To my wife, on our five-year anniversary

My love, whose smile is wide enough to clasp
the heavens in; whose sorrow can expend
the deep-dug wells of earth; whose anger's grasp
no whisper can unravel; whose amend

no benison of rainbows can surpass;
whose passion strides where armies never went,
and lays what claims it pleases; and whose glass
flashes with all the sunrays it has bent,

much like a crystal: Love, on this our day
of memory of cycles run complete
and cycles yet to be, our eyes will meet

and recognise once more the subtle play
of light and night. We'll laugh through dreary weather,
and toast another year of us together.

While I was away

I: May

As if I was the first
To sail beyond the west,
Fall off the end of Earth,
Sink, swim, and gasp for breath.

As if no man knew thirst,
Before I stopped to rest
Beside the spring; or birth,
Before I heard of death.

Beyond the west: each day
A year, each step a road.
Winding to the unknown.

Roads trod by mortal clay
A thousandfold. A ride
I've hitched now. By your side.

II: May

This fulsomeness, this loveliness, this care,
This playfulness, this trust and troth laid bare,
This passion, this impulsiveness, this shock,
This pressing—this inexorable lock,

These waves and curves, this storm of skin and hair,
This push and pull and pause, this fear and dare,
These shades, dim monochrome, that sway and rock,
This stillness, lulled at by the ticking clock,

All this you teach me. All of this you hold.
All this I witness with you. Watch it flow,
Like mercury, like phlogiston, like gold.

This Here-and-Now, this Hence, this Old Made New,
This secret that not even we can know,
This you and I have claimed.
                                                        It's half past two.

III: May

So, there's this girl. Unruly, quite the knave.
Will not stay put. Does what she damn well will.
Frets that she'll fall asleep if she stands still.
Makes mirth of solemn stuff. Derides the grave.

So there's this girl. Can't take her anyplace.
Won't talk on tragedy. Will not wear frills.
Talk French cuisine, she's running for the hills.
And laughs at me about it to my face.

So there's this girl, who's got me all worked out,
piercing my artifices and my doubt.
And still stays put, and won't go anywhere.

What do I do with her? What has she done,
To make my reason and my pomp go dumb?
How have I come to earn reproof so fair?

IV: August

Grace pooling from above. Grace trickling down.
Grace mingling with the common and the base,
Granted unbidden, and divulged unbound.
Grace that suffuses all, for gain or waste.

Grace filling puddles, muddying the ground,
In which the errant wretch begrudged his haste:
Splashed past his shins, only to end up drowned
In startling, blinding, and uncalled for Grace.

Thy grace, thy charm, thy steadfastness, thy blithe
And easy gait: I, far from thee and these
Behold and cannot fathom. Where these thrive,

Where thou hast joy, I hear of now and then:
Reports of floods and mud that boil and freeze
And thaw, and bring this world to grace, and mend.

V: October

Each year Adonis dies, pierced by the boar.
Each year the maidens bear him, singing dirges,
To a tomb. Adonis each new year emerges
To live again, eager to hunt once more.

Each year the black earth, bound in snow, and sore
With grief, bewails its loss in crystal churches.
Each year, Lent breaks: up from the ground life surges
Anew, to bloom, to fade, to exult, to mourn.

Each week, each day, we dance, and draw apart,
And back again; we stop, we spin, we start,
We try anew. It works, it fails, it muddles.

Each time, we don't know that the Spring will come.
Each time, we know that soon the frost will numb
Our hands. Yet still a flame glows, where we've huddled.

VI: November

The cold has come. The stony showers flood
Blurred memories of one-time warmth, as brusque
As Melbourne weather. Now a bleary dusk
Alone recalls the sun, in faded blood,

Soon to grow dark. These feet pass through the mud,
Their pace agnostic, doubting. A boar's tusk,
They'd wailed, has struck. But pilfered myths won't mask
That chill that numbs its prey, and binds it shut.

Now stories leech away. I never sailed
Beyond the west; the storm at half past two
Was merely rain, and bore no grace. I failed

To hear their music. Now they've fallen dumb,
Too drained to praise a summer that was due
to pass. And so it sets. The cold has come.

Will be Stateside next week

Things have continued to be odd around here, to the extent that I haven't given my tuthree readers adequate notice of this: on Friday, I'm going to the US for a week. I'm spending the weekend in Irvine; then I'm travelling to DC for the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit (see my position paper, if you're that way inclined); then I'm spending 24 hours in New York.

Which may mean a blog post or two here, since I only seem to blog at opɯcɯlɯklɑr when I travel.

Also letting readers know that I've accepted an offer to work at the Australian National Data Service out at Monash in July, when my current contract with Link Affiliates expires. I was melancholy enough when I left the University of Melbourne for Monash the first time, in 2006. Since then, I've changed, Melbourne's changed, and Monash's changed. Or at least, I know more people at Monash, and it's a five minute drive away.

I still won't find buskers playing the Chaconne in Clayton, though.

.sig quoting Marcel Cohen, corrected

My listing of email signatures, from a simpler, Web 1.0 world, has often served as a conversation starter for my friend John Cowan, if I can judge from random googlings (first comment down). The listing includes the following citation of the French-born author Marcel Cohen writing in Judezmo:

No saves, Antonyo, lo ka es morirse una lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada diya ke el Dyo da.

I took the quotation from the Esperanto literary journal Literatura Foiro. I copied it from there and not from memory (I don't have a memory for Judezmo); but it looks like whoever published it did mangle it from memory. Cohen's book, In search of a lost Ladino: letter to Antonio Sauro, is a reflection on the death of both Sephardi Jewry in the Holocaust, and the Sephardic language. It is now available in a bilingual edition (link to the passage), and the passage is also cited (correctly) in a Spanish blog.

