Public rant

As I start writing this, it is Thursday morning just before 8am. I am already dreading what’s going to happen ten hours from now. I am looking unforward* to New Scotland tonight. This is not a Good Thing. In fact, it is a Very Bad Thing.

The Curse that is the ghettoblaster has ended up in our flat. It will have to be at the Chaplaincy for 6.30 tonight. Also in our flat are two sets of SCD CD’s, the money box, the membership book, soon a lot of flyers about Freshers’ Week, and the keys to Lutton Place. They will have to be at Lutton Place no later than 6.15. Anyone familiar with the area will know that this is an impossibility.

It appears that no one is available to take the ghettoblaster off my hands (although I still have a slight hope that someone will volunteer), so I am going to have to make myself available, running from my office to the Chaplaincy, and then to Lutton Place. Just hoping there will be someone at the Chaplaincy (New Scotland or friendly servitor) to take the [expletive] thing off me.

I am in lectures/teaching until 5.30. I will have no time for food tonight.

I am also not very happy with the behaviour of some of the more experienced members in the society. I know they’re only trying to help, but still. The society elects a committee to run everything. The point of this, and the point of not standing for committee, is that people don’t have to organise everything themselves. This also means that they should be able to let committee organise things. Friendly advice is always welcome, of course, but certain things don’t need to be said, or can be said at a different time or in a different tone.

I do not appreciate being messengered in the early morning before I can even open Thunderbird to check my work e-mail, to be told that (including the enumeration) [1] we need to announce in notices that there is Country Dance Basics on Tuesdays, and [2] I need to include in next week’s classes e-mail that the new dem class teacher wants us to wear kilts or short skirts.

I have a brain. I can remember something the dem class teacher said less than twelve hours earlier. I can remember it until next Monday. I had even been thinking about the wording. I don’t need to be “reminded” of something so trivial and non-central to the running of the society when there isn’t even the slightest sign that I may have forgotten. (And even if I had forgotten, it wouldn’t have made a difference. People were told individually that they had to wear kilts or short skirts. We are all adults. Surely people can remember for themselves?)

I am also not in charge of notices. I remember very well that I did notices once somewhere in March and got scourged for them being too long and too sarcasting. I have been well and truly impeached from notices and I want nothing to do with them every again.

Also, as far as I understand it, Country Dance Basics is directed not at the people who actually stay at social (who are at least 75% experienced people). It is not really directed at the people who go to cèilidh class and can’t do Beginners’ on Thursday. It is for the people who go on Thursday and want to get better faster. That’s why it’s free: they’ve already paid on Thursday and are making an extra effort, hopefully to the benefit of the society (dem-wise). So anything to do with announcing Country Basics is best done in Beginners’, and the relevant person to ask about putting a notice in that class is the Beginners’ teacher.

Who then sneered at me at Dunedin yesterday, “So I hear I have to be psychic again about what’s happening in my class tomorrow?” Well, it appears that no psychic powers are necessary and he was already told that there was a request for a notice in his class. If he doesn’t want that notice, surely they can sort it out between themselves. Why this warrants a sarcastic comment thrown at me, is still beyond me.

Incidentally this also blurred the sacred distinction between Dunedin (where I can just turn up and enjoy dancing and socializing, no stress) and New Scotland (where I could do that for exactly four weeks before I was drafted onto committee). It did actually take the half-hour walk back home through the wind and drizzle to calm down again.

I hope I can become confident some time during the day that I might actually enjoy New Scotland tonight.


* I need the opposite of ‘looking forward’ but not as strong as ‘dreading’ (yet).

Space

If the people in charge of the space bookings system could allocate me a slightly less confusing one, that would be intensely appreciated.

Thank you.

More conspiracy

More signs that there is a worldwide conspiracy against New Scotland became obvious on Thursday. Not only was it pouring down with rain which may not have done very good things to the cd player (oops), but what exactly do you do when you arrive at McEwan Hall to ‘No you don’t have a ceilidh here tonight!’?

The servitors were great, JB’s skills to navigate the University buildings system came in very handy, Tim and Tom from EUSA were use- and helpful, committee and other NS members excelled, and the numerous freshers who were outside getting drenched until the hall finally opened helped out carrying several hundred chairs off the dance floor.

More NS drama when RW was rushed to hospital earlier that day, but she is fine now. And it turns out I was right all along – a W junior is on his or her way.

In the end we proved the McEwan Hall people wrong, and we did have a ceilidh there tonight. Considering the rain and the late start we actually had a great turnout, Andy was marvellous and his Orcadian probably even better than the one at Rukkus.

