Could you be a little more specific?

“The Matses are a 2,500-strong tribe, and they live in the tropical rainforest along the Javari river, a tributary of the Amazon. Their language, which was recently described by the linguist David Fleck, compels them to make distinctions of mind-blowing subtlety whenever they report events. To start with, there are three degrees of pastness in Matsese: you cannot just say that someone ‘passed by there’; you have to specify with different verbal endings whether this action took place in the recent past (roughly up to a month), distant past (roughly from a month to fifty years), or remote past (more than fifty years ago).  In addition the verb has a system of distinctions that linguists call ‘evidentiality’, and as it happens, the Matses system of evidentiality is the most elaborate that has ever been reported for any language. Whenever Matses people use a verb, they are obliged to specify – like the finickiest of lawyers – exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. The Matses, in other words, have to be master epistemologists. There are separate verbal forms depending on whether you are reporting direct experience (you saw someone passing by with your own eyes), something inferred from evidence (you saw footprints on the sand), conjecture (people always pass by at that time of day), or hearsay (your neighbour told you he had seen someone passing by). If a statement is reported with the incorrect evidentiality form, it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would answer in the past tense and would say something like daëd ikoşh: ‘two there-were [directly experienced recently]‘. In effect, what he would be saying is ‘There were two last time I checked’. After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense.

“But finding the right verbal form for directly experienced events is child’s play compared with the hair-splitting precision required when you report an event that has only been inferred. Here Matses obliges you to specify not just how long ago you assume the event occurred but also how long ago you made the inference.”

And if you think that’s bizarre, wait until you hear about the Guugu Yimithirr people’s use of geographic directions.

Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass

Old haunts

When travelling from one country to another I much prefer taking the train to flying.  The plane has its own pleasures, but travelling by rail, apart from offering (slightly) more legroom, also gives me the time to acclimatise to my destination. Passing through a country, rather than over it, you see the gradual changes in landscape, architecture, and signage that let you know you’re entering a different space, inhabited by a different culture. On the way down I passed through fields blanketed with snow, where the sheep, normally the cleanest, brightest objects in the countryside, seemed suddenly dark and dirty against their pristine white background. On the downside, the return journey was delayed by localised flooding which turned those same fields (and occasionally the train track itself) into lakes.

But enough of the how; why was I going back to the UK for four days? Long-time readers may remember this little post, concerning children taking photographs of places which were meaningful or memorable to them. More recently I wrote about my home town and my changing relationship to it. These two ideas finally coalesced into a photo project. I took a couple of days off work and went back to the town where I was born and raised to take some photos of places I used to hang out in, or play in, or visit regularly. Little corners, bits of wall or pavement, parks, shops, views. It was the first time I’d gone back there alone since before I was married and I took my time wandering and remembering.

The criterion for the photos was a simple one – places I fondly remember and which have not substantially changed over the intervening years. Every time I go back something has been re-landscaped or demolished or “developed”, so I wanted to make some effort to preserve, if only photographically, the places where my childhood played out. One of the things that surprised me most as I started snapping was that a lot of the places I remember are alleyways and walls – borders and transitional spaces. I also kept thinking about the places I’d love to have photographed but which I couldn’t because I knew they didn’t exist any more – this set is as much defined by what isn’t there as by what is…

The photos aren’t especially beautiful in any objective or formal way, and I don’t expect them to be of any real interest to anyone other than myself, but if you want to take a look, the full set, including more detailed notes and relevant anecdotes, can be seen here.

Keeping track

I like to plan ahead. I don’t mean that I want every minute of every day for the next twelve months mapped out, leaving no room for serendipity, chance, or mood swings. It’s more about the fact that I have a terrible memory so I need to write down upcoming events in order to keep track of them. The problem is that I have four calendars in various formats and various locations, leading to a lot of repetition.

During the seven hours I spend at my desk every day I keep an eye on two electronic calendars. I like to keep private and professional life as separate as possible (which is why friends never receive an email from my work account unless they’re also colleagues), so the Outlook calendar which contains details of meetings and other work-related appointments doesn’t mention private stuff unless it has an impact on my work, like a day off, leaving early to collect the girls from school once in a while, etc.

My Yahoo calendar is used for everything else, from travel to evenings out to birthdays to visits from friends and families. I also keep note of films I’ve seen at the cinema, even if it was a last-minute decision and didn’t really require advance planning and calendar consultation. This is a habit left over from the days when I was a slightly more obssessive-compulsive moviegoer than I am these days.

But what happens when I’m not near a computer? I have a traditional paper diary in my bag, which pretty much replicates my Yahoo calendar, so that I can see at a glance when I’m free for some potential scheduled fun and relaxation. I keep these (I think I have about a decade’s worth of them stored upstairs at home) which can be useful sometimes for checking dates, but they’re not really the kind of thing I’d sit and pore over, waxing nostalgic.

Finally, we have a wall calendar hanging just above the telephone. Apart from its decorative function (recently we’ve gone for various land art calendars) it’s handy to have an overview of the month in front of us when we’re on the phone making arrangements for travel or for hosting visitors.