Karo Antonio,
Kyero eskrivirte en djudyo antes ke no keda nada del avlar de mis padres. No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
Lo ke te eskrivo, Antonio, es el poko d eke ma akodro despues de estos cinkos syekolos en Turkya. Yo naci en Asnieres, ke es una sivdeka cerka de Paris. Mi padre y mi madre dainda avlavan en franses ke era la lingua de todos los djudyos de Turkya en akel tyempo porke l`Alliance israelite universelle asi les embezo. Despues de este se foueron al Lycée de Galata Sarail en Stambol y es por esto ke tanto les plazya la Francia, ma en kaza nunka decharon de avlar djudyo y ansina es ke yine yo me embezi.
"Una kayda, una kresida"

[EDIT: Changed from "French-born Judezmo author: Cohen is an established author in French, and his use of Judezmo in 1985 was a one-off.]

"Nick Nicholas"

Surnames, they're a labile thing. Not everywhere is Iceland, where your patronymic lasts a generation; but not everywhere has the self-same string of letters identify a lineage for a millenium, either. Crete switched to a new patronymic suffix en masse, -akis, in the mid-19th century. Well, the Christian Cretans did. The Muslim Cretans didn't, but they don't live there any more. The Jewish Cretans didn't, and they don't live at all. (The one Jewish Cretan left did: Nicholas Stavroulakis.) So until recently, when Greeks, and later on non-Greeks, restored some demographic diversity to the island, there were districts where 98% of the names in the phone book ended in -akis. But there's not many -akis's before 1800. The Who's Who of Cretan Renaissance Literature (quatrocento to settecento) reads: Sachlikis, Della Porta, Choumnos, Falier, Picatorio, Bregadin, Sklavos, Achelis, Cornaro, Chortatzis, Troglio, Foscolo, Bugnali. (Yes, I'm keeping the Italian names Italian. When they were dealing with the authorities, so did they.)

Things are labile in Cyprus too. The dominant pattern in Cyprus is for surname to be archaic genitives of proper names—making them straight patronymics. And people would switch their patronymics to surnames.

I know little about my father's side; my grandfather went by ο Νικολής του Πούτρου in the village. "Boutros's Nick". That's Boutros, as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali—or more informatively, as in the Arabic for "Peter". Does that mean I have links to Lebanon? Probably not immediately, although Greek Cypriots seem to be more sanguine about lack of racial purity than Greece Greeks; it just meant that names lingered and travelled.

But Boutros's Nick was not written down as Boutros's Nick. He was written down as Nicholas of Mark-the-Pilgrim, Νικόλαος Χατζημάρκου (or Χ″μάρκου, because Χατζη- was a damnably frequent surname prefix, and people would save themselves the penstrokes when they could). And when he was Englished, he was Englished as Nicolaos Hadjimarcou.

As an Englishing, "Hadjimarcou" tells you stuff, which is why I took the <dj> across in opoudjis. It tells you that he was a Cypriot, so he pronounced the prefix as /xadʒi/, the way it came across from Arabic hajji via Turkish haci, and not as the alveolar Hatzi- of the mainland. It wasn't the only such Englishing in Cyprus: the other day I noticed a brandy distillery, trading since the 1880s as Haggipavlu. But Hadjimarcou is not really an Englishing of /xadʒiˈmarku/ at all: it's a Frenching. Which I guess shows that French was the default foreign language for the English colonial administrators.

Boutros's Nick had five sons and two daughters. Four of those sons ended up in Launceston, Tasmania. The first left for Australia six months after the birth of the youngest (who has remained in Cyprus). George did not at first go to Launceston; he went to Sale, Victoria. And in 1947, noone in Sale, any more than anyone in Launceston, felt like pronouncing Hadjimarcou.

The second son had already made his patronymic switch to Chris Nicholas by the time he arrived in Launceston. And when the third son arrived (my father, Stavros—Steve to those who speak to him as I write to you, in English), he followed suit, and so did Andrew the fourth son: it would have been awkward to have brothers in the same town with different surnames, particularly a surname awkward for the locals. The fifth son, Savvakis (or Markantonios according to his christening) has stayed in Cyprus, and has stayed Hadjimarcou.

This was assimilation, of course, and it was compounded by the inevitability of me being christened Nick, after both my grandfathers. My father only officially changed the surname when we left Tasmania for Greece, so his papers would be consistent with the rest of the family's: I've never been called Hadjimarcou, except that one time in First Year Uni when I wrote a letter to the editor.

Once or twice my father has expressed mild regret on the name change—"Nicholas" is a name, not a surname, he noted. The double whammy of my name being my surname? The birth certificate says Nick Nicholas, not Nicholas Nicholas; at any rate, with all the patronymic surnames, double whammy names are unremarkable in Cyprus. So no, despite what people often assume when I'm introduced to them, my parents have never expressed regret to me about calling me Nick Nicholas.

I myself wasn't particularly attached to the name, though, and when I used Hadjimarcou as a nom de plume, I was considering making it a nom de deed poll. Twenty years on and with a crap memory for anything past last week, I'm not sure, but I don't think it was out of some nationalist imperative to recover my roots: I've never particularly identified myself as Cypriot outside of the occasional overlong [n] when I speak Greek. It was more that "Nicholas" is a name, not a surname.

But I didn't change it when I cared to; and by the time I was establishing first a scholarly and then a professional identity, I certainly didn't care enough to. I answer to Nicholas (though not as a first name), I defend its authentic post-mediaeval misspelling, I even asked that someone's coinage of Nicholasian referring to my writings be Greeked to Nicolaic. But I don't bask and glory in the surname: it's just a signifier.

It's been convenient, having an Anglo-compatible name, I won't deny that. I haven't felt alienated from this country, to seek to define myself against it; then again, by my time, I wasn't particularly compelled to define myself with it: switching to Hadjimarcou wouldn't particularly have cost me here either. Those that needed to know I was Greek, knew it; that was enough for me. Identification, after all, is a labile thing too.

