So, I’ve moved. I now live just outside Geneva (on the edge of Cologny, a ridiculously swish suburb overlooking the lake) at a research institute which has very generously given me an early career scholarship to be here for two months. I get an en-suite room and full board in a mansion (seriously) that has a view of Mont Blanc from the garden and a galleried library in what I think is the old stable block (or a Very Grand summerhouse). It’s nice not to be living in a city any more, despite the fact that it’s going to be more inconvenient if I do suddenly need something although there is (as I think is mandatory in places where people have more money than sense) an American Food Shop in Cologny, which also sells English stuff – so if I get a craving for kettle chips and marmite, I’m all set. It’s also nice to be working on something new for a change. My Sallust article is making its way round my lovely friends for comment before I send it higher up the academic chain, and I’m quickly knocking out a paper for a workshop I’m going to in Newcastle in May before getting down to the article I’m going to write on Pompeius’ eastern commands. And I am actually going quickly. It’s great. And it’s not like there’s no distractions out here – I mean, I still have the internet 24-7, and there’s actually people to talk with – my French comprehension is getting a good work-out – plus, I’m still working on stuff related to my doctorate, so there’s still a large amount of over-familiarity with the material and copy-and-pasting-and-editing going on. But it’s a different topic – hurrah! And it’s for a presented paper rather than a publishable article, which is making a difference to how I write – I don’t have to worry so much about being a little colloquial and so on, because I get to speak, and it’s a small workshop so I’m feeling less pressure on it than on my first article, and also, I get to do something I’ve been wanting to do in an academic environment for a while, which is to start to think about why Classics/Ancient History and Political Thought is useful nowadays by looking at comparing Cicero’s rhetoric to some of the political rhetoric being flung around now (yes, yes, I am looking to get academic credit for being snarky about Sarah Palin… but also some other things, I hope). Anyway I’ve been at it for two days, and I have 4,500 words. Which needs to become 3-3500 words, so off I go to do some more editing. For the bizarrely-over interested (or googling Classics departments… you never do know), this is the abstract.
Tag: My Life
I’m doing that thing you do when you realise you’re leaving a place soon – when you start noting that it’s probably going to be your last time at this place or that place, or eating here and drinking their, the last of this kind of Kölsch, and so on and so forth. And I thought, well, I’m probably going to want to make up a photobook of my time here, so I should probably grab some snaps of a few things. Not, like, the local supermarket or the chemist’s, but the trams, and my blue gate that squeaks horrendously and so on. So this is ‘my’ cinema. There are a couple of cinemas that primarily show films in the original version, with or without subtitles (OV, OmU) – and this is the one I’ve been to most. Aahhh, lovely Metropolis, where you accidentally started showing the German version of Where the Wild Things Are at the English showing, and couldn’t pull the curtains properly for the first 15 minutes of Shutter Island so the edges of Leo were all wrinkly, and where I had to sit in the same row as the whole of Team Jacob at New Moon and the whole row bounced at that moment where Jacob tries to kiss Bella but then the phone rings… (I know, I know, I just love how ludicrous and awful it is, ok). OK, so I’m emphasising it’s flaws. The truth is, that despite the fact I’ve had to wait a bit at times for films to arrive in Germany (A Single Man is *still* not here, and that makes me unhappy), Metropolis has showed a wider range of films that I’ve wanted to see, for longer periods of time than any other cinema that I’ve lived near. (And they sell beer – I *wish* I’d taken that option during New Moon).
Yesterday I finally met my new supervisor and got introduced to the department by some of his students. Yay for people to talk to who aren’t inside my head!
New boss-man is vaguely suggestive of portly series one Blackadder, but with more brains. He is very busy and likes to refer to himself as Francis Cornford’s Young Man in a Hurry. Who I now have to google. This means I won’t really have to talk work to him for amonth, which is good as it gives me time to do some. He also wants us to only speak German from December. Man the panic stations.
So I now have a desk to work at in the department library in the Philogium (which, btw, is an arcitectural gem featuring permanently broken escalators rising up its core). However, the library doesn’t open till 10am. Which I failed to check because I am so used to the libraries I use opening at 8.30 or being locked with keys of which I possess a copy. So instead of writing job applications/reading Sallust/doing German prep, I’m in the cafe drinking some truly awful espresso, spinning out my time online.
