HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

I endite a tale of wrath.
     I endite a tale of woe.
I endite a tale with purpose.
     I purpose that you too will

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

I come to fly at nine.
I come with flights of wayfarers.
I view the flights departing.
I queue with Salonica–Stuttgart.
("Wir können alles außer
von Athen, ausgezeichnet, ausfliegen.")

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

Salonica–Stuttgart stands
a single flight Olympic.
I queue for fifteen minutes.
The duty droid frets through,
vexed that we queued for Stuttgart
when inland flights queue yonder.




No word of Gate 87
on views of flights departing,
no timetable tells thereof:
in Athens, you must queue
with telepathic sense.

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

I enter past the gate,
a little after eight
to leave at nine o'clock.
Past nine, and nothing moved.
A quarter past, and nothing.
At half past comes the call:
"Flight 191 delayed
due to technical problems.
Update at ten o'clock."

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

Update at ten o'clock:
"Flight 191 delayed.
Update at half past ten."
Update at half past ten:
"Flight 191 is cancelled.
Go hence, collect your luggage,
make alternate arrangements."

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

We queue the ticket office,
a hundred growling Greeks.
Two counter staff to serve
a hundred growling Greeks.
Two crowd controllers to calm
a hundred growling Greeks.
Two crowd controllers know
nothing to calm the Greeks with.
Two crowd controllers disclaim
all corporate responsibility.
"Madam, I cannot help you.
Write the Civil Aviation Authority."

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

Two crowd controllers cordon
the queue for corridor.
The queue is split for stragglers
to join midway, all muddled.
And Rome is cancelled too,
with not a word of penance,
with not a word of wherefore.
"Mum, I'm held up in Athens.
What? Call the airline? You're crackers!
I don't know! Fuck my Whore!"
(For so rage Grecian maidens
into their mobile phones.)

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

A half hour hence, a hero
emerges out of the queue.
"If you be for Salonica,
follow me to the gate,
for there shall we check in
to leave at half past twelve".
Uncertain masses follow:
"Speaks this man what he knows?
Know the women what he speaks?
Leaves this plane before midnight?
Who is this, anyway?"

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

We flood the gate for an hour.
The women at the gate are troubled
that we hold back those bound
for Rhodes or Karpathos.
They cannot fathom why
we will not form a line
behind gate counter 80.
What though we're never told
of 80 or 83; nor told
how we will levitate
beyond our zigzag line
(by now now five zigzags deep)
into a line of order
behind gate counter 80,
from out of counter 87.
How to levitate at all,
when nothing here is flying.

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

"Ten minutes more", one says,
"until you may start queueing."
The Grecians glow with rage.
The hero led us hence;
he bounds ahead and hollers:
"No bastard's boarding anything,
until you deal with me!"

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

The women at the gate cry out:
"Rhodes!" "Milo!" "Karpathos!"
"*NO, NOT SALONICA!!*"
"No thought of megaphone,
no thought of mediation,
other than "Yes, I know,
but do show us some understanding."
"Show YOU some understanding?!"
"Call in the TV channels,
then might we have some action!"
(Greeks brook no authority
apart from Channel 5.)

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

A quarter more of queueing,
and Grecians start to jest:
To them is this old hat,
and thus they try to cope.
The hero led us hence,
the hero leads the call:
"So... anyone for Rhodes?"
"RHODES? KARPATHOS?" they echo.
"Look, mum, don't keep on calling me.
I'm still in fucking Athens."
"That guy in front, he said
no bastard's boarding before him.
That means us too, you know."

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

The few, the slow, the polite,
they head the tail of the queue.
Another queue forms now,
men cancelled from Mykonos,
and sweethearts from Santorini.
"No, still in Athens, mate.
They've bounced me round since seven.
Bollocks to this." "Back off,
you know that nerves are frayed."
"Is this the queue to Rome?"

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

I come to counter at last,
at 12:15 or so
to render account and quit.
"... Why sir, you have a boarding pass.
What are you come here for?"
"... A pass. For NINE O'CLOCK."
"Oh. Next flight out is five.
Will that do you?"
          *blink*
                    WTF?!

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

Olympic can be explained.
Olympic can be accounted.
Olympic cannot be excused.

Olympic has no apologies.
Olympic has no accountability.
Olympic shall have no quarter.

"I could have told you, Nick"
my friend of old phones through.
"Olympic breathes its last."
Then is its death high time.
You too must hasten this.

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

Give these goons no custom.
Bail out these buffoons no packages.
Offer these oafs no sympathy.
Axe these ass-clowns to buggery.
Aegean Air, at least, have self-service.




HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS

Envoi

(Security check-in at four:
"I see your team has lost",
pointing to the Deutschland cap.
"I've lost too." "Oh? What team?"
"The nine o'clock to Salonica."
"Oh, never mind, sir. After all,
it all is part of life."
Maybe. But not for long:

HELP BANKRUPT OLYMPIC AIRWAYS


And Carthage, too—destroyed.)

Berlin: A first report

The Berlin experience started with me getting off the plane, and into the ramp tunnel thingy they attach to the plane, manufactured by a company based in Baden–Württemberg. Krämer, I think. The company saw fit to advertise not just itself (Krämer Men installing lightbulbs, Krämer Men cleaning up a party, Krämer Men being Krämer Men), but also their home state.

• At the opposite side of the ramp tunnel thingy: "You are now stepping onto Twenty Metres of BADEN–WÜRTTEMBERG!"
  