That "Nicholas" was labile when we went to live in Greece. The Australian papers may have said Nick Nicholas, but my parents have always left that to the papers, and called me Nikos. It's just a signifier, it was a translation of Nikolaou to begin with, so the switch to Nikos Nikolaou passed without comment: that's what my Greek papers said. (Well, they said Nikolaos Nikolaou: the State does not allow for shortened names, it's Europe.) The village schoolteacher knew me as Nikos Nikolaou, and so did the town priest.

It's less labile now: my identity is bound to papers written in English, and passports in English, and profile pages in English. In my 1995 trip to Greece, I started getting Νίκολας in Greek, and Νικ. I got more of it in 2000, and 2004, and 2008. And identity may be labile, but I'd have liked it to be labile on my terms—meaning I get a Greek identity, and an Anglo identity. Being given an Anglo identity in what Greeks call me, with an English name I don't use in Greek, means that someone else is telling me I'm not one of them. That, I don't like.

And yet, I say "in Greek it's Nikos" with some hesitation. I'm not one of them, that's the truth. And even if I was, I publish in linguistics under an English name (including, fatefully, my papers in Greek, because professional identities don't get to be as labile). I have an Australian accent that takes weeks to wear off when in Greece, and I don't get to spend weeks in Greece. I comment on the magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' blog as "Nick Nicholas"—because I registered with WordPress for my day job blog, and I'm not particularly driven to put a wall up between my linguist online identity and my business analyst online identity. But if people see "Nick Nicholas", and work out that I'm not a local, of course they'll call me Νικ Νίκολας; what was I expecting? At least when they script-switch to Nick Nicholas in the middle of Greek script, it doesn't look as obvious. (That happens a fair bit, btw, because transliterating is now out of fashion in Greek.)

OTOH, "NickNick" annoys me in English (and at least one friend uses it because she knows it annoys me)—but ΝικΝικ as used by the other bloggers chez Sarantakos is welcome. It is a spontaneous abbreviation of the kind you see a lot there, and it joins Ηλε-Φουφούτος becoming Ηλέφ or Ηλεφού, Μπουκανιέρος becoming Μπουκάν, Φαροφύλακας becoming Φαρό. Unlike the way I perceive Νικ Νίκολας, I perceive as inclusive, because it assimilates me to that community's norm. Of course, they're just doing it to save keystrokes—the same reason Boutros's Nick got written down as Χ″μάρκου. But I'll take my communities where I can find them.

This all was prompted btw by the intriguing thread launched by Άδωνις ο παραχαράκτης ή Άδωνης ο παραχαράκτης; It ranges far from the intended topic, like good comment threads do, and there's stuff there I disagree with but can't articulate a cogent refutation of—again like good comment threads do. There's a couple of linguistic observations which I may pass on to Hellenisteukontos; but I've got to finish off the list of omicrons misspelled as omegas that I've saddled myself with for the past month.

Bücherdammerung

This should have been more traumatic than it was, but: Saturday I was at my parents', sorting through my books that had ended up over the years in boxes in their garage, to determine what would stay (and go to my place), and what would be dispensed with.

It should have been more traumatic, but these were books that I had not seen in years, and had grown unaccustomed to. Even though the books from my childhood, in particular, were what reared me. So farewell, my 1977 World Book Encyclopaedia, which my parents would allow me to access one paper-wrapped volume at a time over the next six years; you taught me the world, but that was several ages before Google and Wikipedia. (I don't think a thirty year old encyclopaedia gets to fare very well at all; but I'm not dwelling on that.) Farewell, Greek children's book retellings of Swift and Defoe; I never got to know Gulliver and Crusoe in the original Georgian English, and I doubt I will now. Farewell, Asimov paperbacks: you introduced me to sci-fi, and eventually made me turn my back on fiction entirely. You graced me with projecting into the future before the impending Singularity made all projection pointless. Somewhat less of a farewell to the old transformational grammar textbooks I picked up, thinking one day I Must Really Get this whole Chomsky thing: it's not my dayjob, it's not even my ongoing side interest, I'm not going to read the 1968 exegeses of the theories. And I'll Google it if I ever do need to. Not everything good is online enough, but there'll be no shortage of the East Coast linguistic mainstream online.

It should have been more traumatic, and I was pretty snippy during the whole process, but I still kept more than I discarded, and not all of it because I was going to keep reading it. The Shakespeare paperbacks are safe for the moment. The old Calculus textbook I first learned maths from—old enough to contain learnèd doggerel and allusions to the Jacobite rebellion—stays. Not a jot of anything in Esperanto is touched: it's been over a decade since I've had anything to do with Esperanto, but I've ended up a kind of custodian to Frank Banham's Nachlass, and I'm holding on to it. (Frank Banham was the long-time editor of La Rondo/The Australian Esperantist—now Esperanto Sub La Suda Kruco; not much on Banham online, but here's a PDF of the first issue he put out in 1940.) Same goes for Mark Durie's sort-of Nachlass, left outside his office door when he left linguistics for the Church. (They include his Indo-European linguistics assignments, from back when one learned historical linguistics as an undergrad via Lithuanian. As opposed to now, when one doesn't learn historical linguistics as an undergrad at all.)

The books left behind are in a couple of suitcases in the garage, and the books that have made the transition to my place are in stacks in cupboards in the garage—both waiting for when I can afford more shelving. The fact that it's perpetually too cold to go to the garage to check something when I need to (invariably when blogging at 1 AM) may yet turn out to be an argument for further book rearrangement...