Friday morning was spent with JB sorting Thursday’s events out with EUSA, and that too seems to have worked fine. Friday afternoon was the workshop in Teviot with LG, which went really well too and we had five sets at some point. The last hour was a bit slower, we may want to consider that non-dancers (or not-yet-dancers *grin*) will have limited stamina on the last day of Freshers’ Week. Four people joined us in Teviot Middle Bar, which I think is a good score.

The Societies’ Fair will always be one of the middle levels of hell, but we survived. And exactly whose idea was it to put us next to the stuck-up Reelers Club? ‘So do you have free booze at your dances?’ No, we actually like to dance? We made friends with the Flamenco Society and above all with Choc Soc. (‘Join Choc Soc and get free chocolate!’ ‘Come to our ceilidh and dance it all off again!’) At some point AL was handing out Choc Soc flyers while the Choc Soc girl was rallying for our ceilidh.

We also made friends with the Officers Training Corps. They have pipers. AL, LG and me did a fling to the pipes in the Pentland Room. Let’s just say we got an audience...

Worst line of the week, when it was pouring down with rain on the Thursday: ‘You look very wet. We have an indoor event.’

We also seem to have succeeded in attracting Norwegians. There is a Norwegian girl anyway, which is a start.

It’s official!

They are out to get us. There is a world-wide conspiracy against New Scotland, jeopardizing both the running of the society and my personal sanity. It’s been going on for a while, the first signs was the news about when the booking at Pleasance was mysteriously not reaching New Scotland. The Church of Scotland are against us as well, deliberately planning youth Bible groups on Tuesday evenings. Teviot and EUSA aren’t so much against New Scotland in particular, they’re just against societies in general. The Council are being arses, as are the people that run youth hostels. Or those that run marathons.

On a positive note, the workshop that JW ran yesterday went quite well. We even had men. Well, two. But although they may not have been entirely serious about coming to the workshop, they did seem to enjoy it and they did take a flyer with them. Tomorrow and Thursday is the Societies’ Fair.

In other news, I saw a property that was being let by Alba, and on one side it had a sign “Sorry, it’s gone!”. On the other side it had “Przepraszam juz wynajty” (I think it was). So the Polish contingent in Edinburgh is now so significant that lets are being advertised in Polish. Maybe we should advertise our ceilidhs in Polish as well?

(I already discussed with JW the necessity of advertising in Norwegian.)

Late

You know that it’s late when you suggest that doing Brooms of Bon Accord is both funny, a good idea and doable.

And it all started with this photo of a variation on the Broad Swords. New Scotland do broad women, these Californians seem to be doing Broad Farming Equipment.

Hurrah!

They’ve managed to find back the painting Skrik (The scream) by Edvard Munch, which was stolen from a museum in Oslo two years ago. It’s all okay. I came across something Munch-y just the other day, and I remember thinking what a pity it was that the painting was lost forever (as everyone assumed). I feel a weird sense of relief.

In other news, I managed to get through the entire Register of Testaments of Shetland (1611-1650) today. I’m pretty sure they haven’t recorded everything, unless either very few people died or there were very few people to begin with, neither of which I believe is true. I noted down 266 marriages; the next step is to code the names for Norse or Scottish and then I can try and say something sensible about exogamy (inter-ethnic marriage patterns).

Fun fun.

And the purpose is...

Wikipedia (though evil) is very useful. Although sometimes you wonder what the purpose is of the information it gives. For some odd reason that I really can’t remember anymore, I started looking into post codes earlier this evening. Riveting read. It doesn’t seem British post codes are actually used for sorting the mail anymore, because (a) the system isn’t very efficient, and (b) automated handwriting recognition isn’t either.

More to the point: there is an article on the postal areas of Edinburgh, and for some reason for the postal areas of Edinburgh city, it gives the supermarket that serves the area. Whoever wrote this article mustn’t consider Scotmid a supermarket, though. We don’t have a supermarket, says Wikipedia.

Oh well, I guess it’s only a small one. But it sells food and that’ll do.

So

Bleurgh.

Time flies...

(Ah, I’d used that title before.)

I’ve already been back for a week and a half, and I haven’t done a proper blog update for at least a month. In short, I was back home, was first baking for a week and a half, and then suddenly, when AL arrived, was drenched for a week and a half. It was fun though and I had never done a tour on a canal boat in Amsterdam before.

