First day of Autumn

and the leaves are already falling.

Yesterday morning and evening were spent neglecting work, in the interests of getting the garden ready for winter. Which mostly involved pruning, and the pulling up of weeds before they get too established, and in the evening bundling and carting away whatever won't compost easily. Always a good occasion for reflection, by analogy, on the Garden of the Soul, and all the horticultural parables.

My spouse did most of the work: I had to get back to the computer in the afternoon, or the urgent translation will never be finished on time.

There was, as a necessary result of our (unplanned) gardening moratorium since our youngest was born, a certain amount of "Did you plant that?"
"No, I didn't. What is it, anyway?"
"I don't know."
"Must be a blow-in. Is it cat mint?"
"No, smell that, it's lemon balm."
"Well we'd better pull it up whatever it is."
(An exchange that tells you everything you need to know about our expertise.)

A whole thicket of viciously spiky brambles has slyly grown in from next door's neglected garden, and is settling rootedly under camouflage of our geraniums. That was left for me to dig out another time (it'll be half a day's work in itself).
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Confirmation classes

Confirmation classes kicked off this afternoon, so I spent two hours getting to know half a dozen eleven year olds, and then talking about Jesus with them. The first step was to gauge the state of their knowledge, and it turns out once they get going they can recount a fair number of events and stories from the Gospels: the Nativity, the Magi, the massacre of the innocents, the miraculous catch of fish, walking on water, the woman taken in adultery, the Last Supper, Judas's betrayal, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. Two of them did bring up Moses and Samuel as people Jesus had spoken to, which might not be entirely wrong (I'm not sure how the trinitarian theology plays out there), but wasn't what we were looking for.

The course we're using is based on Luke's Gospel. Asking whether they knew the names of the other evangelists brought some close misses -- guesses but not wild guesses: John! Philip! Simon! Matthew! Nobody managed to get Mark.

We read Luke's account of Jesus' baptism, and discussed it briefly: we were running behind by then, and wanted them to be able to burn off a bit of energy before Mass. They'd been told to bring photographs of their own baptism, and their baptism candles, if they could. Most did. There wasn't even any sword-fighting with the candles.
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Guild of St Sebastian

Last night I took our eldest to a meeting of the Guild of St Sebastian. It was the first time either of us had been, and we both enjoyed it. I think he'll make a better archer than I will. The Belgian tradition of vertical target practice is something I'd only seen in Baroque paintings before - now I've done it myself! Neither of us hit anything. No doubt we will with practice, but next week is the last meeting till April. I can well understand why shooting requires light evenings: you need to be able to see where the arrows are falling. Not just to find them, also to get out of the way.
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Meetings, meetings ...

Parents' association meeting tonight, catechists meeting the night before last - I'm starting to feel like a pillar of the community or something.

Apparently there have been complaints that the lion flag displayed at the school fête back in June (before the school, and the parents' association, broke up for the summer holidays), which should have been Or a lion sable armed and langued gules, was armed and langued sable (in other words, was all black and yellow, no red!). It's encouraging that people notice and complain about such things, as well as noticing and complaining that after-school care is getting more expensive and that swimming is now only once a fortnight rather than once a week. And that nits are upon us (not necessarily literally).
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Too busy living to blog

Or at least that's the positive spin. Perhaps "too busy being disorganized to get anything done at all" is nearer the mark.

At any rate, there's little more to tell about the Italy trip I intended to continue on. Unexpectedly being in Milan Sunday morning (rather than passing through rapidly on Saturday afternoon) I took the opportunity to visit the cathedral. I'd been in Milan cathedral once before, but not for a sung Mass on a Sunday: an entirely unexpected bonus. Just lately, leafing through Joyce Sugg's anthology of Newman's letters, I happened on a letter written to Henry Wilberforce from Milan on 24 September 1846, describing services in "that overpowering place, the Duomo":

the incense rolling up from the high altar, and all this in one of the most wonderful buildings in the world, and [...] all of this without any show or effort, but what everyone is used to -- everyone at his own work, and leaving everyone else to his.

Alas, such joyful and unselfconscious solemnity is something I'm not at all used to, and it's rather like finding an oasis in the desert. My Chinese travelling companion tagged along, and although an unbeliever she happily sat through Mass just for the beauty of it.

The reason for going to Bologna was in large part to consult the oldest copy I'd been able to locate of a fascinating Dutch children's picture book I want to write about. Bologna has a copy printed in the 1710s, while the earliest I'd found in the Netherlands was from around 1760. Shortly after my return I found that an even older copy, from the 1690s, had turned up in Groningen or somewhere. Ugh.