Nick makes the local paper

'Twas two weeks ago, or maybe three, that as I made my daily walk to Oakleigh Railway Station, to go to work for the day, I saw three people arrayed at the entrance of the station. There was a girl, standing and smiling awkwardly; a woman, holding a clipboard and looking officious; and a man, holding a whopping big camera, and who seemed to me to be photographing the girl's feet.

"Odd location to pick to stage a fashion shoot for shoes", I pondered, walked around them, and went about my business.

And so it was that my pondering on locations for photographing shoes was immortalised in the April 7 Oakleigh Monash Leader:



Yea, 'tis I.



Didn't realise the UCI backpack made me look quite so fat...

Late-Night Work Bender

The past few days at work, I've been doing one of my favourite work things (information modelling) under my least favourite work circumstances (four-day deadline for what was truly a four-month job)—with all the back history and negotiations and frustrations and blinding insights and occasional outbursts of singing that authoring by committee brings with it.

Today, I was on the phone at eight, off the phone at ten, in to work at twelve, getting somewhere by two. Alone in the office by six, with the occasional status update interstate. By nine, Interstate and I had declared what I like to call the Optimal Iraq Strategy: "Declare Whatever The Hell Happened A Victory, And Go Home." Maybe on a global scale the work wasn't done, but the door on this phase of work had creaked shut.

Save, Post, Done. I IM'd my goodbyes; I checked a couple of links for tomorrow's tasks. I turned off the harpsichord Goldberg Variations: too preoccupied to have been listening anyway, and interrupted too often for them to run their course. I unplugged the laptop, one peripheral at the time: Keyboard, Screen, Network, Power. I shrugged on my coat, I pocketed my mobile; I switched off the light. Door Release, Staircase, Passageway, Door Release. Night lights in Parkville.

As I paced into the street, and followed students onto the tram, I was hit by a wave that occasionally swells at the end of an occasional twelve-hour work day, or a nighttime lecture. Night and yellow street lights summon it, and bleary eyes host it. It's bleak and spent and slightly peeved; it's envious of those walking past, surely having more of a life than it does; it's subdued. It needs a coffee or a beer or a game of charades; more than that, it needs someone to share it with, and it's not going to get it. It's going home to crash; it's done. And yet, there's the corner of a smile about it. Not joyful, God no; not really even happy. Relieved, I guess. Relieved with a soupçon of potentiality. A memory of future expectation, a still awareness: "Now, now that's over. Now... now I can do something else."

Which is to go home to crash, yes; but still. Now I can do something else.

Twenty years ago, this would have been a poem, every bit as self-conscious as this post is. Ten years ago, this would have been a brewski, because I had a colleague who worked late too. Ten years hence... well, who knows where any of us will be, ten years hence. Right now, this post, too, is over. Now I can write something else.

I'm not a nerd, I just play one in real life

Via Vanessa's blog, I ended up at Peter's blog, and via Peter's blog, I ended up at the Nerd Test site. Now, I may have a day job in IT, but it involves diagrams and bullet points rather than code, and I no longer read all that much, so surely my nerd credentials have been blunted by now...




Oh. That's... surprising. Ah, I see there is a new and improved, more granular test. That will sort things out properly:





... I see. Not a sci-fi nerd: well, Star Trek TNG was a long time ago, and I was much more into Klingon because of the linguistics than the trekkiedom. More a science nerd than a history nerd? A lot of the questions were retrospective, I guess.

Still. A bit taken aback. Once again, my self-perception is out of sync with objective external measures. I haven't changed as much as I thought...

Orahovac

I had a highly Croatian day yesterday (visit chez Nick of my friend Marija cum familiā; visit of Nick chez Andy and Reena cum familiā). At the end of the day, I had a dwarf lime tree, to complement the dwarf orange tree and compact lemon tree; and I had a bottle of Orahovac, to complement the duty free Laphroaig and Baileys.



Mm, Orahovac. It's not gueuze (mm, gueuze), the vindication of all Belgic lambics. This is West Balkan walnut liqueur: dunk some green walnuts in some rakija (grappa, if that helps), leave in a summer window in Dalmatia for several months, and savour the woody syrupy goodness.

I'd had a shot glass of it at Hrvatski Dom, Footscray with my third Croatian friend Tim; it formed a trio of on-the-house welcomings together with paint stripper (er, Slivovitz, plum brandy) and cough syrup (er, Kruškovac, pear brandy). I fell in love—not least because it was neither of the above; and as lovers often do, I embarked on a quest, through the wilds of Dandenong (which has a large number of Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians), to find a supply of the golden walnutty nectar. The search proved fruitless, though it did generate what was my unupdated Facebook status message for the next several months. I complained about this strategically to Reena next time I saw her—and it paid off: now, from Boccacio Cellars, Balwyn to my humble abode, I have an added source of solace.

The taste was already familiar to me, because Greeks make walnut preserves, as one of their long suite of "spoon sweets": take any edible fruit (and a few things that are neither—such as walnuts), and turn into a sickly sweet preserve that you can only ever consume one spoonful of at a time.

When I described Orahovac to my mother this morning, she reported that people in her village did the same with sour cherries and brandy. Odd that I'd never heard of it; I know of vissinadha (βυσσινάδα), sour cherry cordial, but not that there was a Greek version of crème de cassis. (Hercule Poirot's favourite drink? He can have it: it's closer to Kruškovac than Orahovac in my book.)

(Mm, Orahovac.)

Late March Distractions

Life has run away with me. Which is normally a preamble to me suspending operations on this blog. chaq qaS, 'a wej qaS. Maybe, but not yet. (That's for the couple of you that expected more Klingon out of me. It's all you're getting this posting.)

Life has run away with me in lots of ways. There was the World Is Much Too Small Way:

NICK: [walks from Melbourne Uni to Fitzroy, having been roped into a focus group]

NICK: *pulls up to the traffic lights before the focus group*

NICK: *notices next to him a vaguely familiar Levantine-looking woman with a short haircut. ignores*

...