Back in Edinburgh, I made a start with editing the Postgrad Conference papers. This is a tedious job because... well, basically because Word is misbehaving. Also, the first-years’ inability to reference properly seems to be an epidemic that is spreading to postgrads. I guess they were never taught how to reference as first-years either.

I also spent time at the National Library again. Somewhere between two and two-and-a-half hours each day. It wasn’t as bad as previously; I guess that reading French is less offensive than reading German (from the time that Stalin was still a hero, so it’s German nonsense as well). I still need to spend lots more time at the NLS, because they have the books that Edinburgh University Library doesn’t have. Also I need about a truckload of Inter-Library Loan vouchers.

Now how did I end up reading stuff on historical demography?

In other news, my friends are slowly returning from various places which is a good cure against social isolation. I still haven’t managed to do any Fringe Festival thing, although I did go to the Book Festival and bought a book. If you take away the workshops which I have no intention of attending, and the meet-and-greets with authors who I don’t know and whose glory I am therefore not very likely to want to bask in*, the Book Festival is nothing more than a café and bookshop in a tent. That was slightly disappointing, although I don’t quite know how I would imagine a book festival other than that.

[* Now draw a Chomskyan tree for that! I wonder if it doesn’t violate a few constraints on pied piping...]

Freshers’ Week is coming scarily close, it’s only three weeks. I’m sure it’ll turn out fine in the end, but there are far too few ticks on the “Things to organize” sheet. It would also be very nice if we could find teachers for two of our classes, and venues for three of them. I have reasonable hope for the venues. Anyone feeling inclined to teach Beginners Country?

It is also amazing how quickly crap accumulates. It took half an hour to sort and put away all the bank statements, gas bills, book bills, New Scotland letters and other paperwork that had piled up on my desk. My folder with financial stuff is now officially full.

Tomorrow and Tuesday are American High School dems. They’re promising to be a hoot. Well, they’re usually okay and a better audience than the IALS ones, we don’t get haggis [that is a Bad Thing] but also we don’t get Mozambiquan dancing, Japanese singing or the so-manieth cross-dressing IALS staff contribution [that is a Very Good Thing]. It does involve silly monkey suits though, and I’m too polite to abuse the fact that BW really needs me to get rid of that uncomfortable pseudo-traditional garment.

Think that’s all for now.

Historical pedantry

I have a bone to pick with Dr. Jorge Cham. In a recent Piled Higher and Deeper comic [link], the character Prof. Smith is described as “recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of the Federal Republic of the Netherlands”, among other things. This is total and utter nonsense. Of course I understand that the Ph.D. comic is a work of fiction, but it does at least suggest a real-life and contemporary setting – witness references to Stanford University and current events in the real world.

So just to educate the general populace that will not read this anyway...

Alexander von Humboldt (* Berlin 1769 – † Berlin 1859) was an explorer from [drum roll] Berlin, which was in Prussia. In other words, in Germany. In other words, not in the Netherlands. He did probably set foot on Dutch soil at some point during his travels, but the main foci of his work were Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Latin America. He did not write anything major about the Netherlands which makes a Dutch prize being named after him extremely unlikely in the first place.

More ridiculously... the Federal Republic of the Netherlands? My passport clearly says “Kingdom of the Netherlands” in twelve languages. Not Republic. Not Federal. We were a republic once, or rather, twice, in our history. From 1581 to 1795 we were the Republic of the (Seven) United Netherlands/Provinces, and then from 1795 to 1806 we were the Batavian Republic. (Those were the days.) Sure enough the United Provinces (not the Batavian Republic) were a federal republic but we were never called such.

Alexander von Humboldt’s first publication dates from 1790, so five years before the Netherlands ceased to be a federal republic. His major claim to fame, however, the five-year expotition to Latin America (1799 to 1804) came when the Netherlands were no longer federal and well on their way to becoming a Kingdom with a rabbit king.

In conclusion, a badly-named Alexander von Humboldt Prize of the Federal Republic of the Netherlands is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility, but the probability of a certain comic strip (anti-)hero graduating is doubtlessly infinitely greater.

Rant over.

(Only one more month before I can tell first-years that Wikipedia is evil!)

Pyramid tea bags

What they want you to think:

Pyramid tea bags are specifically designed by top-of-the-bill tea bag designers to improve hot water circulation through the tea bag, in order to perfect the brewing process as the tea leaves come into contact with the water. The design was inspired by the age-old knowledge that pyramids are a magical source of health, good luck and other invariably Good Things.