Still, at least I got to do some other things in Bologna, not least simply be in the Archiginnasio. But I had serious academic stuff to do there, not just sightseeing: I had to consult Robert Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare, the first maritime encyclopedia (a strange absence from local libraries, but it was published in Florence so I suppose Italy is an obvious place to find it), and also managed to read some of the works of Thomas Dempster, a Scottish professor in 17th-century Bologna and a neglected figure in Neo-Latin letters.

Anyway, it's all months ago now. What I really want to be doing is getting down my impressions of South Africa from last week. This wasn't intended as an academic "travelblog", but somehow it's turning into that.
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Flying Easyjet

Since blogging last, I’ve managed to get to Italy twice -- once for a couple of days in Bologna, for research, and once for a couple of weeks in Cortona, on holiday. The first time, back in June, was something of an adventure. Just as the aeroplane was about to take off, roaring down the runway, it juddered to a halt on the tarmac. We sat there for a little while, and then the co-pilot announced that two birds had collided with one of the engines. We trundle off the runway. We sit about. Mechanics come and look at the engine. The pilot announces that two of the blades are “outside the limit” (whatever it means it can't be good) and that buses will return us to the terminal. This is announced by the pilot in English and French, to sighs and muttering, and then by one of the stewards in Italian, to hubbub. A young man leaps to his feet, seizes his belongings from the overhead compartment, and triggers a rush of thirty or so people into the aisle -- where they stand waiting for the bus for a good ten minutes, all squashed together. People are strange creatures sometimes.

We were shuttled to the terminal, processed through security checks for a second time, shunted to a boarding gate, and left to wait. Eventually, at 6 o’clock, somebody came and told us that a replacement flight had been arranged for 8 o’clock (the original flight had been taking off on time, at 4.15, when the birds so abruptly intervened). Now the problem was, my plan had been to fly to Milan, and then get the Eurostar to Bologna, where I was booked into university accommodation (the simple but pleasant Collegio Erasmus), where I was supposed to arrive before 10 to be let in. Still, nothing to be done about it, so I emailed my friends in Bologna to inform them of developments, and had some dinner with the dinner voucher Easyjet had provided. Returning to the departure gate, I was greeted by the news that estimated departure had moved to 9 p.m., estimated time of arrival 11 p.m. With the flight so much delayed, I wouldn’t be able to get to Bologna that night at all. And what was I to do, unbudgeted, in Milan until morning? Ten years ago I’d have chanced the railway station until the first train, but now I have children to think of. A very good friend of mine lived in Milan for years; might he know someone who would put up a friend-of-a-friend at a moment’s notice? I phone his number - he isn’t in. I speak to his girlfriend, whose English can be patchy, on a poor line, and try to explain my problem. “Thank you for phoning, I hope you enjoy your trip,” she says cheerily, and hangs up. Hm.

Back to sitting at the departure gate, where a young woman of Chinese appearance is trying to get the staff to find her the phone number of the Milan Youth Hostel, so she can confirm her booking and let them know she’ll be arriving at 1 in the morning. I ask her to pass the number on, and we get talking. She suggests sharing a taxi to the youth hostel. Turns out she’s got an engineering degree, and is now a risk assessor by trade: I must look low-risk. Twenty minutes before the new plane finally arrives the staff hand out sheets of paper detailing our rights -- things like free phone calls, and the right to move the booking to a flight the next day at no extra charge, which if they’d informed us from the first we would no doubt all have done. Easyjet has quickly chartered a plane from Titan Airways. I have to keep mentally correcting myself: Titan, not Titanic.

We board the plane. We wait. We wait. Crew walk up and down counting us all. It is announced that we cannot depart until all the passengers who are checked in have been accounted for. One of our number is missing. Heads are counted again. Names are taken. Cabin crew consult with ground crew, muttering about locating her luggage so it can be removed from the plane. Staff put heads around the doorframe. Finally, to thunderous applause, the woman makes her entrance, bowing and apologising. As she takes her seat two rows behind me, I hear her outraged hiss to a companion: “I was stuck in the bathroom.” In the meantime the flight has missed its air traffic slot. We wait. I doze. We arrive in Milan at midnight.