NICK: *hang on, her hair didn't used to be short...*

ZOE: ... Nick?!

NICK: ... Zoe?!

Hail fellow well met, has it really been two and a half years, woah this is freaky, you've got the same email address right, well (looks at watch) gotta go ---

ZOE: Yeah. I've got to head to this house in Napier St.

NICK: Oh. I've got to go to this place in Napier St too.

*blink*

ZOE: ... You're not going to a focus group, are you?

NICK: [grins] F*ck off!

The even funnier thing was when we both walked in to said focus group, and the mutual contact looked at us both, clicked, and mouthed to me, "that's not... the Zoe?" Like I say, small world.

*waves if you're reading this btw Zoe*

There was the Failed Sleep Readjustment Way:

SISTER: So why did you invite me over today if you hadn't had any sleep?

NICK: ... Zzzz...

SISTER: Did you want me to make you a cup of tea?

NICK: ... Zzzz...

There was the Sudden Work Deadline Way:

... Nah, I'll skip the illustrative dialogues :-) --- they make fun of me, as they usually do, but with work it pays to err on the side of caution.

The deadline's still inconceivable, but I've accommodated to circumstances; it tends to take me a day --- and some gentle course correction. I convince myself the world is X, and it takes a couple of statements of "since last Thursday, the world is Y" before I realise that the world might in fact no longer be X.

I blame the coming Singularity, because the rate of change isn't going to ease off.

And finally, there's the New Toy And Associated Challenges Way, now that I have a power supply for my eeePC. The summary of the challenge is given in a separate Geek Dept posting.

I'm typing this on the eeePC, in fact. The 8.9 inch screen is fine; the keyboard will take some getting used to, and it's moving me away from touch typing (which I've been slowly inching towards over the past 25 years) back to two-or-three finger typing. In fact, in the standing room only train (one more reason I'm not normally a morning person), I was down to one-finger typing. And a lot of grumbling.

Some shoutouts

For those of you keeping score, a shout out to my tuthree loyal blog readers, for staying subscribed even though I had not updated in nine months.

A shoutout to my friends who have been waiting for a status update on Facebook for about a year, and will have to settle for this instead.

A shoutout to my friends who optimistically thought I might at least do updates on Twitter. Eh, yeah. Get back to you on that.

A shoutout to my sister, for landing the promotion and dodging the bullet. I kept glibly saying she'd be fine; it's great to know that in the end, she was.

A shoutout to my friend George, who pleads antiquity of computer for not being able to read the blog, but did have the incisiveness to comment "You, having a blog just for when you travel—a fine perversion that is!"

A shoutout to Keith Jeffery, whose charger I borrowed to confirm that the eeePC I bought actually worked.

Er, yeah. I bought it in the end. Temptation mumble mumble. £150 with 4 + 12 GB drive, surely a steal. And surely it *was* a steal: the charger they were puzzling over for not working didn't work because it was a 9.5V charger for the eeePC 700, and not a 12V charger for the eeePC 900. The bloody thing will cost me $40 extra; it already cost me €15 in taxi money because I didn't check that shops in Amsterdam are closed Mondays till 1 pm (though that did at least get me out of Centrum and into the actual city of Amsterdam). And, uh, haven't gotten to play with it much yet. When I'm back, it shall be the envy of every café-goer in Melbourne! 'Cept that they'll all have one already...

A shoutout to Flevoland, for remaining above water. Next time I'll try and visit. (Andrew Treloar just biked over; alas, I am ill at such numbers.)

A shoutout to Sebastian for hosting me tonight.

A shoutout to The Lower Countries, for being The Lower Countries.

A shoutout to the Australian and British taxpayer, for their unwitting sponsorship of my work travel.

A shoutout to work, for having me both travel and use my brain, though not necessarily simultaneously at all times.

A shoutout to my work colleagues, for putting up with me in not one blog, but two.

And a shoutout to you, dear reader, wherever and whenever you may be.

OK, enough hippy crap. Booze waits at la bella Nimega.

Where I live

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I now no longer live in Cheltenham (A: 20 km SE of the Central Business District, B), somewhere I've never really formed an attachment to. I now live in Oakleigh (C). Oakleigh is the outermost limit of where I was prepared to live: 15 km southeast of the CBD. End of Zone 1 for metropolitan transport; there is a cost barrier between Zone 1 and Zone 2, but a more important psychological barrier. It is suburbia, but it is at least suburbia that gets lumped together with the inner city on some maps. Those maps are unfamiliar to my friends at Melbourne Uni, who congratulate themselves if they venture as far as St Kilda (D, 3 km south). But if your world extends beyond the self-conscious inner-city bohemia of Brunswick (E), you can tell the difference. My friend Tania has bought in Ivanhoe (F) (but will construe it as Heidelberg, G, if you don't look at the map too closely, for some reflected bohemia), and overlooks a generous serving of parkland; when she heard my news, she exclaimed: "Oakleigh. That's a bit... urban, isn't it?"

Mm. Urban.

And it is a bit. It's still tree-lined in the residential streets, and there are lawns; but the lawns are measured, and the old weatherboard houses are increasingly being subdivided into brick units. That's a trend sweeping outwards from the inner suburbs for a while now: more people want to live closer to town, especially if the alternative is the exurbia of Cranbourne (H), Point Cook (I), or (heaven help us) West Sunshine masquerading as Caroline Springs (J). So houses that took up an entire block in 1920 are being replaced by two or three units of higher density housing. Murrumbeena (K, two suburbs up from Oakleigh) has already succumbed to this, and it's now noticeable in Oakleigh too. The Great Australian Dream of sprawling lawns and gardens and sundecks lives on, but not inside Zone 1. In fact, it's a diagnostic for another pair of suburbs I was looking at: Bentleigh (L, also 15 km SE, around train station, lots of units) vs. East Bentleigh (M, no access to trains, houses left brick and sprawling as they were in 1950.)