What really happened:
— Hey boss? There’s been a slight hitch in the tea bag sealing machine and they’re now asymetrically sealed.
— What? You [expletive deleted]!
— Yeah, sorry boss. But look, if you fiddle with it it kind of looks like a pyramid.
— “It kind of looks like a pyramid.” Now what good is that going to do?
— I s’pose not... But wait... What if we claim it was all on purpose? With the right ad campaign we can put 50 tea bags in a box instead of 80 and put 20% on the price as well. It’s a winner boss, we can’t lose I tell you!
— Yeah I guess those Britons are stupid enough to fall for it. Let’s give it a go.

Letter from the AHRC

I got a letter from the AHRC. I have funding for the remaining two years of the Ph.D.! That means (a) financially, that I don’t have to get so much money from my parents and (b) psychologically, the knowledge that other people have faith in me! Yay!

In the unimitable words of LG: *BoInG!*

Almost gone

I finished a first version of the taboo-language piece today and put it in an envelope for April together with the write-up from the Shetland conference. Gives her something to do while I’m away. That’s all I did in the office. My lovely Japanese office-mate claims this is “mild weather” and, although now at setting 4 rather than 8, still has the heating on.

The mystery of the droning noise is still unsolved. It can’t be my computer, as I can’t even hear it in the bathroom... Another mystery is now added to this block of flat: a missing package of XXL clothing for the lady in flat 1, which someone has signed for but which she’s never seen. Oddness.

Long walk

Today I went for a Long Walk. I went to Holyrood Park, then started following the signs to Craigmillar Castle. It looked like that would be a boring walk along a main road, so I deviated and took the «Innocent Cycle Path» which, as I learned at the end, used to be a railroad. That was nice. It spat me out onto a main road nonetheless, and I started following signs to Craigmillar Castle again. This is very well hidden behind a new development with, in good Edinburgh fashion, streetnames like «Craigmillar Castle Road North Lane West Crescent Circle Square». I had one pound, so didn’t go into the castle, but continued on the walking path, which ended at the Royal Infirmary. Yay?

Then I had to walk along a main road for forever, and ended up at Cameron Toll. Where I’d never been before so I tried that and almost got lost in Sainsbury’s where I bought malted milk biscuits and chocolate chip biscuits. They have too much choice. Then I walked up to Newington, through Grange, bought new cycling shorts at the Bicycle Coop and sat in the Meadows for an hour.

My sunscreen has glittery stuff in it which is really cool (and glittery) but now I have lots of other things with glittery stuff on it as well.

What I did

On Thursday I had my first year review meeting. It was positive, they had some concerns about the amount of historical research I had to do with very patchy secondary sources (which I share – I might decide to dump some case studies), and there was a comment that in the final dissertation it’s probably more relevant to the research questions to present the case studies thematically rather than geographically. This is probably also true.

I also made an apple pie for Heather, who is leaving to get paid more for less work at the Dick Vet. This went down well. The pie, that is. No one’s too happy about her leaving.

In the evening we had a dem/cèilidh for Davide’s language school kids. Italian teenagers: what the boys have too much in attitude, the girls lack in clothes. They were a bit apprehensive at first, but in the end we did get them up to dance. Got home late.

On Friday I finally managed to book a hall for trip practice on the 30th. I had earlier had an «Allo Allo» experience with the people from the German-speaking church (this also implies they don't speak English very fluently...), and a wild goose chase with Drumbrae Leisure Centre. But finally on Friday I got hold of a school that is available. The woman was obviously Dutch, judging from her accent, but I kept speaking English with her which was awkward.

Then we had a picknick lunch with the English Language and Linguistics postgrads in the Meadows in honour of Heather leaving. I had made date and nut pie which went down even better than the apple one.

The evening was not a quiet evening in as intended, but a late evening out because we were celebrating the fact that ylla got a new job as secretary at the Physics department. (As I write this she has yet to mention this on her own blog.)

Today (Saturday) I sat in the Meadows and got slightly sunburnt. Then I decided it was getting too hot and I went for a walk through Grange and Holyrood Park. Had tea, then read something in the grass outside our flat (for some reason I don’t refer to it as «our garden» even though I guess it is) and then went for another walk approaching Blackford Hill but not climbing it because it was already getting later.

Homophony

Someone on the radio was talking about this street with all sorts of nice ‘eetstandjes’. I wondered what was so nice about ‘aidstentjes’ before she went on about food.

More loop

I am home alone, as MG has had to go back to the US. It’s quiet.

