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.