To be continued ...
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Turkish Delight

Recently I had the privilege of speaking at a conference in Izmir (the city that used to be Smyrna). Flying out there, I got to see Istanbul from the air, which was tremendously impressive, especially the view out over the miles and miles of tankers and freighters in the Bosphorus. At Izmir airport I was met by a grad student, who put me into a taxi instructing the driver to take me to Ege University Guesthouse. The first thing to greet anybody arriving in the lobby of Ege University Guesthouse is a framed photograph of Ataturk. So is the second thing. Then there is the desk. I won’t try to describe my impressions of Turkey, just a few of the events that enlivened my trip.



The conference began the next morning, a Wednesday. There was a shuttle bus laid on from the guesthouse to the Faculty of Letters (above the driver’s head was a portrait of Ataturk, this time in poster form). What looked like the full student complement of the English department had turned out as helpers to facilitate the conference. I registered and hung around, at a loose end, for twenty minutes or so drinking instant coffee from a paper cup. I’d always been led to believe that the Turks had invented coffee; why would they want Nescaf?

The plenary sessions were to be held in a lecture theatre that was draped with flags and pictures of Ataturk. We trickled in and took our seats. All rise for the national anthem. Speeches by heads of department, of faculty, of association of English Studies, British Council local rep, winner of English Studies in Turkey lifetime achievement award (an eminent emeritus who described the study of English Literature as giving sympathetic access to different modes of thought and feeling; not the way it’s done these days it won’t be) - half a dozen in all. Conference officially declared open. Then a break for more coffee. Then the first plenary lecture (very erudite) until lunchtime.

My own paper was in the afternoon, followed by more coffee, then a couple of TEFL papers (less of the thought and feeling, more the "How do we equip our students with the English they will need to do business?"). The day’s academic delights being over, there was a bus to take us to a cocktail party on the lawn of one of the few surviving pre-1923 grand houses, now the university's restaurant. Waiters circulated with a choice between wine and glasses of fruit juice spiked with vodka. Those wanting non-alcoholic drinks had to go to the bar and specially request fruit juice without vodka. I was on my third fruit juice before I discovered this. I chatted to an Azeri Professor of English from Iran, a lecturer from Van (half Turkish half Kurdish), and a lecturer from Hong Kong. With the exception of the medieval studies conference at Kalamazoo this must be the most international conference I’ve ever attended. On arriving back at the guesthouse I headed to the restaurant with the intention of getting some dinner but ended up just drinking beers with an American (a lecturer at an American university in one of the Emirates), and two Turks (one a lecturer in Turkey, the other a graduate student at Manchester). The American regaled us with stories of the depravity of the oil sheikhs amongst his students. He went to bed about midnight, then the Turks started debating modernization and the “Eastern question”. Talked till 2 in the morning. Very profound and enlightening conversation, if only I could remember much of it.

The next morning I dragged myself out of bed just in time to have a bite of breakfast before the bus left for the Faculty of Arts. After the plenary session I asked a student the way to the railway station.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked
“To Efes,” I said, having read somewhere that this was the Turkish for Ephesus.
“Ephesus?” he clarified.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You can’t get there by metro,” he said, doubtfully.
“Well, I was thinking of going by train,” I clarified.
A cluster of three students consulted together. They called in others to canvas a broader range of views. A remarkably tall young woman turned to me and said, “You do know you can’t get there by metro?” I think I might have rolled my eyes. The consensus that emerged was that Ephesus by rail was a non-starter.
In the meantime another participant in the conference (with what looked like waist-length blonde hair) was telling me that she’d made the trip to Ephesus by bus the previous day, and that Turkish bus drivers were just so friendly and so helpful. In the end, one of the students volunteered to take me to a minibus stop that would get me to the big, out-of-town bus station, and wrote “How do I get to Ephesus?” and “How do I get to Izmir?” in Turkish on a piece of paper for me (I tried to get her to write “Please look after this bear”, but she didn’t think it would help). She even insisted on paying my minibus fare to the bus station.

Arrived at the bus station all right and got the minibus to Selçuk, the modern descendant of Ephesus (a sleepy-seeming place, certainly compared to Izmir). Journey time about 45 minutes by motorway. En route, the young man sitting in front of me asked to see my guidebook, translated parts of it into Turkish to entertain the person sitting next to him, and offered me a couple of biscuits and some handwash. Changed at Selçuk for a minibus that dropped me off only about a 15 minute walk from the site of Ephesus. Trudge, trudge, through the dust and heat (getting close to noon by now). Should have thought to buy a bottle of water somewhere.

