opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

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Arrived 9:30 at Oxford, got free wireless at the station long enough to download just two junk mails, went to the wrong university building (A) an hour early, and broke the shoulder strap of my bag — all in twenty minutes. Fortunately my colleague Anthony went to the wrong building too, so we got to intersect, and he gave me an update on his own travels.

The day was booked out with meetings at the Oxford e-research Centre (B): basically Anthony being debriefed about the status of various projects in Oxford, and me taking notes (as well occasionally reading up on LolCat when noone was looking). Excellent catering, Oxford has; must get the recipe for them pesto mini bruschettas on toast thingies.

Btw, I’ve heard of unisex toilets, but this fixture of the e-research centre, is just silly:

The day done, we shlepped back to Anthony’s hotel room (The Royal Oxford (C), rather sensibly positioned close to the station) rather than mine (Hawkwell House, plucked from wotif.com, and positioned the next village down from Oxford). Stopped off to buy a backpack ten minutes before closing time: no late night trading in downtown Oxon, thank you very much. Regaining the use of my right hand while travelling is a welcome win.

There wasn’t much in the way of twelfth century spires going on along our way — our walk basically involved High Street, so the houses looked closer to 18th century. Keble College, opposite the e-research centre, was as Oxford College as I got to see:

High Street is a jumble of clashing buildings. A theme-park kind of jumble, which made little sense as a cityscape. With a lot of people out and about of a Friday afternoon. Some in their best upper class finery.

A juvenile upper class dinner was being held, apparently. You could tell it was an upper class dinner from the fact that a separate entrance was signposted for workmen and entertainers. And from the fact that people were wearing top hats without being immediately beaten to death.

Anthony and I had our own upper class dinner plans, and made our way past Oxford University Press (D) —

(which does not at all like I thought — I guess I expected some kind of glass and air structure, which would really be completely inappropriate for OUP)

— to a brasserie française (E), which advertised itself as informal, relaxed, and integrated into its community. Relaxed relative to a community of straitlaced upper class top-hat wearers, I think; but lovely eats, nonetheless, and a surprisingly mellow shiraz.

My hotel was in Iffley, which really was the next village down:

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There was at least a block of unused land between Oxford and Iffley. The guidebook says Iffley features one of the few extant instances of 12th century Romanesque churches in England. By the time I got there (and my fourth cab in a row that had never heard of credit cards), it was pushing 10 pm, and I wasn’t checking out any churches, Romanesque or Arabesque. The receptionist thought my check-in banter hilarious: I guess the upper class top-hat wearers don’t deign to share their wit with the staff. (Sure enough, four female equivalents of upper class top-hat wearers burst in, looking for the dinner dance.) I failed the IQ test of finding where my room was multiple times, but I managed to get inside my room by, uh, 10:30 (which meant just about dusk). I got to delight in some of the local televisual culture: nice quiz show Stephen Fry has there.

Oh, Coventry station has a ladies’ lounge distinct from the passenger lounge.

Not sure if this was progressive or quaint.

Standing room only on the train in from Basingstoke; and none of the reservations made on the training from Coventry corresponded to conditions on the ground — might as well have not booked at all. (As always, watching the English fume in frustration was good entertainment value.) I did elbow my way into a seat after the first stop: I had a work document to get started on, and with only two hours of worktime at Coventry, I had to justify my day’s wages somehow.

It’s a frustrating document too, which is why I’ve kept putting it off: Nigel and I couldn’t agree on a twelve-page document, so we turned it over for arbitration to Judith, who came up with a counter-document at four pages. As with last time, I’ll be coming up with a counter-counter-document, which tries to address the concerns raised; if I know what I’m doing, it’ll end up eight pages long instead of twenty. I managed four pages in the train; the remaining, uh, OK, ten pages? at most? or thereabouts? — will be stitched together in Newcastle when I’m on my own Sunday.

OK, enough work. Rocked up to Woking at 5:40; by the time I worked out that I could not get mobile phone roaming, where the payphone was, and I should really call Peter who was still waiting for me inside the station while I was not, it was more like 5:55.

And given that dinner was involved, I didn’t want to keep Vanessa waiting. We ended up having to take the scenic route to their place on foot; the Basingstoke canal was worth the detour, although I was still too blah to get the camera out to immortalise it. I’m sure Flickr has already taken care of that. And it must have featured in at least one episode of Midsommer Murders.

