I couldn’t stand anymore. Quite literally. So I sank first onto, and then into my bed. That may not have been very sociable but I really couldn’t stand anymore. And AL, CI and SÖ joined me on my bed so I wasn’t completely alone. (How many English speakers would understand the expression «Remi» for being alone, I wonder?)

Okay, now I’m going to say something that really shouldn’t be said in New Scotland circles. The barbecue on Portobello Beach is a bad idea. It might have been fine when the term finished in June and the weather would actually cooperate, but if the temperature is 9 degrees, the wind is howling over the beach, the barbecues provide a sole, tiny source of warmth and we might just be able to eat all the food before the rain starts pouring down (the scenario of 2005 and 2006), maybe it’s time to revise the tradition.

Oh, we also watched Eurovision. («We» being myself, AF, JW and HP.) Finland, Russia and Bosnia rightfully ended up in the Top 3, I have no idea what possessed Ireland to give 12 points to Lithuania, and why did Armenia not get more points than they did. Eyebrow guy from Malta got one lone point from Albania, that was kind of pathetic.

Now I am completely lacking sleep. I’ve also not been drinking as much tea in the office (I was totalling about three litres a day which seems a bit excessive, so I need to slow down on that). I should also eat less chocolate and sweets, but that’s proving difficult with ER, BB and WB having birthdays on three consecutive days this week, so there’s birthday cake in the office. Maybe I should go to trip practice and dance off the extra calories. I will also burn calories being frustrated about trip people (and myself, but I have an excuse) not knowing the trip dances. Although with JW teaching rather than BW it should be less annoying. Still, I think I’d better stay home.

Muddy Bay Diaries (6)

Saturday evening
After we returned to the hotel, the Faroese quickly went to the bar before it closed. It was quite an interesting conversation, and although I’m not entirely sure how drunk Hjalmar was, it did make for some good comments. He wanted the Corpus Carminum Faroense to be parsed entirely because it would make a good corpus for historical linguistic research into Faroese. But he also thought it would be a good idea to tag everything for literary topic and function. Eyðun didn’t think that was quite necessary. This conversation alternated randomly with Hjalmar’s career plans about selling fish to Germans. All he needed was a fax, an internet connection and a mobile phone, apparently. Another one of the Faroese tried talking to me but I didn’t understand a word of his drunken babble.

Sunday
Sunday was a sightseeing tour of the South Mainland of Shetland. First stop was the Crofters Museum, which is a little crofters cottage that they’ve done up. It’s supposed to give you an idea of how the crofters lived. Except this cottage was about twice the size of all the other cottages of which the ruins are still scattered across the fields. It was quite nice though, but that may have been a result of the extremely good weather. Imagine living there with the usual Shetland weather of rain coming horizontally at you with the speed of an intercity train... They also had a little water mill a bit further down the hill. Quite idyllic.

Next stop: Old Scatness, which they claim is an iron age village. Or a Pictish settlement. They were still busy reconstructing it, so a large part of the terrain was heaps of stones held together by plastic and sand bags. The one building that was finished had a peat fire in it that was particularly smoky that day, so perhaps not advisable to go inside. When the guide at Scatness started telling about their little vegetable garden, I kind of lost interest. Apparently, the Picts had little gardens where they cultivated nettles, dandelions and other things that we call weeds because they grow everywhere. The woman was saying that they do indeed grow everywhere, and they take root wherever you just chuck the weeds, but if you try planting them they die. Maybe that’s a sign that these people didn’t actually have dandelion gardens but if they needed dandelions for anything, they’d just go into the fields and pluck a few kilos?

The airport which was right beside Old Scatness was a much nicer view. They’d just extended the East-West runway at the cost of half a million pounds per metre or something ridiculous. This also means the runway now crosses the road. There are no beams or anything, just a traffic sign saying ‘Positively no stopping on or deviating from this road, by order. Sumburgh Airport Authority.’ There didn’t seem to be an airplane coming so I stood on the runway. It’s impressively short, and you really hope they’d brake more than they did... otherwise it’s right back into the sea.

There was a quick stop at the hotel next to Jarlshof, where they have excavated an old Viking settlement, and then it was on to Sumburgh Head, the southernmost point of Shetland, to eat the lunch we had collected at the hotel. Great views, lots of birds (seagulls are scarily big!) and almost no wind, which was scary.

The tour was concluded at St Ninian’s Isle. The island is connected to the mainland through a narrow strip of sand. In the 1870s they decided that it was much more profitable to have sheep on St Ninian’s Isle than people, so they cleared the island and filled it back up again with sheep. That’s still the situation today. The strip of sand overflows regularly but not at every high tide, or the tide had been low for unnaturally long, because the seaweed on the beach was totally dried out. We had a look at the ruins of the church of St Ninian’s Isle, and I decided to head to the top of the hill so I could have a clear view of Foula. (That’s the peat bog on a rock, and apparently the most outlying island of Britain, although JW and I had decided that it wasn’t. Not the most outlying. They’re probably right about the peat.) But the hill kept on going and going and going and I never seemed to get to the top so I stood on a little wall, saw Foula and left it at that.