• In the corner of one ad, "Now that you've arrived in Berlin Airport, log in to http://www.berlinairport.de , to find out how you can make a connecting flight to BADEN–WÜRTTEMBERG!" (... Connecting flight? Now? But I don't wanna go to Stuttgart; it was enough of a hassle moving to Berlin. Dale hasn't even come back to Heidelberg or anything.)
  

And the slogan tucked away in all the ads:

Baden–Württemberg. Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch.

I was sure I missed something, but no, I read it correctly:

Baden–Würtemberg. We can do ANYTHING!!!1!!!

Except speak in Standard German.

I'm sure they think they're too cool to speak Standard German, or too busy building airplane ramps or something. Problem is, outside of some bits of Saxony-Anhalt, none of the states speaks standard German; so this does not exactly single Baden-Würtemberg out. Still, I can see huge LolCat potential here:




moar funny pictures

The executive summary of Berlin (which will be enhanced if and if I get time):

• My German sucks.
  
• Berlin has a lot of ugly hurried buldings. And they're not restricted to the East.
  
• Berlin has a few wonderful Roman buildings (Good thinking, Friderice Rex Borrusice!)
  
• Berlin, especially the East, has some amazingly jarring contrast, between the old, the new, and the rushed. Which gives it a lot of historical texture.
  
• There are bits of historical texture that get swept under the carpet still. Hitler's Bunker --- blink and you miss it. (At least there's an explanatory display on the site.) My friend Leslie saw how trashed The Stadium at Nuremberg is now. (I'll use the pics when I get to it.) And the rush to tear down the East German Palace of the Republic is unseemly. The photos will speak more to that.
  
• Bits of Berlin reminded me of Vienna (where I had been before). Other bits of Berlin, to my surprise, reminded me of Athens. Yes, the rushed bits of the landscape did; but also the interior layout of the apartment. Athens does not do back courtyards, though (let alone mutiply nested courtyards); and more's the pity for Athens.
  
• Ostalgie (nostalgia for the GDR) is alive and well. In fact, for tourist reasons, the Ampelmänchen (East German traffic light figure, with hat) is not only kept on in East Berlin, but is spreading to the West.
  
• It's World Cup season, so one of the few times in the decade when German flags are allowed in the open. It's a delight to see. Especially when the cars double up, reconciling their twin allegiances: German and Russian flags, or German and Turkish flags.
  
• My habitual greeting to Gert ("Auf Wiener Schnitzel!") was converted into a night of dining at the Austria Restaurant, Kreuzberg. The schnitzel was so huge, it would have had trouble landing at Heathrow. It blocked out the sun. It left the layers of potato salad and lemons beneath well shaded. You could eat off it for a month.
  
• Berlin has latterly embraced the street party as a neighbourhood institution. Kreuzberg was up for it that night: Kreuzberg jazzt!, the posters said. I didn't hear all that much jazz; I heard some Balkan gypsy music morph into Latin. Gert pointed out that after the first few street parties, the sequence of Food, Drink, and Couple of Bands got old; but it was novel to me.
  
• Grapefruit–Beer cooler. So very very wrong. So wrong in fact, it almost made sense. But it figures why Pilsner Urquell tried to get the Reinheitsgebot (the German Beer Purity Laws) enshrined in the German constitution. (Eh, ad campaign I'll come back to.)
  
• Laibach's rendering of Bach's Art of Fugue in Industrial Techno. (Gert played highlights to me as I fidgeted nervously about my departure to Athens.) So very very wrong in a different way, which again almost made sense. Not in the live concert, as he reported. But the album recording counterpoints Bach with their own techno noisemaking in an interestingly textured way. Much like downtown East Berlin, in fact.
  
• Laura's English is starting to have its own texturing with German interference. "You are in the near of it." Utterly cool; she is being be-Germaned.
  
• My German sucks. Thought I'd say so again. So I was not that be-Germaned --- despite protests to the contrary. The protests included the purchase of a Deutschland cap --- remember, it's only every four years you can wear such things publicly in Germany. (This will cause issues with my uncle tonight when he's watching the Euro soccer final tonight.)
  

Oh boy, does my German suck. Some examples:

• Austria Restaurant
  

  
  *Nick fails to eat a quarter of the Biggest Schnitzel in Christendom*
  
  HEIDI THE AUSTRIA RESTAURANT WAITRESS: You know, we make a hundred of these every day.
  
  GERT: Well, I think the gentleman would like another one.
  
  HEIDI: He'll have to finish this portion first.
  
  EVERYBODY BUT NICK: Heheheh
  

  
  
  
• Austria Restaurant, as understood at the time by Nick
  

  
  *Nick fails to eat a quarter of the Biggest Schnitzel in Christendom*
  
  HEIDI THE AUSTRIA RESTAURANT WAITRESS: Mein Hut hat drei Ecke hundred of these every day.
  
  GERT: Freude schöner Götterfunken another Tocher aus Elysium.
  
  HEIDI: Od und Leer finish das Meer first.
  
  EVERYBODY BUT NICK: Heheheh
  

  
  
  
• Kreuzberg Jazzt!
  

  
  *Nick buys Deutschland Football Cap*
  
  RANDOM GERMAN WOMAN: [in joyous recognition to Nick, sung to tune of Volare] Fi-nale!
  
  NICK: ... woah-oah (?)
  
  RANDOM GERMAN WOMAN TO HER KID: See, if you say "Fi-nale" to people, they will immediately understand what you mean.
  