Had not seen Peter and Vanessa for nine years (we were undergrads together). It was an experience I’ve had with other friends from uni I hadn’t seen in years: there’s flotsam of a few shared memories, the shock of recognition of long stowed-away quirks, but a lot of rescaffolding of familiarity to do. Peter and Vanessa have both been relentlessly sending me Facebookiana, and I have just as relentlessly not been responding; I’m too old to get into Facebook, even though we’re all the same age. Fortunately they’re still on speaking terms with me. Realising that you have to rescaffold (and Facebook pokes don’t count) is a shock; the good news is you’ve still got enough of a shared base that you can at least make a start on it. We kept talking into the wee small hours — which for parents of young children and childless jetsetters alike meant 12:30.

I’d completely forgotten how much I owed Vanessa for background research into Startrek realia when translating Hamlet into Klingon; she didn’t even get an acknowledgement in the preface. Then again, given that the preface was written by the Klingon Imperial Commisariat for Alien Liaison, it would be hard to work an acknowledgement in. As is well known, after all,

MICHAEL DORN: Klingons do NOT use words like please, excuse me, or thhhank you.

Nick does use such words on occasion though, so: Thank you. (Memo to self to dredge up a copy of the second edition to send.)

Peter and Vanessa have three kids, which led to much freaking out on my part; they’re Gen Z or AA or whatever we’ve gotten up to, so they’re all plugged into the Matrix.

• Catherine demonstrated a TARDIS control room she’d assembled, complete with two sound effects per button (OK, some of it was probably pre-fab). When I’d last seen Catherine, she was a newborn; newborns aren’t supposed to be assembling TARDIS’s, dammit! (Of course, with parents like Peter and Vanessa, I wouldn’t be surprised if she had assembled it while she was still a newborn.)
• Naomi, well, Naomi is six months old, so there was a lot of smiling, a little crying, and a soupçon of regurgitation. I didn’t notice her assembling any space vehicles yet; I give it three months.
• Kieran (three and a half) was merrily in his own world, which involved a lot of car brands. Most of them Red fəˈʋɑːʋɨi 355’s. [That’s Fewwahwi to you non-linguisticians.] I sprung “Bayerische Motor-Werken” on him, which startled him speechless for a few seconds. Dunno if it was my German, or the temerity of mentioning BMW anywhere near Fewwahwi.

Btw, the house claims to have a water heating unit. They’re not fooling me: this is sicherly the Charles Babbage difference engine. I’m thinking Catherine put that together too, during her steampunk phase.

Woking is a pleasant enough commuter town, heavily featuring the legacy of H.G. Wells — who spent a lot of time in Woking, identifying things to blow up in War of the Worlds. Woking Main Drag inevitably features a sculpture of a big alien poised to eat you. Good think I was leaving for Oxford when the alien spotted me; you never know what CCTV camera the alien was using for targetting lunch…

Just passed Reading on the training (home to linguisticians since retired or moved to Melbourne, but nice to see the town exists); next stop, Oxonii. IT building, so am not expecting to see many spires. Or bump into Inspector Morse.

Got to bed at 1 am (now that’s more like it), got up at 6:45 (now that isn’t). Decided to make my way in a leisurely fashion to Gloucester Rd Tube station, and have a regal Burger King breakfast. (There, I did it; I won’t have to do it again for another year now.) Burger King was advertising a £95 burger. Not a joke, and not a terribly good use of Wagyu beef or Himalayan pink rock salt, either. They were taking prebookings for burgers for next Thursday. I will be back at Gloucester Rd by then, and was contemplating doing it just to say I did it. But nah. Some indulgences are truly too pointless even for a dare.

I allowed myself an hour to get from Gloucester Rd to Euston, which was a big mistake: the tube was congested to a Tokyo-like extent on the Picadilly line, and I ended up bailing for the Central line; I made it with a change at Victoria, but with only 5 minutes to spare. Not cool; I’ll be getting in more timely from now on (and thankfully I’m mostly out of London.)

The countryside out the window of the Richard Branson Express to Brummingham is impossibly manicured:

[OK, OK, “the Virgin Trains express to Birmingham”. Must I translate everything for you people?]

I found the countryside implausible last time I was here (12 years ago) too: the land has been beat into submission by two millennia of farming. Only the Scottish border on my last trip seemed to show any resistance to well-ordered copses.

(Of course, I can only report on the bits of countryside that I sight off the motorway.)

Coventry is too green to be a city; for an industrial park, BECTA where I was visiting was a lot like… a park:

Phil (who is working out here for a while) pointed out the reason, and I should have picked up on it: when the Baedeker Blitz took out Coventry Cathedral, they took out the rest of Coventry as well. So when Coventry was rebuilt, the city fathers took the opportunity to rebuild it bucolically. Dunno, I still find it distracting.