That evening was the conference dinner. Not a cold buffet but a proper dinner! I had spinach and potato soup first, then Shetland lamb, and finished with strawberry cheese cake. About time for some decent food too!

Monday
The return flight was a lot less eventful than the trip to Shetland. The airplane was now green and had the Loganair logo on it, so Klaske and I decided that the other one must have given up completely and they’d just used another one. (They do use the same airplane all the time, apparently.) They put me at the emergency exit which I’m never too happy about but (a) I fly too little to remember to request a window seat not at the emergency exit, and (b) there wasn’t any other place left so I got stuck there. Fortunately everything went well, we managed to land and lift off again in Wick, and we were in Edinburgh before I knew it. Might have slept for a bit actually...

All in all a nice trip, a good conference and a good experience. I’ve already been invited back to Shetland and back to the Faroes. I just might.

Muddy Bay Diaries (5)

So where were we...

Saturday daytime
The big event on the Saturday morning was not the seals, but my talk. I was up directly before lunch, which apparently is a good slot. I had prepared 20 minutes as Brian had originally instructed, although it would probably turn out 25 anyway, and then padded a bit when Brian gave me 50 minutes for talk and questions. I just seemed to keep on yapping, and I must have talked for about 40 minutes. Quite ridiculous really. Throughout the talk I kept glancing at Brian, whose work I’ve been using, and Doreen who was one of my supervisors, but they didn’t have any noticeable facial expressions. Not helpful guys!

Anyway, all in all it went pretty well. The questions weren’t too harmful, even from the irritating mad lunatic that Klaske had warned me about. Then the compliments started rolling in, which was quite awkward. First from Doreen, then from a gazillion others. Including the fat dialect poetess with the Nana Mouskouri glasses, the president of the Shetland Amenity Trust who I thought wasn’t a native speaker of English (oops!) and a host of other local celebrities. There were also a couple of Juan Antonio Samaranch comments: my talk was apparently the best yet. Or the most interesting yet.

So from then it was relaxation time. The rest of the talks was moderately interesting, but apart from mine, I think the most interesting one was Leyvoy’s. Or the debate between Hjalmar Petersen and Michael Schulte about whether Jakobsen’s or Hammershaimb’s (well, Jón Sigurðsson’s, really) spelling is better. I side with Michael on that one. There’s also interesting ways in which Leyvoy’s talk can be drawn into that. And then there’s some more stuff that ties into that again. Really cool stuff.

After the talks had finished, there was a tour of Scalloway Castle, led by an Orcadian tour guide (which was pretty random, considering we were in Shetland). A nice little castle those Stewart earls had built for themselves, although the labour was not always entirely voluntary. The view was also quite nice, or at least it must have been in the earls’ time before they whacked those ugly modern metal-plate buildings between the castle and the bay.

Saturday evening
That evening the organizers had provided food again, and once again it was a cold buffet, although it was slightly better than the day before. After dinner there was entertainment in the form of a Shetland foy. I had done a Google search before and had decided that it was pretty much the same as a traditional Gaelic cèilidh, with maybe a bit of Faroese kvøldseta mixed in. The internet, of course, was right. There was traditional Shetland fiddling, much of which sounded suspiciously familiar from New Scotland. There was Shetland dialect poietry (which is how they say it), with the Nana Mouskouri woman mentioned above, and there was story telling which was also quite amusing, not because of the stories but because of the man’s accent, which related to Scots as Brabants relates to Standard Dutch.

After the foy had ended and everyone had left, we had to wait for the bus to fetch us, and of course the Faroese delegation decided to turn this into a proper kvøldseta, so out with the fiddles and in with the kvæði and some traditional ring-dance (which hadn’t been seen in Shetland since 1774).

Noregs menn, dansið væl í stillum,
stillið tykkum allar
riddarar, Noregs menn,
dansið væl í stillum

Sigmundskvæðið, for those who are interested. It’s about Sigmundur, who was sent by Ólavur Tryggvason to the Faroes to convert them to Christianity. Unsurprisingly he ended up dead, but the Faroes converted in the end. That was in 999, one year before Iceland.

Anyway...

History of Upper Lusatia

Search engines are sometimes quite random. Looking for something on the 17th and 18th-century history of Upper Lusatia, it came up with...

Karl-Ernst Behre, 'The history of beer additives in Europe: a review', Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 8 (1999), 35-48.

Kurt J. Wein, 'Die Geschichte des Rettichs und des Radieschens', Genetic Resources and Crop Cultivation 12
(1964), 31-74.

Somehow I'm not too sure on the relevance of those two articles...

Muddy Bay Diaries (4)

Friday daytime
The conference was opened with a nice little introductory talk by Brian Smith. A couple of funny anecdotes with the necessary mention of Famous Shetlanders of Yore to give the conference just that little bit of extra prestige. The first proper talk was by Marianna Debes Dahl, on the life of Jakob Jakobsen (the guy the conference was all about) and what could be read from the letters he sent and received during his life. I think we got the full inventory of what letters he sent to whom, where and about what. This didn’t bode well for the conference. The seats in the Scalloway lecture theatre have very little leg room. How on earth am I going to survive these two days?