  RANDOM GERMAN WOMAN TO HER KID, AS UNDERSTOOD BY NICK: Meine Ruh is hin, mein Herz understand ist schwer.
  

  
  
  
• Morning bus to airport
  

  
  *Gert buys ticket on bus*
  GERT: A single ticket, please.
  
  NICK: I also hases the single ticket, please you.
  
  *Coins worth €2.5 go on a tray*
  
  *Nick pops money into tray slots specific to each denomination. Because that's what they're there for, right?*
  
  BUS DRIVER WOMAN: No you don't do that. If you do that in the supermarket, they'll give you a slap on the wrist.
  
  *Bus driver woman mimes a slap on the wrist a bit close to an actual slap on the wrist*
  
  *Change pops out of other side of tray*
  
  *Nick tries to pop change back into the slots, because he thought the ticket was €2.50 and not €2.10
  
  *Bus driver woman issues sounds of consternation*
  
  *Bus passengers find this all very amusing, given how German they are supposed to be*
  
  *Gert retrieves the €0.40 change to put me out of my misery*
  
  *I follow after Gert*
  
  NICK: Uh... what just happened?
  

  
  

... What indeed.

Berlin: A chronography

It was quick, but very much worthwhile. In fact, reporting on Berlin will take up several days of Greek downtime.

Be warned, my German is a lot worse than my French, which impose a layer of haze in my interaction with the outside world. I was sublimely lucky that Gert and Laura were prepared to mediate with the world for me. As always, I am not worthy of the kindness of my friends. (Or so I keep telling them.)


Berlin itself? Well, there'll be much photography attached, but here was the sequence of events. (All times approximate to the nearest hour.)

Saturday 13:45

Arrive in Berlin.

14:30

Finally escape from passport control, which, in a fit of German efficiency, was brought right up to the airplane exit (past a strip of Baden–Württemburg, on which more below).

14:31

See Gert.

14:35

Make way to busstop.

14:38

Start asking Gert questions about Berlin for the next six hours, instead of bloody well buying a guidebook or looking it up online like sensible people do.

15:00

Change buses at Hauptbahnhof. Get introduced to annoying Berlin Bear figurine.

15:30

Make it to sunny downtown Kreuzberg.

15:35

Survive ascent up four flights of stairs with two immobile suitcases in tow.

15:36

See Laura.

15:37

Dump suitcases, beeline for coffee, start klatsching.

16:30

Leave with Gert for quick explore of the city.

17:00

Make it to Telephone Tower, where a bird's eye overview of Berlin is to be had.

17:20

Make it inside the Telephone Tower, negotiating tourist peak time.

17:25

Start gaining bird's eye overview of Berlin.

17:30

Realise am out of battery on my camera, start delegating photography to Gert.

17:50

Stop getting bird's eye overview of Berlin.

18:00

Start exploring Berlin on foot. The following sequence was involved, roughly:

• Dom
  
• Palast der Republik (about to be completely gone)
  
• State Library, Humbolt Uni, Opera House, Museum of Contemporary Art, and assorted Frederican buildings
  
• Frederic Statue
  
• Unter den Linden
  
• Brandenburg Gate
  
• Lame schlager concert on other side of Brandenburg Gate
  
• Holocaust memorial
  
• Conspicuously inconspicuous: The Bunker
  
• German Ministry of Finance, which use to be the GDR Hall of Ministries, which used to be Göring's Luftwaffe offices
  
• Chunk of the Wall
  
• Checkpoint Charlie
  
• Unattractive West Berlin streets; to Gert's disgust, one of them was named after E.T. Hoffman
  
• Somewhat ill-thought out Alley of Visionaries. You too can tread on multilingual platitudes. And if you're Turkish, be puzzled by the missing vowel of MERĦBA.
  

• OK, OK, I'll explain. Merhaba is Turkish for "hello". The word is originally Arabic, and also features in Maltese as merħba. If you're one of the many Turks of Berlin (and Alley of Visionaries is next to or in a Turkish suburb), the inclusion of MERĦBA in the multilingual salutations must look peculiarly askew.

19:30

Scheduled to meet Laura for Austrian dinner.

19:50

Actually make it to Austrian dinner.

20:20

Have the Biggest Schnitzel In Christendom delivered to table.

20:25

Pluck up the courage to start eating the Biggest Schnitzel In Christendom.

21:30

Emerge from Austrian dinner forswearing schnitzel for at least the next day.

21:35

Work way into Kreuzberg Jazzt! street party.

22:15

Make fatal acquaintance of Hefeweißen–Grapefruit beer cooler.

22:30

Make fateful purchase of Deutschland football cap. Start being accosted by merry German football fans, get struck dumb.

22:45

Get caught by sudden torrential downpour outside Döner Kebab shop. Be assured by proprietor: "German weather. Cannot trust him."

23:00

Make it back to Kreuzberg Apartments, shlep mattress up four flights of stairs.

23:10

Discover that Gert & Laura's neighbour Gabi, God bless her socks whoever she is, has left her wireless open to all comers. Abuse the privileges for the next quarter hour.

23:30

Zzzz.

Sunday 05:30

Oh God, am I *still* on Yerevan Time?

06:00

Wake up, abuse Gabi's internet connection some more.

06:30

Pretend to be asleep some more.

07:00

Give up trying.

08:00

Furtively shower.

9:00

Bid a good morning to Gert and Laura.

9:55

Get introduced to Laibach's techno/industrial rendering of The Art of Fugue.