Caught up on some news with my spare hour after my presentation here; am heading down to Woking after this to catch up with my friends Peter & Vanessa.

Hwæt! Ic eam in Engelonde gecuman!

Landed in Manchester Or Something Airport (Heathrow Terminal 5), 8-ish. Caught up on email (eek, this is going to be difficult — deluge of stuff, little time to digest or respond). Discovered the Bible Translation into LolCat project; something I identify much too much with for reasons of Klingon. Got the Heathrow Express into Paddington station: much too petrified of luggage logistics to attempt navigating away from Paddington to discover a different left luggage locale. Got the cab out to London School of Economics, again for reasons of fear of logistics. Got held up by the Changing of the Guard (11 am); I certainly wasn’t going to encourage that kind of mass market tourism activity by photographing it!

Workshop went from 1:30 to 4:30; I got there at 12 (mpf), and hanged out with the organisers and the Way Too Fun Phil Nicholls till 7. It was comforting to know that I could have a succesful geek out with complete strangers about my day job now, and not just linguistics. Checked into the disconcertingly luxurious Ashburn Hotel, popped out to eat, came back. Am tired (have been catching up on TV instead of blogging), so some quick summaries:

• London is more verdant than I remember it. Then again, I was driven past Green Park on the way down.
• I was checked in to the Ashburn by a bubbly temp from Noosa, doing the standard British working holiday for Australians under 25; unfortunately I’ve been too soon out of Australia to react to a kindred accent with the joyful recognition with which she reacted to mine…
  

  “Yeah, she sounds Australian. Uh, doesn’t everyone? Oh, I’m not in Australia any more? Better stop saying ‘hooroo’ then. Not that anyone under 60 in Australia knows what ‘hooroo’ means anyway.”

  She was so helpful, I felt bad for skipping out of the hotel for dinner, instead of eating in and giving them more of my custom. But I figured I’d be doing enough fearful eating in and not looking around my surroundings, once I was out of London.

• After dinner, I got ice cream from the local milkbar equivalent. Run by jovial Arabs yet again. (I think this is an Arab neighbourhood, there’s a few signs up in Arabic, and several women walked past in various states of veiling.) Because this time the joviality was in English, I was almost able to engage in banter. (But I confess, still a bit thrown off to do it properly.)
• They really do live in a panopticon in this country: cameras everywhere.
• If you drink outdoors, you get your booze in a PLASTIC CUP?! Never mind the risk to public health and safety if a drunken Englishman smashes you over the head with a glass mug outside; my HUMAN DIGNITY is far, far more offended by drinking cider out of a PLASTIC CUP!!!1! (Well, maybe not. But hyperbole is a useful thing.)
• It took me a couple of minutes looking for a bin in Paddington Station until I remembered why I wouldn’t find one: the IRA used them twenty years ago to put bombs in, so they got banned from metro stations. Much like the ongoing security theatre at airports, this is fighting the last battle instead of the current one, but these things take on a life of their own eventually.
• The LSE library needed you to swipe a card to get in to the books. Phil says Sheffield Uni’s the same. I find this offensive (and incomprehensible): uni libraries have a knowledge-keeping responsibility to the public, it baffles me that the public should be blocked from accessing them.
• London is vaguely familiar culturally — though with many more cool buildings; the Natural History Museum is just down the road from here, and is exactly what 19th century Romanesque should look like. But it’s just different enough from Australia to be slightly askew. The Tube felt very familiar though.

Lovely al dente pasta tonight, punctuated by a waitress being quite animated into her phone in what sounded nasal enough to be Portuguese, but must have been Northern Italian dialect — I’m guessing Piedmontese:

1. lots of final consonants;
2. nasal;
3. no central vowels or diphthongs with e in them that I could discern;
4. duminica has too many vowels left in it to be Portuguese;
5. she said ciao at the end; and
6. she was working in a small Italian restaurant.

Inductive reasoning at its finest. (I had heard recordings of Piedmontese from my former boss the Italian dialectologist; this was certainly strange enough to be Piedmontese.)

When I got the bill, I interrogated the waiter accordingly:

ME: So what dialect of Italian does your colleague speak?

WAITER: … dialect?

ME: Yeah, is it Piedmontese?

WAITER: Piedmontese?

ME: Yeah, you know. Northern Italy.

WAITER: … She is Romanian.

Yup, see? I was right. Definitely not Portuguese.