The stuff I had to write for the first year review meeting is now finished, although I have of course spotted some errors already. I am now in the process of putting the entire thing in LaTeX, as Word threatened to die on me on Friday, which is typically one of those things that would happen minutes before the due date. (And this was before putting the pictures in...) The whole coding thing is done now (I managed to automate much of it, at least all the accented characters) and I’m just having to put the references in and cure some BibTeX bugs. Having authors with nice exotic names in your reference list is cool, but a problem for automation... Will ask Cassie or Peter for help.

I am still not going on the trip. I have maintained this position since February, and I do not think I can be held responsible in any way, shape or form for some important event in the realm of marketing classical music taking place at the same time as the Ludwigstein trip.

Message for tigger_boing: Tesco has mugs with Tigger on for £3.97. If you go to the Tesco’s on Nicolson Street (this message goes for everyone) and it seems like you’re getting the slightly large, smiling Indian woman, pretend that you’ve forgotten something and leave the queue. Her “speed” makes a heavily sedated turtle look like an Olympic sprint champion, and she has a habit of putting about two items in a bag before deciding it’s full.

I brought the cheque for Lutton Place to the Docwras on Friday. It wasn’t a very long walk and as I had been wide awake since 6am anyway, it was a nice thing to do before going to the office. They live at number 10b of their street. As I was approaching, I could see number 8 – a massive posh house. Number 10 – a massive posh house. Number 12 – a massive posh house. But where was number 10b? Upon closer inspection there turned out to be a tiny cute little archway next to number 10, with 10b on it. Now I’m curious as to the Docwras’ house...

I also received the cheque for Nic’s costume proposal. It was addressed to me, ‘Esq.’! I looked it up but Esq. really doesn’t mean anything. But it looks cool.

Unfair

It is unfair that the England and the Netherlands are having gorgeous weather with sunshine and real summer and all, while we're stuck with [looks out window] oh look, it seems to be temporarily dry at the moment. Can't complain then.

It is also unfair that loads of people are running experiments at the moment for which they need participants. They dish out money for this, if you participate you often get £5 or £10, or at least chocolate. All the experiments require native speakers of English. Grunt. The one or two experiments that require L2-speakers of English want people whose first language is Chinese or Japanese.

It's unfair!

Loop

The past two weeks have seen...

• two apple pies, one for SB’s party (see below) and one to see if HO would eat fruit. He took his piece home with him so we still don’t know. The other people in the office were well impressed though.
  
• moving KH into her new flat at Polwarth. Nice flat!
  
• a party at SB’s where we watched The Full Monty which CB was afraid to watch so she left (probably for the best), talked and at surprisingly little chocolate
• a trip practice that is coming along quite nicely, and will look very performable as soon as people learn to listen to the music and phrase the figures accordingly.
  
• CB’s farewell party with lots of chocolate cake and a surprisingly fun game which was a mixture between Articulate and charades.
• a new ringtone for my phone.
  
• the Japanese kiddies’ dem where YS talked too much and the kids took about half an hour to learn the Circassian circle.
• attempts to do the swords mirror image, as SB and I decided at CB’s leaving party that it would probably make a nice dem. Later LG and RW agreed and suggested doing it on either side of the Broad Swords for a really impressive dem. Strathspey bit is okay to do mirrored, I’m having a bit more problems with the fast bit.
• finding out why Laurits Rendboe was wrong with his assumption about George Low’s word list and the taboo language of the Shetland fishermen.
  
• bulk veggie curry making.
• trying to learn LaTeX with varying results.
• watching the football World Cup with varying results and varying but crucially dire refereeing capabilities.
  
• finding out train ticket details so that AL can get to Ludwigstein (still to be organised).
• no progress meeting for the Ph.D.
• not enough blog updates.
  

Distraction

It's quite hard to concentrate when there's a full pipe marching band, with pipes, drums, and a whole collection of people with swords and a guy shouting at them, practicing off the bowling green downstairs from the office. They were playing one of the Highland tunes that I can never tell apart. It wasn't the silly sailor dance tune.

Evil magpie

I just saw a big evil magpie kill a cute tiny little cuddly fluffy bird. It was fluttering and trying to get away but the evil magpie held it tightly in its horrid beak. There were two or three other tiny little cuddly fluffy birds attacking the magpie to make it release their friend, but due to their tininess and cuddliness it made little impact. The monstrous magpie flew off with its victim, and followed by the little birds who were still trying to save their friend, it flew around the corner and out of sight.

I hope the magpie gets indigestion.

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.