10:10

Get the bus for the airport.

11:10

Get to airport with twenty minutes to spare before boarding.

11:15

Find I'm 7 kg overweight, because I didn't read the fine print on Olympic Airways baggage allowances. Because they made it so easy to find out what the baggage allowances were. Get told to pay €105 at Olympic Counter.

11:20

Clear security.

11:30

Realise that they actually meant the Olympic Counter back at the main building of Tegel.

11:31

"Could Mr Nick Nicholas please come to counter 73". (Dr, dammit, Dr Nicholas.)

11:33

Counter official relents and lets me pay her personally at the counter. I still need someone from Olympic to make her way over from the main building with my receipt.

11:37

While we're waiting, I help translate at the counter for some Albanians going back to Greece from Majorca, whose luggage has been misplaced. Counter chick asks me to confirm that their Greek visa is still valid. Who died and appointed you Greek border security already, I fail to exclaim.

11:38

"Please to excuses me, madam, is possible I can go to flight without the receipt?"
"Oh, no sir, there it comes now."

11:39

Guiltily abandon the Albanians to their fate, because I'm boarding already.

11:43

I'm not boarding yet (back of the queue), and two relieved Albanians join me. They had their luggage after all, they'd just misplaced the label.

11:45

Albanian dude offers to help with my suitcase. I am suitably mortified.

11:46

Nick tries to remember how to say "Where in Albania are you from" --- and fails. (So I do not utter the ungrammatical Nga ku në Shqiperi... uh... është?)

11:50

Board the Olympic flight to Athens scheduled to leave at 11:50.

11:55

Start smalltalk with German woman next to me. The fateful Deutschland football cap strikes again. To my surprise, I understand about 80% of what she is saying, as opposed to 20% in Kreuzberg.

12:15

The plane actually leaves; remember, they work on "Greek time".

12:30

I start writing up my Berlin blog.

13:00

Food arrives, and smalltalk resumes in earnest. I am still mostly (though not entirely) struck dumb by lack of German; but that's ok, she talks enough for both of us. :-) She has spent a lot of time in Greece, so on the rare occasions I let on that I'm not following, she annotates with Greek; English gets used only a couple of times. (My blog is behind, but I do have to do some living in order to have something to blog about.)

15:45

Arrive at Athens.

16:00

Find Athens has no facility for purchasing wireless access; you have to have roaming with one of about five European telcos. Retarded, seriously retarded. Am fearful that will not get on line for the next ten days.

16:20

Hello again, Costly And Immobile Suitcase. You'll pay for this. Coz I already did.

16:30

To relieve some weight, mail Notis' thesis to Australia. Greek Post Office staff indulge in customer service that is both lackadaisical and good-humoured.

*Chat among themselves for three minutes.*
*Start handing over stamps*.
"What star sign are you?"
"Uh, Virgo?"
"Have a Saggitarius stamp. We have plenty on offer."

16:40

Board Metro train for Athens. Next stop, Constitution Square. Next next stop, an uncle in Upper New Smyrna, who's going to be very disconcerted by my Deutschland football cap....

Englandaganza, Stop 10: London

I didn't do much more in my last two nights of London. Well, strike that: I got sloshed my last night in London. Where by "sloshed", I mean "had a plastic cup of white, a pint of ale, and a bottle of perry, in the space of, oh, seven hours?" And caused much consternation at the table with my refusal to imbibe further. Or for that matter (as I realise in retrospect) to shout anyone else any booze.

I had tentatively raised the prospect of catching up with my friend and Yet Another Ex-Academic Mindy (and her entire family) once in London; but she was pretty tentative about it herself, and I was in advanced meltdown by the time I'd hit my hotel. Not least because I was reunited with my gargantuan and not especially mobile suitcase --- last sighted on arriving in Albion: I was hard put to recognise it. So I conventiently forgot.

Instead, I was distracted by the bright shiny object of new headwords for my lemmatiser: I was finally sent the dictionary entries from epsilon to kappa for Kriaras' Dictionary of Early Modern Greek. The dictionary knows that ζγουραφιά is a modern (Cretan) variant of ζωγραφία; but that still means a lot of manual entry into the data files and tidying up spelling; so that was my five hours spoken for. I sadly enough find that kind of thing relaxing.

Woke up at 6 am *again*, and made a half hearted attempt to do some work for my day job. Oh crap, people from my day job are reading this. I mean, worked diligently and assiduously for a couple of hours. Erk. It's end days for the project, and unfortunately I can't get my mind around concerted project outputs; so I'm doing little patches of stuff and shipping them to the project manager to make sense of them. Sorry Dennis.

Feeling fearful and uncertain in a foreign city, where everyone asks questions with the completely wrong intonation, I popped out to the corner post office to mail home my Oxford purchases. 2 kg of dead tree, and every kg counts. I then hied myself (well, leisurely hied myself) to the London School of Economics, for my last work meeting of the trip. The turnstiles, I noted with disapproval, were still there.





Walking away with the gift of a VIF project pen and thumbdrive (viral marketting --- very smooth, very smooth), I made an equally leisurely beeline




for University College,



where Bruce Fraser of Cambridge ("... You're Nick Nicholas! Do come in!") was giving a talk, which my old colleague Gabby was hosting. I was early enough to ambush Bruce before the talk (an hour early in fact), and talk about how we might help each other out in our respective projects. Gabby and crew were British enough to wait outside until we'd paused for breath, which was a good half hour. Ah, the benefits of a well-ordered society. I was non-British enough to send off to look for a spare powerboard for the microphones to record the talk. Slight problem in sending me off: "powerboard" is not the British English term, so noone had any clue what I was asking for. "Thingy with a lead and lots of plugs on it" was a much more efficient way of communicating my request.