Fortunately Marianna’s talk took a turn for the better and she made the interesting point that Jakobsen, who is credited with a lot of the success of language status planning efforts in the Faroes, wrote all his correspondence in Danish or English, and zilch (well, only one letter) in Faroese. An article I read a while ago made the same point for the people behind the literary revivals of Catalan, Welsh and a number of other minority languages. So what’s going on there?

Two of the speakers admitted that their first visit to Shetland was to do with knitting, before they even had an idea there was once a Scandinavian language there or this odd Faroese guy who wrote a dictionary of the language ages after it died. And knitting was still enormously prevalent also at the conference. Two delegates were knitting during the talks, and one was doing crocheting. There was already talk about organizing a pan-Scandinavian knitting conference.

I can’t possibly remember all the talks that were given at the conference, so feel free to read the proceedings when they finally come out. The proceedings from the 2004 Shetland dialect conference were available in the foyer and they make for an interesting read, if only because half the articles are written in Shetland dialect in various spellings. Reading it out loud to yourself is the only way to go.

The cold buffet we got for dinner was only marginally acceptable. It was very very fishy, and there were scary crab things, and the small chicken things they had were gross (I managed to eat a bit of one before deciding it was a bad idea to continue) so the only thing that was vaguely edible was some wrap thing with undeterminable filling.

I should mention Doreen’s lecture on the Friday night. A public lecture on just some random words from Jakobsen’s dictionary of Shetland Norn. Random in the sense that she chose them because she had special memories connected to them, or because they just sounded funny. The most interesting thing here was that her slides with random words that no one in Shetland knew anymore caused the Faroese part of the audience to start ooh-ing and aah-ing because they recognized so many of them. Especially sparl (Fø. sperðil) seemed popular. This is basically haggis but not made in the sheep’s stomach but a couple of stages further along the metabolism route.

Friday night
Late Friday evening was spent in the hotel. I didn’t really speak to anybody, but sat in the lounge of the hotel reading my own article again (on which my lecture for Saturday was based) and later the book that I bought at Edinburgh Airport on my way to Shetland. Everybody should read Spoken here: travels among threatened languages by Mark Abley. I also talked to Sanna a bit.

Saturday morning
For some reason everyone woke up extremely early throughout the conference. In this case I had finished breakfast shortly after 8am, and with the bus not coming until 9.30 there was plenty of time again to explore. I had been told by Klaske (the only other Dutch person at the conference and with a lot of background knowledge on Orkney and Shetland) that there were seals in Brei Wick, the bay behind the hotel, possibly with the extra tourist attraction of authentic Shetland neds throwing rocks at them because they eat the fish. I missed out on the neds, but there were plenty of seals on various rocks in the bay.


At some point I seemed very far away from the hotel and it started to drizzle a bit so I decided to walk back. Distances are a lot shorter than they seem (plus I didn’t go back climbing over rocks like I did on the way out) and the weather changes every five minutes anyway, so by the time I got back to the hotel ten minutes later, we were all bathing in sunlight again.

Muddy Bay Diaries (3)

Thursday evening
While on the expotition through Lerwick, I got a phone call from Brian Smith, the organizer of the conference on the Shetlandic site. The bus that would bring us from the hotel in Lerwick to the conference in Scalloway would be leaving at 9am the next morning. And could I please tell all the other people who would be going to the conference?

So while I had dinner in the hotel that evening, I kept an eye out for possible conference people. I knew hardly any of them, only some of the Faroese and they were nowhere to be seen. There were some people who were talking in English with a Scandinavian accent, but that doesn’t necessarily have to mean that they were conference people. So I ended up not identifying anyone and later asking the hotel reception if they could pass on the message.

Hotel staff doesn’t seem to be English. There was a Scottish woman there (who later turned out not to be a conference person) who asked for a glass of rioja with her food. They brought her a glass of milk. This is a true story.

Friday morning
So the next day I find out why the Faroese were nowhere to be seen the day before: the Norrøna had only arrived at 5am Friday morning. Which for the passengers means being woken up quite loudly in Danish at 3.30 or something rude like that. So at the breakfast buffet I said hello to Turið, and later also met Leyvoy and Hjalmar (æh?) again. Plus being introduced to a busload of other Faroese, I think there were about twenty of them.

There was also this blond girl who looked really familiar but I couldn’t quite figure out why. It turns out she was the cousin of the people I stayed with in Argir in 2004, so I did see her then but only very briefly. It was nice though to see all these people again, and speaking Faroese again. A bit rusty, but that was soon to improve...

The bus came at 9am as promised and drove us to Scalloway. They have this massive fisheries college there, where the conference was held. There I saw Doreen again, and she introduced me to a host of people that I’d read books and articles by, so it was nice to put some faces to names. They already seemed to know quite a lot about me, which was pretty scary.

Name badges are very useful.

Back in Edinburgh

I’m back in Edinburgh. It rains. The conference programme was so busy, and the internet connection in the hotel so unreliable, that I didn’t actually continue the Muddy Bay Diaries in real time. I will have to get rid of a backlog. I might even include pictures!

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.