As far as recording events after they’ve happened is concerned, I was never really the journal type. As a child I tried it once (around the age of ten, I’d guess), keeping a diary for a few months before I got bored or ran out of things to say. Before I started this blog the only record I kept of my life was scattered across photographs, videos, letters to friends and objects I kept. Even now, as you’ve probably noticed, this isn’t really the “what I did today” kind of blog. The family blog fulfils that function when necessary. The way I look at it, unless your day-to-day life is immensely varied and thrilling, that kind of stuff is of limited interest to a very small number of people, which only diminishes over time.

Anyway, must go, as an automated Outlook calendar reminder tells me that I’ve scheduled a coffee break for the next 15 minutes.

Time is money

When I took my youngest daughter to school this morning she stopped in the communal toilets to relieve herself. The room is open plan, with three tiny WCs in a row. On one of the other seats was a small boy with his trousers around his ankles, looking up at his mother with big sad eyes as she repeatedly sighed, looked at her watch, and said “Hurry up, I’ve got an important meeting this morning!”

Don’t be a stranger

Recently I found a couple of people through Facebook with whom I hadn’t been in touch for over a decade. I’m not the kind of person who feels the need to “friend” everyone with whom I’ve ever exchanged three words, but these two were people I’d spent time with, got drunk with, laughed with, and then lost touch with.

Why did we lose touch in the first place? Mostly due to one of us (usually me) moving to a different town or a different country. There are some who say that if the person was that important to you you’d have made the effort to keep in touch with them in the first place, but it’s not always that obvious, phone numbers and email addresses change or are mislaid, and circumstances conspire to separate people.

What does annoy me is when you do make an effort to keep in touch with someone despite a geographical divide, and your efforts are not reciprocated. Both my wife and I have one friend each who behaves like this. You write to them and receive no reply. You call them or manage to meet up with them when you go back to visit and it’s all smiles and “It’s been too long!” and “We must keep in touch!”. And then the next time you write…nothing. Or they make some lame excuse about not being very good at keeping in touch, as if it requires some special talent to reply to an email.

We go through phases in our relationships with these people. Occasionally we miss them (because at one time they were good, close friends) and make an effort to maintain contact. Then time passes and we say to ourselves “Sod it – if they can’t be arsed, neither can I”.

What would you do?

Gulliver’s Travels

Going back to the UK is always a weird, dislocating experience, and becomes moreso as the years go by. While I stay in contact with the motherland to a certain extent via the media, and still have friends living there, there’s no substitute for being immersed in the culture full-time, and the occasional few days back there have two contradictory effects: it reminds me how much we’ve both changed and grown apart, and it reminds me where I came from and, to a certain extent, what it means to be English.

Also, I feel taller in the UK.

No, really. When I wander around parts of my hometown I used to frequent as a child, it always strikes me that I can now, for example, see over walls which were tall and unassailable when I was a scabby-kneed boy trying to climb them. It’s not just a height thing: apparently as you grow and your head expands, the distance between your eyes increases, meaning that you literally see things with a different perspective as an adult.

So the familiar things look different, but there are also the new things. Things that have disappeared, changed, or appeared since you were last there. Each time we go back to either of our home towns my wife and I seem to spend the first day wandering around pointing at things and saying “That’s new; that wasn’t there last time; where’s that one gone?” and “I can remember when all this was open fields!”.

Ok, maybe not that last one.

This applies to the culture as well as the physical environment. References to musicians, TV shows and commercials that have entered the mass consciousness are often mysterious or meaningless to me, making it all the more comforting when I find something I do recognise; a little unchanged corner that I can point to and say “Yes, that’s mine, that’s part of me.”

It also applies to the very house where I grew up. Mostly redecorated several times over since I lived there, I have to look hard beyond the new carpet and re-arranged furniture to recognise the places I used to sit in, hide behind, and play in as a child. I never sat on this carpet as a child, but the stairs beneath them contain memories, if I look hard enough.

Shelf life

For a while the appeal of box sets of tv shows escaped me entirely. My attitude was that it was only worth buying something if you were confident that you’d get your money’s worth by watching it several times over, exploring all the special features, and so forth. Even then, I found it hard to get my head around the fact that there were people out there willing to spend hundreds of euro/pounds/dollars on a complete set of, say, Thundercats.

But recently two things have changed my mind. Firstly, the fact that I’ve missed all or part of some things that I would have enjoyed, due to a period of country-hopping around the turn of the millenium. For example I watched, and enjoyed, the first series of The Sopranos, but immediately afterwards we moved to Dublin, where we had no tv, and then shortly afterwards moved to Italy, where we only had access to Italian tv (and an inordinate number of German channels via satellite). So it wasn’t until we arrived in Belgium that I was able to watch English-language series again – we get BBC1 and 2, and most of the Dutch and Flemish channels show British and American shows subtitled rather than dubbed, although we have been known to watch stuff dubbed into French (Lost, Battlestar Galactica). But by that time I’d missed a series or two, and I’m anal enough to not bother with something unless I can watch every episode, in the correct sequence.