The talk was a disconcerting experience for me: it was about electronic publishing in the humanities I got shoutouts from Bruce during the talk both for my old job (the lemmatiser work) and my new job (institutional repositories). I should have felt reintegrated as one person again, but I'm not used to wearing multiple hats at the same time.

The talk concluded, and some departmental bottles of vino poured down the sink (coz they won't keep; thanks anyway, British taxpayer), I followed Gabby to the pub, where he met up with his pub crowd of incipient and ex-academics. Much like my pub crowd really. I could not leave the country without sampling The Blandest Thing On The Menu; following the Goodness Gracious Me sketch, I went for the scampi. Not unpleasant, scampi. Just like fish fingers, but all mooshy and tartare inside. The peas were horrid though. They tasted of styrofoam or shoe polish or something.

As always, it is weird catching up with someone who you haven't seen for, in this case, seven years. Great to see that Gabby's keeping well, and doing Great Things professionally; also comforting to slowly reconnect with glimpses of shared memory. But also unsettling how much memory is not shared. Especially as Gabby, like other friends, has held on to all the inane catchphrases that I used to bludgeon them with and have long since forgotten. I'm not going to disrupt this family-friendly blog with the catchphrases in question (many of which are related to the village in Surrey named in the previous blog entry).

Even more blasts from the past came up during the evening because Nathan, one of Gabby's friends, was enough of a Trekkie to shout some Klingon phrases at me. Boy, am I rusty with my Klingon: I got jItob "I prove" and jInID "I try" confused. Which I think means I'm getting my Klingon wires crossed with my French wires.

I did have to excuse myself at 11 pm --- before I could even delight in the earnest call of "Hurry up please it's time" (and fancy myself in the background of The Waste Land): I was dozing off very quickly, having been waking up at god awful times for the past fortnight. Sorry about that, I'll buy beer next time? Maybe?

This was the site of my infatuation with perry, btw. Yum. Just like drinking liquid caramel cheesecake. 4.5% alcohol, 96.5% sugar. Oh that adds up to 101%? I'm sure the fermenting is ongoing, so there'll be some sugar/alcohol overlap. "A Warrior's Drink", if ever there was one. (Thank you Nathan :-)

The following morning was a dash to pack (or stuff crap into suitcases, which to me is the same thing). What with all that perry, I really did need the 7 am wake up call. Because I did not feel like negotiating my Luggage of Immobility down the Tube, I decided to splurge out, and get a taxi to the airport. The cabbie was too cheerful to be addressing me as "sir"; then again, this is England.

Like every cabbie in this country, credit cards were foreign to him. Like every Oceanian coming from a post-cash economy back to the Late Neolithic, I had £35 cash on me, panicked when we hit £30 on the meter (we got to £50) --- and completely forgot that I had another £20 scrunched up in my pocket. I guess the mad dash around the terminal for an ATM (or as they so quaintly term them here, "cash machine") was some sort of surrogate for morning exercise.

I am breakfasting at Wagamama at Manchester or Something Airport (Heathrow Terminal 5). The egg, bacon, mushroom and cabbage yaki soba is more successful a dish than it should be: certainly more successful a venture into cultural fusion than the Del Taco Egg & Bacon quesadilla. My waitress is Polish (Sylwia --- the "w" is the giveaway), as indeed have been many of the service staff I've been interacting with. That's another change in Albion from seven years ago. Lots of East European signage in High Street.

Next stop, the former Lusatian outpost of Berlin, to catch up with Gert. No East European signage there since 1300, but I have no fear that Gert will show me a good time regardless.

Englandaganza, Stop 9: Brighton

Having given up the ghost in Oxford town, I wasn't going to be that productive in the remaining time allotted. My Thursday meeting was with Rob, who had done the initial consulting with us on the PILIN project, and had given us some analysis that helped us tie things up at the end of the project. The intention was to show him how we'd ended up tying things up, get some final feedback for the report, and fill him in on what else was coming up. I think that got done at some point in the day; but Rob was determined to get me touristed up, and I'm glad he did.

I did have the chance of inviting Rob up to London from Sussex, to stop the madness of me bouncing all over the English countryside; but no, I had to go down to the sea again, the lonely sea and the sky. Well, not that lonely: it was Brighton, after all. The train took me past Gatwick, whose platform I photographed wistfully:



Here was the airport I was not going to be flying in or out of. As it turns out, Heathrow is not that bad at all (or at least, the Manchester or Something terminal isn't); but I wouldn't let that get in the way of a good phobia.

I alighted in Brighton, and by the time I realised I should be photographing the Railway Sign for Brighton, I was already past the gate.




I was about to photograph the No Smoking sign in fifteen languages; including not just Welsh, but Scots Gaelic --- for all those monolingual Highlanders arriving in Brighton through a time portal from 1825. (But then, the monolingual Highlanders from 1825 couldnae afford a packet of fags, anyway; so they really didn't need the Gaelic at all. Still, touching gesture.)

I didn't photograph the sign either, because Rob bounded into view, and we were off to explore Brighton.

After parking underneath a pigeon:



Brighton makes sense. It's narrow alleyways, affluent shops, self-consciously bohemian, packed with strolling Englishpeople, and suffused with light. In other words, it was St Kilda. (The Melbourne St Kilda, not the godforsaken island off Scotland.) That's cool, I like St Kilda. I just wasn't expecting to see it this far north.