I should at this point praise the weatherboard houses as giving a historic depth to Oakleigh that is absent further out: the weatherboard is 1920s, and the undistinguished brick veneer of middle suburbia, like East Bentleigh, is associated with the postwar urban spread instead. I should, but I can't bring myself to praise weatherboard: it's always looked impoverished to me, and it does not compete for character with the Victorian terraces of (*sigh*) Brunswick.

The other urban thing about Oakleigh, which has made it very attractive, is the set up of its shopping centre. My house is walking distance from Chadstone (as long as you have a packed lunch); Chadstone (N) is the Biggest Shopping Mall In The Southern Hemisphere—i.e. an unnavigable sprawling suburban mess, strewn with the skeletons of shoppers looking for parking. But Oakleigh itself has a bunch of shops 5 minutes walk away from me, including four computer stores (it's almost-but-not-quite walking distance to Monash University, O), lots of restaurants, a couple of late-night supermarkets, and more Greek food shops than I have use for. The walkscore.com index gives it a walkability rating of 74%.

Critically, Oakleigh now also has a patisserie that stays open past midnight. I haven't availed myself of the post-midnight confections yet; but knowing that it's there, and seeing people spilling out onto sidewalk tables past 7 pm, is reassurance enough to me. Having anything open here past 6 pm is an urban thing, and unknown in the suburbs. (Pubs excepted; but suburban pubs don't arrogate public space to themselves the way sidewalk tables do.) Having a midnight café option is something I've always found a comfort—enough that I spent way too much time in Denny's in Orange County past 2 am, commenting on thesis drafts. (Tania's, in fact.) It's a victory of sociability over seclusion, of activity over repose, of urbanity, dammit, over dormitory suburbs.

And as those of you in the know will have gathered, of the contemporary urban Greek scene over the suburban Australian scene: the patisserie is doing what Salonica does by night. Oakleigh is now Melbourne's Greektown, and the original Greektown of the CBD is on its last legs. Oakleigh being Greektown is not why I ended up buying there—it was more an intersection of price ranges and luck, and if I was made of money, the sweetspot would have been Caulfield (P). I already know shoppers in Greek sound like, I wouldn't have minded finding out what they sound like in Yiddish. But a familiar streetscape is not a bad thing and off the main shopping street, Oakleigh is no longer as monolithically Greek as it used to be; so it's familiar without being oppressive.

Oakleigh is no South Yarra (Q), where I went to high school, South Yarra with its head held high in chic and affluence; and the Portman St Mall of Oakleigh is no Chapel St, full of Beautiful People doing their passeggiata. Which is a shame: the passegiata (or volta, as the Greeks calls it, using a different Italian word—the public stroll in your Sunday best) is a fine pastime, and would have done me some good. But Oakleigh is not the rough suburb it was in the '80s either; the murals of the late '80s at the train station, monumentalising ghetto blasters and Metallica T-shirts, look out of place as well as dated. Oakleigh's liveable enough, it's home, it will do.

"So you have a house..."

Yes, I have a house. Now to work out what to say about the whole process, without twitching uncontrollably.

I renovated. That should help explain things.

OK, from the top. I entered into a protracted period of house-hunting, carefully evaluating market offerings and weighing them up, and not at all panicking that I'd be locked out of the market if I did not buy yesterday. This went on for, oh, at least a month. At the end of it—and as it turns out, at what was still the tail end of the housing bubble, I settled on a townhouse in Oakleigh. The townhouse has several things in its favour. It is not weatherboard, in a suburb full of weatherboard; in fact, it was only built in 1998. It looks quite stately on the outside. It's in an estate with nine other townhouses, but they're separated by garages, so no common walls. It's on the spacious side for a townhouse: the Australian inflated real estate measure, counting by roof surface, is 14 square (= 1400 square feet, or 126 m²). It has a garden surrogate at the front (tenuously superimposed on some woodchip), and a paved yard surrogate up the back (though not spectacularly wide—not quite two metres). It has lots and lots of windows, so it is potentially suffused with light. Its entrance is off the street, and the street is at any rate off the main drag, so it's quiet. (You can barely make out the train at night if you strain to listen. And I hear the train more often than I hear the garage band rehearsing in the front townhouse.) And of course it's walking distance from the shops and transport: I do virtually no driving to get to things. (I do a lot of driving to and fro from my old house, but that's another story I'm not getting into now.)

There were some catches to the place. Primary among them, it was designed by buffoons. I mean, a toilet opening up into the kitchen area? Srsly? Three toilets in a three-bedroom residence—what is this, a youth hostel? Not to mention the claustrophobia of the downstairs area: a kitchen with little storage area, and crappy cupboards, cordonned off by a superfluous doorway and a side corridor. Icky mouthwash-blue carpet, fake floorboards, drab walls, risible blinds, bare lightbulbs. Things could decidedly do with rearranging.

Rearranging is not for the faint-hearted, and I'm positively pusillanimous about that kind of thing, but once I embarked, I kept going until I ran out of money (and arguably even longer than that). On the way, I discovered that I have expensive taste. This surprised a lot of people, not least myself; and it helped me run out of money all the faster. Things also dragged on because of the logistics of coordinating dependencies between various tradespeople; and changing one's mind about one thing (as is one's prerogative) was enough to throw the tradies' schedule off by a month. All up, I settled in late July; the house wasn't really habitable between September, when the work started, and mid January, and I finally moved in early February.