Ephesus is a seriously impressive ruin. It's amazing how much of the Roman city is still there to be seen - two or three streets, an amphitheatre, a couple of gates, the shell of a Roman library, a scattering of ruined houses, a set of latrines, the odd bit of bath-house, and a few wells. There might be more Roman remains in Rome, or Trier, or a dozen other places, but in Ephesus they’re all together on a hillside, without a modern city in sight. And to have walked where St Paul and St John have walked! In a couple of the stalls lined up by the gates to the site I bought some gifts to bring home; in one sense I knew this must be the worst possible place to buy souvenirs, one of the greatest tourist traps of the Aegean, but it must mean something that these are gifts from Ephesus - surely? (And the prices weren’t bad by Belgian standards, even if I was getting ripped off by Turkish standards.)

Then I got a taxi from Ephesus to the putative house of the Blessed Virgin Mary - entry to the house is free, I was informed, but there’s a municipal charge on access to the grounds (hmm). I’d made especially sure to pack my rosary beads for the trip, but had somehow managed to leave them at the guesthouse. Luckily, in the chapel there was a prie dieu with beads provided, so I wasn’t reduced to counting on my fingers. Prayed the Glorious Mysteries while a coach-load of Japanese (or possibly Korean) pilgrims filed through, each in turn bowing to the altar and taking a candle to light (in the trays provided outside). Lit a candle for a friend’s intentions, posted a couple of postcards, and got the taxi back to the bus station.

I arrived back at Selçuk bus station just in time to get the bus to Izmir bus station, where I asked a number of people what bus to get to Ege University. After some consultation I was put on a bus, and told that the driver would tell me where to get off. After driving around through thick traffic for what seemed a very long time, the driver shouted something and another passenger told me that he was saying it was my stop. So I got off, and found myself at a gate bearing the inscription "Ege Universitesi" and then some other words in Turkish. Nothing looked familiar, but I had been told that Ege University had a large campus so I assumed this was just a different entrance from the one I was used to. After wandering lost for a while, approaching a number of people who didn't speak any more English than I speak Turkish, I found a helpful young medical student.
"Could you tell me the way to the Faculty of Letters?"
"The Faculty of what?"
"Letters"
"I don't understand"
"Literature, History, Languages?"
"I don't understand"
He got out his mobile phone, which had an English-Turkish dictionary in it, and suggested I dictate the word to him. He looked it up, consulted with a young lady, and then said,
"Follow me!"
I followed him. He took me into a building that wasn’t the Faculty of Letters, and to the office of a distinguished-looking silver-moustached gentleman, who had three different framed portraits of Ataturk on his office walls. I take him to have been the dean of the Faculty of Medicine. He explained that I was at Ege University Hospital and Medical Faculty - a different place entirely from Ege University Campus. He offered me a seat, and made a brief phone call. Ten seconds later his phone rang, he spoke again briefly, and passed it to me - it was the head of the English Department.
"We are having an international conference, is it about that?" she asked.
"Yes, that's right, I'm one of the speakers."
"I'm very sorry not to have met you. I should really attend, but with so much teaching to do, and getting ready to go to Bologna next week, I really haven't had the time."
"Well, I'm sorry to disturb you when you're so busy. It's really nothing, I just got off the bus at the wrong part of the university, and now I'm in somebody's office."
"And you're having trouble finding the faculty?"
"Yes, that's right."
"And are you supposed to be giving your paper now?"
"No, I gave my paper yesterday."
"Oh," she said in surprise, "So yesterday you could find the faculty, but not today?"
"Yesterday I just got the bus from the guesthouse," I said, somewhat defensively.
"Well I wish there was something I could do to help, but I'm teaching in ten minutes."
"Oh, please don't worry - now that I know what's happened to me I'll find my way somehow." (This brought a laugh from the man whose office I was in.)

So I thanked the dean of the faculty of medicine and took my leave of him. It was too late by this time to rejoin the conference group at the Faculty of Letters, so I got the metro from the University Hospital into the centre of town, sat on the waterfront for a while, near an Ottoman clock tower and a pretty little mosque (see photo), and wandered through the bazaar, which was an experience in itself.
After much wandering amazed, and briefly making the acquaintance of a number of friendly dealers in leather (their merchandise, not their attire), I bought a small loaf of bread and some fruit as a very late lunch. A picnic on a bench outside the Roman forum (which was all locked up by then) was followed by a walk to the main railway station to get the metro back out to the university suburb.