Oh, and the Brighton Pavilion is truly out of place. What exactly is a mini Taj Mahal doing on the English seaside again?







Rob decided we should head back to his village over the hill, to get our internets in order. We didn't in the end, and I suspect he just wanted to give me a further guided tour. Facts gleaned from the topographic expedition included:

• Over The Hill from Brighton has a microclimate, because there's a hill in the way. It's not a terribly tall hill; but it was enough to block the weather, and all human through traffic until the railways came to town (or unless Mother Nature beat a way past first, with a river). The dikes (as in ditches) between the hills were absurdly dippy, too. Devil's Dike, they called it, and they weren't wrong.
  
  
  
  
  
• There is a village of Fulking at the bottom of one of those hills. With the "l" strategically scratched out in the panoramic map atop the hill.
  
• The trees! The trees! I'd been wondering through both my sojourns in England where the trees all went; they upped and moved down to Surrey (and on the other side of The Hill from Brighton). There were actual forests to be seen, even by the roadside. In reasonably small clumps, to be sure, but enough to hide French contraband in. Rob pointed out that whereas the top of the hill had a panoramic view of everything, the villages surrounded by trees felt claustrophobic; and for England, that would be rare.
  
  
  
  
• If you want to buy a house in Sussex, don't get on with stone slabs for its roofing. The National Trust will be all over you with the renovations, and the timber frames have started to sag under the weight. Another couple of hundred years, and the frame might actually collapse. And then where would you be.
  
• If you're a Norman invader with lots of restive Saxons in your countryside, a moated farmhouse is an excellent idea: it keeps the resentful plunderers out, and, uh, makes your daily commute to the fields very amphibian. If you're a twenty-first century Englishman living in a moated farmhouse, they're not quite as handy, because you've got bloody tourists coming by to take photos all the time. ("Y'all get the hell off of mah property before I drown y'all, y'hear?")
  
• Burmese cats really are a lot like dogs. Rob's Burmese actually rubbed noses with me.
  
• I'm still allergic to cats, as I found out five minutes later.
  

After an hour or so, I was bundled off to Gatwick, to recover from my allergic reaction and board the train back in to London. Gatwick had a vending machine with Ben & Jerry ice cream. Cherry Garcia, I've really missed you...

Englandaganza, Stop 8: Oxford Again

Ech, I'm over this. There are no photos from this leg, even though Oxford will be hurt that I took so many photos of The Other Place.

I did note, at least, that the tourist placards on Oxford are themselves in Oxford font:



Not being prepared and guidebooked-up --- and indeed, not feeling like being guidebooked-up --- I started and ended my day with free Wi-Fi at the same café by the bus station. There was also a midday break of an hour, reporting back to my bosses on the week's events (the stuff that couldn't go on the public work blog). Typing takes time, dammit.

My meetings at Oxford are blogged in my work blog; I'll only add that

• The humanities virtual research environment (Extreme Closeup pics of wax tablets, plus annotationware) stunned me into silence not because of their tech per se, but because of the complexity of metadata they anticipated --- which made them go with RDF. After that, I could hardly bring up the old school schemas of the ARCHER project.
  
• I may have gotten a bit carried away with my enthusiasm for the eIUS project, but I think they've got what they're trying to do exactly right, both with the business analysis and their use of the e-framework --- and all that basically on their own, as far as I can tell, without much in the way of handholding from the e-framework people.
  

Oh, and as before, Oxford e-research is exceptionally well catered.

The meeting was in the Babbage room, btw, which is next to the... Berners-Lee room:



Ego much? :-)

OK. The eUIS people pledged to get me out shopping by 3:30, but I was having way too much fun with them, so we kept going to 4. I then wandered out to see what I could shop for before 5:30. (Oxford may be a town, but a city it ain't.) Borders was a dead loss --- surprising for Oxford Town. I kept going, and ended up at the Oxford Ice Rink --- which is well and truly out of the way. Any further, I'd be back in Iffley.

I retraced my steps, picked up my tickets for the next day at the train station (just as well, as it turned out) --- and happened across Oxbow Books: specialists in Graeco-Roman and Mediaeval books. Aha, says I, some shopping at last. I couldn't leave Oxford without buying at least one book.

Well, not as much shopping as I'd have liked, but I did manage to pick up two books.

Hinge, George. 2006. Die Sprache Alkmans. Serta Graeca 24. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert.

Hefty oldschool philological grammar of a Doric poet. I've already completely lemmatised Alcman (and in fact just about everyone else before Aristotle), but there was some guesswork involved, and this may prove a useful cross-check. Or not. It's bought now, anyway.

Constantinides Hero, Angela. 1983. Letters of Gregory Akindynos. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks.

These letters got mentioned briefly in my book, as one of the few instances of Byzantine dissident literature. (Ihor Ševčenko called them samizdats): the guy fell afoul of the Byzantine civil war, and wrote the letters in hiding. Well, now I can judge for myself how samizdat they are.

Two more acquisitions, since I'm at it.

Toufexis, Panagiotis. 2005. Das Alphabetum vulgaris linguae graecae des deutschen Humanisten Martin Crusius (1526–1607), & Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der gesprochenen griechischen Sprache im 16. Jh. Neograeca Medii Aevi VIII. Cologne: Romiosini.