The house is now rearranged and reconfigured; the kitchen dunny is walled off, downstairs is tiled, the master bedroom wall is a solid Sienna red, the doorway underneath the stairwell is a Tardis of storage space, the crap cupboards have been banished to garage as supplementary bookcases, the kitchen is shiny and austere, the kitchen bench is a conversation piece of opal-like sparkle (doesn't photograph that well though), the lighting fixtures are conversation pieces of chrome and crystal, and the walls are yet another conversation piece of subtle warmth. (They're more white than the apricot I wanted, ca. 1982 vintage, but still more apricot than what everyone else wanted.)

The catch now is, the house is still substantially unfurnished, which makes it hard to take seriously as a place of residence. Furniture is slowly trickling in: there's stools, some plastic chairs, an armchair, and a bookcase. As of two days ago, there's also a bedroom suite—which makes the place start to look like I'm not just squatting there. Still, until it has a sofa (and a computer bench), it isn't really a home; and the sofa is going to take a very, very long time to settle on: I simply not partial to anything I've seen to date. Which means I'd better save my pennies for what I am likely to be partial to. Expensive taste, you see. (And the blinds have to come first.) Until there's a sofa, any friends visiting (couple of visits so far) get shown the conversation pieces, listen through the conversation underlying the conversation pieces, and then get frogmarched to the all-night patisserie. I mean, how can one entertain without a sofa? Honestly. There is a telly (which I couldn't really afford—it was an impulse buy, I have to admit); but I also don't get the bit where people visit me and end up watching my telly. I'd like to think I'm more fascinating than that. Ι might be wrong, but my house is where I get to nourish my illusions.

Speaking of which, the academic books are now in the house (or the garage), which makes it a bit more mine than it was. (The non-academic books are the next batch of ferrying; the storage spaces are still work in progress.) The sight of all the Greek dialectology texts arrayed underneath the stairwell is melancholy: it's who I used to be, not who I am being now. But at least they too have a place.

There'll be photos of the place when I'm back from Amsterdam. The photos of Amsterdam will come first.

General Update

(The temptation of the eeePC has so far been dodged: HKD 3500 is if anything dearer than AUD 650, and they were still flogging Windows on it. Heathrow will be the real test for the eeePC temptation, given what the Brit behind me was saying to the shopholder in Hong Kong: "Things seem to be more expensive than in Britain..." "Yes, pound now really weak.")

Given that I'm resuming blog service, I owe people an account of what I've been doing for the past nine months. Not that you were getting an account of the months before that through here, nor that you're going to get much of an account here. (At least not unless I order another Bailey's here in Patrician Class. The curdling of the last Bailey's I ordered suggests I shouldn't.)

Well, I have a house, and I'm in it. More on that next post.

I'm on a diet as of three weeks ago—calorie controlled intake: it's the same diet I went on when I came back from the States, and is timely since I've long since regained all the weight I'd lost. That of course is the flaw of the whole diet cycle: little point shedding weight if you're going to keep eating midnight snacks afterwards. Still, I can do without the bloat, or the casual GP question "do you have a history of hepatitis" because of how much fat has built up around my liver. The diet does make it aggravating to go out to dinner (the primary means of socialisation in my circle), and watch other people eat, while I'm limited to a latte—chai, if I'm feeling like throwing caution to the winds. Serves me right, though: no penitence without penance.

Of course, the diet is being shot to buggery while I am in the Low Countries this week, but I will make some token efforts at good behaviour. I declined the second breakfast in a row just now, for instance. Tasty though that porridge looked. Must have been the strawberry plonked in the middle of it. Just like they plonked a strawberry in the middle of the first breakfast. [Update: I did have the tuna baguette a couple of hours later instead, so I wasn't all that disciplined...]

I'm still working with Link Affiliates, this year with more responsibility to manage myself, and I'm still working through what that translates to. I've have been based back in Melbourne Uni since October. I'm working the other side of the street from campus, in the Thomas Cherry building—it's where university IT used to be based, upstairs from the former garage where I used to entertain myself by doing Robin Williams impersonations on the technical support helpdesk. There is now no helpdesk as we knew it—certainly none that would have patience for impersonations of anything. The former garage succumbed to the same imperative as my erstwhile pub, and has become a soulless student apartment block. The IT division has long moved out of Thos. Cherry, which now hosts miscellanea, including me. And the place is not what it was twelve years ago: You can't go back.

That's even more true of the campus itself. The students want their money's worth, now that they're paying real money, and aren't there to have fun. The staff that haven't taken redundancies and left are harried and not having much fun either. The libraries are no longer in the book business: what used to be the ERC library (and is now a student lounge with some books up the back) does not even have an after hours book chute. I'm hard put to recognise the place, and don't cross the road that often. In a way—and I did not expect this at all—I actually miss Monash. Not so much the Monash Industrial Park, but the library and environs where I first was stationed. Maybe there were just less ghosts there, maybe that's what it was.

I dipped into Twitter, but I doubt I'll ever get into it: I'm not one for aphorisms, and the world does not need to know what I'm having for breakfast. I am contributing though to the Suda On Line—translating entries from a Byzantine encyclopaedia online. All the fun stuff got cherry picked eight years ago, so I'm left with verb definitions and the occasional complete misconstrual of a Classical passage. That's fine; it keeps me busy, and I occasionally learn something. Strange to find out how tenuously our knowledge of the Classics has been transmitted: we depend on mediaeval commentaries to make sense of a lot of Homer or Aristophanes, but the mediaeval commentators often don't know what they're talking about any more than I do; on occasion, they know even less.

Apart from that, I still don't have a life, but at least I have a shorter commute. :-)

Hong Kong once again

In re:
Last time I was in Honkers airport

Once again, I am in Hong Kong airport, waiting to get back on the plane to *shudder* Heathrow. Wonder if I'll end up in Manchester Or Something airport again.

It being 6:30 am local time, the duty free shops are closed; so yet again I avoid the eeePC Temptation of Nick:

• How adorable the eeePC is!