But there are also the frustrating scheduling practices to deal with. Seasons are sometimes cut in half, and it’s hard to know when, if ever, you’ll get to see the second half, let alone subsequent seasons. I saw, and fell in love with, the first series of Six Feet Under. A pause of a couple of years and I finally found a channel showing seasons two and three. Then another pause. Occasional episodes popped up on various channels, but they’d jumped ahead, or it was difficult to actually establish which season they were showing. It was at this point that I caved in and bought series four and five on DVD (just started watching them now – no spoilers, please).

But the second reason for starting to watch things this way is the realisation that, if something’s worth watching, it’s not only worth watching the moment it’s released. So what if I’m behind everyone else, and I can’t have those “water cooler” discussions? If I’m reading a book, it doesn’t bother me whether it was published three months ago or three hundred years ago. If it’s good, it’ll keep until I have time for it. If I’m always scrambling to keep up with the latest thing, I’ll miss plenty of older stuff more worthy of my attention.

 

TGI Friday!

A recent change in my responsibilities at work means that Friday is now the busiest day of my week. I think that this is probably a good thing. If I’m going to have an empty afternoon stretching out in front of me, when I sit idly refreshing my inbox and rss feeds in hope of distraction, I’d rather it wasn’t the afternoon immediately before the weekend begins. This way, Friday flies by.

Mondays, as you can see, are a little more relaxed…

I’ve always had a somewhat different perception of time, and while I’m all too fond of days spent doing nothing but pottering, musing and lazing, when it comes to sitting in an office under flourescent lighting, breathing conditioned air, next to wittering colleagues, I’d rather have something that distracts me from my situation and fills my hours. 

Not that being busy is only a way to kill time. I remember my years at university being enjoyably full. Not, of course, with study or evenings researching in the library. Heaven forbid (I was a literature student, after all). But I was kept occupied with the student TV station for which I was constantly filming or editing something or other, as well as being its secretary and newsletter editor (which, in reality, meant that I wrote the whole thing myself). Add to this the occasional essay, written in a few frantic hours the evening before the deadline, plus an embryonic social life, and I found that the days were so packed that I often barely had time to remember to call my mother (*cough*).

 

I vant to be alone

I was always a fairly solitary child. Despite having two elder siblings and a smattering of close friends, my preferred company was always my own. Once, at a birthday party, I retreated upstairs with the book I’d received as a present (Spiderman, if memory serves), leaving my friends downstairs to party on without me.

While my own room was my preferred bolt-hole, I was also, as I believe many are, drawn towards quiet, hidden, secret places. Within the house, these could be seldom-used rooms like the loft – for me always a place of musty mystery, full of abandoned toys and empty (or are they?) boxes. They could also be corners of normal rooms – behind the sofa, under the table, even a landing halfway down the stairs. Outside the house there were trees and bushes to hid in or behind. Even in a public space, there was often a nook or cranny to be found where I could sit and…what? Read, observe others, or just sit and enjoy being still and quiet and alone. Maybe I thought that if I sat still for long enough, I’d disappear completely.

Two things started this train of thought. Firstly, a recent movie featured the enduring post-apocalyptic image of an entirely abandoned city. Often intended to be horrific and spooky, I find these images strangely attractive, and have often fantasised about wandering alone in a ghost metropolis.

Secondly, I’ve read a few articles recently about “ghost villages”, where economics, demographics and geography combine to slowly kill a community – those few children born there leave as soon as they can, leaving a couple of seniors who’ve never known, or wanted to know, anywhere else. And then, eventually, no-one is left, and everything rots and crumbles in a very picturesque fashion.

What is it that attracts people to these places? It’s not just about wanting to get away from other people – deserts and the open ocean have always been good for that. It’s about the specific pleasure to be gained from being alone somewhere which is normally full of bustling life, but which, for a deliciously transitory moment, is all yours.

The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to

I can’t remember the last time I physically injured myself. I’m not talking about breaking a nail or banging my head – I mean something that resulted in real bleeding, a large bruise, a break.

As a child I never needed to go to hospital – I’ve never broken a bone (although I did manage to break off the bottom half of one of my front teeth while attempting to perform a pole jump using a pool cue). However my hobbies of BMX and skateboarding meant that I spent many years with a constant tattoo of bruises, cuts and scabs across my limbs. Add to this the results of other types of physical recklessness, and the (thankfully) rare schoolyard fight, and, like many boys, I was all too familiar with the tang of blood in the mouth, the sting of antiseptic lotion, the dizziness and trembling from a bad fall.

My life (or the life I have chosen..?) no longer puts me in any great physical danger – I exercise, but not in a “throwing myself off mountains” or “wresting alligators” kind of way, and my wife and two girls are relatively gentle with me, the occasional kick or bite notwithstanding. Any physical pain I experience now is likely to be the onset of old age – a twinge in the lower back, a stiffness in the knees, a headache, heartburn.