Notis' thesis. Crusius was an cool character: decided all on his own to be Mr Modern Greek in the West, a couple of centuries before anyone else did. As a result, every Greek passing by Germany would rock up to Tübingen for a free feed, in return for "So pleasse zu tellen me, vot dos zis wort ouzo mean?" Notis goes through the dictionary he put together --- complete with a word that "it cäme zu me, in ze dream seqvence". (I'm convinced the wort in qvestion was a garbled Turkish loanword that got stuck in his head at around "pleasse zu tellen me, vot dos zis wort undies mean?" But that's a paper for another time.)

Pompella, Giuseppe. 1996. Lexicon Menandreum. Hildesheim: Georg Olms.

For my hoovering up of all ancient Greek words, I need to track down as many dictionaries as I can. (I mentioned a bit of that in the Cambridge Non-Grownup Classics library.) Dictionaries of specific authors don't come up much, because the Standard Dictionaries cover most of the words; but they don't cover all of them. Especially with an author like Menander, who's mostly papyri found after 1950 --- and with this dictionary, which came out at the same time as the latest supplement to the LSJ dictionary. (Which means that the LSJ didn't get to incorporate the new words, like they did with the Galen dictionary I found.) Of course, Modern Greek isn't the only discipline that libraries in Australia are retreating from: there is not a copy of the Menander dictionary to be had in any Australian library. So I ordered this online. Looking forward to it coming over: I've got 99.3% recognition of wordforms up to Aristotle already, and this will help my stats.

You can tell I didn't care much about Oxford sightseeing if I'm blogging about my books. At any rate, retreated to Iffley for the night, did not eat (there was Curry With Greeks the previous night to recover from), bummed around the internet (because ech, I'm over this), and STILL woke up 5 am for an 8 am departure. I hate how Engelond has made me a morning person: it's unnatural.

Speaking of Engelond: I'm seeing a whole lot of St George's Cross flags this time around, and not a lot of Union Jacks. Looks like devolution's working even better than expected...

As I type, my train is going past cows the next morning, on the way to Brighton. For I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside. Actually I don't (and I had the option of staying put in London), but it seemed like a good idea when I booked the trip a month ago. But ech. Over it.

Englandaganza, Stop 7: Cambridge

Arrived in Cambridge Monday night ---



and got a cab to my accommodation. My accommodation was a while away. So much away, that the road exhausted Cambridge, and took me to an industrial park next to Cambridge Airport. (Yes Cambridge has an airport. Who knew.)

As I already had found, the UK takes the "park" component of "industrial park" seriously, so the view out my window was rather more, shall we say, bucolic than I'd expected.




I finished off the 12 page down to 4 page document, and collapsed. Wouldn't you know, the document did swell back to 11 pages. I'd like to think the 11 pages are more readable than they used to be, at least.

My appointment wasn't till 10 the next day, so when I inevitably work up at 6, I pledged to get some more work done off my "Warning Warning June 25 Deadline Approaching!" list. Being still in holiday mode, I didn't get moving until way past 7 am, but I did manage two or three items. Maybe a bit more expeditiously than I'd have liked.

The signs all over Cambridge Town proclaimed that this was the home of Anglia Ruskin University.



But I had business at another tertiary institution at Cambridge you may have heard of: I was visiting the Mediaeval Greek Grammar project .



I'd made contact with Notis Toufexis, who blogs matters Early Modern Greek, and was blog-savvy enough to be camera shy. I'd also met the project head honchos in conferences, and I'd known Io Manolessou since my PhD years. Io now lectures in Patras, and I had no idea whether she'd be in town; she was (and was leaving the next day), so I kept up my mission of seeing her every four years. Marjolijne, their other researcher, was new to me; she'd replaced Tina, who was already suffering Junior Academic Syndrome in Athens U.

In fact a whole lot of academic mobility, which is what happens when you haven't talk to people in four years: Pantelidis in Athens, Doulavera in Salonica, Giakoumaki retired.

And Nicholas a business analyst (a job title I had to explain to people yet again). I knew intellectually that visiting the project was going to cause me lots of regret, but that doesn't quite prepare you for the actual emotion. After all, I knew those books.




I'd written one of them, after all:




Even worse, there were several books there I didn't know, because my bibliography stopped in 1995. If you're not doing the conference circuit, you have little idea what's coming out, and what editions people have been sitting on ("What do you mean, a new Athens Digenes edition is coming out?") This is particularly bad in Greece, where far too much academic publishing happens in vanity presses, and is never heard of again. Not to mention that, with the collapse of Modern Greek studies, Western libraries don't buy Greek books any more anyway.

Notis was bemused by me not considering Greek university libraries Western. Ah, caught out once again by the Hellenic/Romaic dichotomy. After all, the Greek libraries now have a unified online card catalogue, Zephyr. But me being from Oceania instead of Eurasia, if it isn't on Worldcat, it doesn't exist --- certainly not as far as our interlibrary loans people are concerned.

(Conversely, Notis being from Eurasia instead of Oceania, he'd never heard of Worldcat. I'm assuming btw that Oceania is and always has been at war with Eastasia. Otherwise I might have trouble getting back.)

The pangs didn't stop there. See the project whiteboard?



Let's zoom in close on the list of things to do for the grammar:



That, ladies and gentlemen, was the research question of my PhD thesis.

(Even worse, that was the question I didn't get to do anything mediaeval on, because I ended up distracted for two years by the modern dialect data.)