• But I don't need one, I already have a laptop.


• But you could do, like, impromptu blogposts and stuff, and type on your palm without it being a Palm.


• I don't want a Windows machine anywhere near me, and I doubt my wireless modem will work on Linux.


• Pish tush, you'll be on campus anyway. And it'll be so much smaller and more convenient than your laptop!


• 13″ down to 10″ is a non-starter, what's the point. 8″ may be too small to type on.


• Oh, it won't be. Anyway, you can well afford it.


• AUD 650 dutyfree for a machine I don't actually need, when there are Expensive Roman Blinds to put up chez Nick? I doubt that very much.

I have four more airports of temptation to clear before this cup is removed from me. After that, I'm probably free to save my dosh unless those Apple Netbook rumours materialise.

What's that? The plane's not leaving till 8 am? Hm, may just casually stroll past that duty free electronics shop after all...

The Station I Shall Have Been Accustomed To

This post is courtesy of my boss, who has seen fit to pay for me to travel to Amsterdam Premium Economy, that I may turn up to the UKOLN Repository Workshop refreshed and productive.

I'm just about at Hong Kong, and I type this with my laptop plugged into the patricians-only powerport (which took me ten minutes to work out). My posterior is in garb plebeian enough to have startled my workmates—they are sore unaccustomed to seeing me in denim and a T-shirt, especially as my colleague Mark had gone the opposite direction and becravatted himself, our managers visiting. My Levis nonetheless are enthroned in a seat patrician enough to wiggle in. My arms rest against armrests patrician enough to fit the next guy's elbows as well.

My feet are taking a rest from the footrest patrician enough to let me recline in style, and now perch on my computer bag plebeian enough to have had its handle break off for the fourth time. (The nail's clean out of the fabric this time, I don't see how I'm going to reattach it.) The computer bag is awkwardly propped against the seat leg in front of me, as Premium Economy seats are too patrician to welcome carryon luggage stowed underneath them.

I am digesting a patrician supper of lamb and a patrician breakfast of cereal. Well, the lamb still had the slight whiff of microwave, and cereal is still cereal even with a strawberry in it; but the accompaniment of tablecloths (OK, matcloths) and silverware is enough to elevate any microwaved confection to Versailles level of sophistication. Or at least Inner Suburbs.

My ears have delighted to complimentary headphones being noise-cancelling (ha!), with a very patrician triangular plug; lamentably they were more soundproof than I was Brahms-proof, so I'm now back to my iPod (with my plebeian noise-cancelling headphones and their compromised structural integrity), wondering whether purchasing that Telemann trumpet concerto was really a good use of my money.

In all, not at all a bad way to fly. My snap reaction, which startled me, was not as much gratitude that for once I could stretch out my legs, but impatience at all the times I couldn't. Surely these are the minimum requirements for decent travel, surely they are my due. A sense of entitlement: who knew I had it in me.

Not that much of a surprise, really, given what my new house looks like. On which, next post or so. I've turned out quite the snob, really. Well, this isn't my due, and this isn't my entitlement, and I'll take it while it's on offer. And stretch some more.

Descent commenced; stowing laptop. More anon.

Nicholas as householder

In my latest unrehearsed role, I found myself on Friday in possession of a house. In fact, I wasn't even in town when it happened. (I was away in Sydney on business. And no, I don't end up owning a house every time I'm away on business.)

The role is still quite unreal to me; it won't mean particularly much to me until I'm actually overnighting there. And that won't be for a little while yet: the place needs some work. I did get some perfunctory weeding done Saturday—which is not what I'd been expecting to do just back from Sydney with three hours sleep. And I am ill at such numbers.

(The three hours sleep was of course because I've got the Yerevan Time bug from England: if I'm in a hotel and flying out before midday, I will wake up at 5 am. This bug is something I truly consider a bug...)

As for this past day, I started on my quest for furniture. Another experience I wasn't really prepared for. Case in point: the furniture joint I visited is 200m from the pub I've been defaulting at when at Monash for the past year-odd; and I'd never noticed it:


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The surprises don't end there. I ended up well-disposed towards the furniture joint's classic range of lounge suites. I really expected my taste in living room essentials to be more along the lines of Buck Rogers meets Art Deco: metal and straight lines and very little wood. But if you're shopping this close to Oakleigh, and you care about back support, you take what you can get; and you don't get the tan square leviathans that threaten to digest you, leaving nothing behind but a remote control and half a sock.

My more assiduous readers may have noted that I have an anonymous stalker on the blog. (Don't worry, I know who he is; in fact, dear readers, he's been named here.) The anonymous stalker has asked that I finish off my account of my previous voyage before I embark on this new voyage. I haven't, so I'll try and inelegantly dovetail them over the next few time units.

The time units are left unspecified...

*sniffle*

Yes, yes, I'm back in town. And in the shift from 40° heat to 7°, I've managed to get first jet-lagged, then a cold, while being pretty deluged at work. Plus I crashed on return, psychologically as well as physically: the house looked pretty small, after the whole of England was my bailiwick.

I have work socialising tonight plus a lot of invoices to scan in (something I've managed to avoid at my peril so far), so I won't be updating for a little while yet. I did go out to Chapel St on Sunday, and snagged a book and a recording at Borders there. The recording was Bach's French Suites, which I don't know yet. The book was George Megalogenis' The Longest Decade, about the last two prime ministers of Australia, and how their agendas mashed together despite their protests to the contrary. I read it pretty scattergun —dipped into random pages, then went back and filled in the rest. Nicely written, with some cute anecdotes. Some surprise recognitions from me of 15-year old events...

In transit to Melbourne

Just updating people that I am now in Honk Kong airport, rather sleepless but (unconfirmed reports indicate) still alive. Back in something resembling action sometime in the next 48 hours.