Just by the railway station I passed a barber's shop, and paused thinking "I could probably do with a haircut, and it's likely to be cheaper here than at home." Even as I paused, a barber dashed out and took me by the arm, sat me down, wrapped a sheet around me, and set to work. After a while he indicated that I had dandruff. "Yes, that's right," I said, nodding. He whipped a pot of smelly, oily stuff out of a cupboard and applied it to my head with a paintbrush. Then he shaved my chin, jaw and neck with a cut-throat razor, waxed my nose and cheeks, put a lit match to the hair in my ears and nose, gave me a cup of tea, rinsed the ointment out of my hair, put some sort of gel in it, massaged my shoulders, arms and hands, cracked my knuckles, seized my head and jerked it so my neck cracked, and charged me 50 euros (which I'd guess would be 60 or 70 American dollars).

By the time I'd got back to the guesthouse I was exhausted, but also hungry again. There didn’t seem to be anybody from the conference around, so I dined on kalamar alone, and just after I’d finished eating, my lunchtime companions from the previous day arrived. We enquired about one another’s day. By the time I’d finished telling them about mine one of them was doubled up in stitches with laughter, and insisted I share the story with a group of other people I’d never met before. Perhaps I should just have stuck to “I got lost and had a haircut”.

The third and final day of the conference was relatively uneventful. The plenary session in the morning went on far longer than scheduled, so there was very little time to go out for lunch - tagging along with one of my drinking companions from Wednesday night I found myself with half a dozen Turkish colleagues having lunch in the staff canteen (I seemed to be the only foreigner there). The meal was very basic - some stewed vegetables, some rice, and a bowl of cold yoghurt and cucumber soup - but nice enough. As it turned out, I would have had much longer for lunch than foreseen (not that I would have preferred to eat anywhere but in the staff canteen), since the afternoon session that I was planning to attend started half an hour late: there were supposed to be two speakers, but one (an Iranian) didn't turn up, and neither did the person supposed to be chairing the session. The speaker who did turn up was a Chinese lecturer, who I gather teaches Translation Studies at one of the technical universities in Beijing. She waited patiently while student assistants phoned around on their mobiles trying to find an alternative chair. I volunteered my services, but they seemed to think it was necessary that the chair be someone from the host institution, or at the very least the host nation.

That evening there was a "gala dinner" to celebrate the end of the conference, and it was a remarkable meal, in a restaurant near the top of a steep hill looking out over the bay (at the very top was the fort). There was even dancing, which I was almost sorry I couldn't join in.

We got back to the guesthouse about 2 in the morning, and I had to be up at 4 to get an early flight to Ankara (to transfer for a flight to Brussels). The previous afternoon (between the end of the conference and the depature for the dinner) I’d asked at the desk of the guesthouse whether they could arrange for a taxi at 4.10 the next morning to take me to the airport (no problem), whether I could pay by visa without knowing the secret four-digit code, since I can never remember the number (no problem), and whether they could give me a wake-up call a little before 4 (no problem).

Well, they came through on the wake-up call. But when I tried to check out, there was a problem paying (their machine would, after all, only accept payment by visa with a secret code), but in the end it turned out I could pay by debit card; by the time that was sorted out it was 4.20 and I was surprised there was still no sign of a taxi to take me to the airport. I asked about it and was told they'd call a taxi right away. It would only take 10 or 15 minutes to arrive. Twenty-five minutes later it was there, and the driver wanted to know where I was going. At the fourth or fifth attempt he grasped the word "airport" and took me to it. I paid him and he drove away. I dashed in and discovered that even though I'd stressed "domestic terminal", and "Ankara", I was at the international terminal. It was now after five in the morning, a little more than twenty minutes off boarding time. There was a single taxi by the terminal, but the driver was asleep with his seat down. When I knocked on the window he frowned and waved me away without opening his eyes. I walked as briskly as I could manage to the domestic terminal, arriving with less than ten minutes to boarding time. I was amazed that they let me check in. Even more amazed at having to wait forty minutes before the boarding gate opened. Would my suitcase make it? From my window seat I saw it being loaded on to the aeroplane. Oof.

Ankara, like Istanbul, I saw only from the air. Seen from above, the most noticeable things are the enormous blocks of flats on the edges of the city. An improvement on shanty towns, at least. I had about three hours to wait between flights, but resisted the temptation to explore the city by taxi - having tempted fate enough for one day.
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Clean slate?

What few posts there have been since November have just been deleted in a fit of revulsion at how tedious they all were. If I'm not interested, I can't imagine who else might be. Let's try again, shall we?
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