Nor did my attempts to impress them with my gleanings of odd inflections quite work out as planned:

ME: [to Notis] Have I got an inflection for you! 1st person passive imperfect -unmu. Turns up twice, in the Achilleid as estekunmu, and the Alexander Romance as erxunmu.

IO: Yeah. I came across that in the Theseid as memfunmu.

Well that'll learn me. I should have already known not to mess with Io. (And note that the Theseid is basically unpublished.)

At any rate, I discussed with Notis for a couple of hours what we were doing in our respective gigs --- same subject matter, same data even, but not really same approach or results. The grammar, after all, is a grammar: it's tight and organised and exhaustive (I was very impressed by the sneak preview of the articles chapter). My lemmatiser is really engineering instead of science: it tries to deal with all stages of Greek at the same time in the one search engine, so it's less perfect than if it did one dialect at a time, and relies a lot on ranking. Fallible ranking, as Notis found in a search for "creek" he did while I was there. (Fixed later that night; duals are not your friend.)

I did get to lunch with Io and friend, and dine with the researchers and other friend. In between, the grammar project was, after all, a place of work, and they had deadlines, so I moseyed over to the Greek Lexicon Project, which is developing a learner's dictionary of Greek. The dictionary isn't competing with the big standard dictionaries; but I have unearthed a handful of headwords missed out by those standard dictionaries, and thought they might be interested.

So unannounced and all, I knocked on the door in Classics (once I found it), and launched in:

BRUCE: ... Yes?

ME: You don't know me, but I've been lemmatising the TLG for the past five years, and I may have some lemmata for you.

BRUCE: ... You're Nick Nicholas! Do come in!

It's good to be king.

We only chatted for a quarter hour (they too were in a place of work), but it looks like there's room for followup there. Turns out that Bruce is giving the Friday evening seminar that Gabby (an old TLG colleague) had invited me to. They're actually taking the semantics bit of the dictionary seriously, which standard classical dictionaries tend not to (especially as they all date from 1840); so I'm looking forward to it. Will have to take my leave of the people at London School of Economics early, though.

With a couple of hours remaining, I went down to the Classics Undergrad library, to see what I could see. You only get access to the Grownup library if you have a letter of recommendation stating your business. I can't for the life of me get this preciousness; and that's the kind of preciousness that Web 2.0 will not bust open.

No surprises in the Byzantine section (banished to an alcove off the side); the mediaeval grammar had taken all the good stuff anyway. Cute 1880s grammar of Albanian in Greek characters, reversing Greek characters to do new phonemes. (So reverse kappa was what's now "q", reverse gamma was "gj".) When characters were symmetrical, they had to go plundering: lowercase gamma revived the Byzantine lowercase form (a miniature of the capital); capital lambda ("l" vs. "ll") went for the Roman character). Don't let anyone at Unicode know; as far as I can tell this was a one-off; and unlike the reverse letters of Ancient Greek Musical Notation, it was aesthetically challenged.

I also gathered up some lemmata for the lemmatiser, from the specialist dictionaries in the undergrad library. Again, most of them I'd already seen; but I got four words of Callimachus pinned down, and there's a new dictionary of Menander I'll have to order in when I get back.

Once ejected from the library ("You have a key to get out, don't you." "Uh, no. That would be my exit cue."), I wandered into the town centre (and not back to the industrial park). There was something different about Cambridge than Oxford that I couldn't pin down. My first stab at it was, Cambridge was grey. There was certainly plenty of evidence of that about:





Io was dismayed to hear my one-predicate encapsulation of Cambridge. No, she said, you aren't seeing the right part of town. You must go to where the colleges are. And she's right: the colleges aren't grey.

More beige, really.




OK, OK, beige and magnificent.







Or redbrick and old and magnificent.






Or in the case of the Fitzwilliam Museum, marble and magnificent (and a little Albert-Speer-ish):







Except for the green bits. They were green and magnificent.




But the bits that weren't the colleges didn't counterpoint with the colleges in the aggressive, jumbled way that Oxford High St did. And Io --- a Cambridge partisan through and through --- proffered the crucial insight:

IO: Cambridge is a village and Oxford is a town.

And all became clear. Especially after she lamented that the only place open past 11 pm was the Greek souvlaki place.

Oh, btw, scrumpy? Never again. I downed just half a pint of scrumpy, and couldn't walk straight. A pint of scrumpy! You might as well pour a pint of vodka! I think they actually did pour pints of chardonnay in there: they certainly had wine on tap.

Wine on tap. What the hell kind of country have I gotten myself into?! Probably the same kind of country in which restaurants are vegetarians.



(ΧΟΡΤΟΦΑΓΟΣ ΕΣΤΙΑΤΟΡΙΟΝ—a slight mistranslation. That's cursive Hebrew, right?)

Wednesday morning, I was getting out of Cambridge and to That Other Place ("Oh no! Not that place west of here!") The 06:30 bus has intriguing evidence to suggest that Cambridge and That Other Place are actually accessible from each other.



But a bus is a daft vehicle to travel on. You'd have thought I'd learned that lesson on the Greyhound in Richmond, Virginia...

*flashback*

ME: My luggage is on that bus that just left.

BORED GREYHOUND DUDE: Yup.

ME: And I'm not.

BORED GREYHOUND DUDE: Yup.

No luggage lost this time, but I did lose my reservation number; so that's £6.50 I'm never seeing again.

Dishevelled, sleepy, and cramped (daft vehicle to blog on, too), I am now being disgorged at Oxford. Where I'll hold on to my philological identity just a smidgeon longer...