There’s no easy way to change the name on the post box of my flat (which is why I told everyone to add the name of my landlord when mailing stuff to me) – but there are some people who won’t do that. Like the bank, for instance, who don’t have a ‘z.H’ (c/o) line on their address forms. So I have stuck a post-it on the front of the box, and I’m hoping it won’t get rained off every other day.
I managed to get it up in time for the postman to deliver the PIN number for my new bank account, but the card, which should have been sent out first, has gone AWOL. So yesterday I had a fun Anglo-German phone conversation with the bank to get them to send a replacement. It’ll be nice when it arrives – currently I have money in one account and no way of accessing it, and not much money in the account I can access. And they’re in different countries, making transfers tricky and potentially expensive.
It’s all part of the fun of moving, no?
… but it sure does look like I have a website.
At least – it’s as done as it can be for now, until I do some more writing. I’ll sort out some more photo albums soonish, and I have categorising of various things to do, but I can do all of that whilst watching television across several evenings. I don’t have to spend more hours at the computer forgetting that there are things called meals to be eaten and an outdoors to be visited. Oh but it’s going to be nice to get back to that. And even to work – since tomorrow is the first of October, so I should be starting that.
German phone number. CHECK.
Sends messages outside Deutschland. CHECK. Though apparently not to my mother’s phone.
Registered as a furrriner living here for more than three months. CHECK. That one took some time, due to not being able to read the signs very well. Furrrriner fail.
Bank account so I can get my scholarship. CHECK. Easiest bit. Nice bank lady who was happy to speak English to me.
I live here now.
I’m working up to the bit where I do some work.
After yesterday’s adventure to find the International Office was done, I explorationed into the city centre and saw the cathedral (quite stunning but v. busy due to something called Domswallfahrt – I may venture thence for Vespers or Evensung tomorrow though) and meandered a bit, and had my first proper Köln brewed beer, and it was all very civilised. I spent this morning running around doing busywork, and then pootled back into the Neuemarkt where I had spied a Habitat, for I needed pillows. Don’t do your household shopping in Habitat, ye godes. I whimpered and fled from the one-person €30 coffee presses and €50 towels towards a nice department store called Karstadt, where I spent about half the amount on a pair of pillows, a towel and flanel, the fluffiest blankey you ever did contemplate snuggling up in, and a coffee press. Mmmm. I can have coffee tomorrow morning.
So, I have arrived in Cologne. It was a loooooong day of trains. Left St Erth at 0700, and arrived at Koln Hofbahnhof at 2115, by way of London and Brussells. Did I mention it was looooong. And my big suitcase was superheavy (which was partly why I got the train), and now my arm is so tired from pulling it that I can barely hold a pen to write a list of all the things I need to do tomorrow.
But my new landlord met me off the train, and brought me to the apartment, so I have a very hazy idea of where I live, except that it’s about 10 minutes walk from a direct train/tram (seriously, it starts as a u-bahn, and ends up overground like a tram) into the city centre, and that there’s a nearer stop if I don’t mind changing once along the way. I know that there’s lots of shops on a street that we walked up, including a supermarket that opens at 7am, which is good, as I will need breakfast tomorrow (having had a cereal bar and satsuma for supper). I know that the university is vaguely ‘up-the-way’, and I’m going to trot off there tomorrow to find the international office, who were supposed to be emailing me about an appointment for tomorrow, but haven’t – but I have been invited to a concert and drinks, and to a reception by the mayor, and a city tour, and offered shiny public transport deals, so I guess I can go find them about the other stuff, like police registration and banks. My German appears to be coming back – at least, I can understand a good deal, but I don’t have the confidence to talk yet. My default foreign language is still Italian, so I need to crack that habit. Tomorrow I think I will be writing lists of conjugations and declensions, and pinning them up around the apartment to help me out.
Brain-stretching time again!
I’ve been thinking for aaages that I should probably get around to sorting myself out a website of my very own, rather than being scattered across the internet at various different places, to create some kind of portfolio-esque spot for my writing/blogging/photography, rather than having to say, in various different places, “Go here to see this.” Of course, this is going to mean a fairly major amount of tweaking to various set ups. Not to mention getting my head around an awful lot of new stuff. But this is good – it will make me more web savvy.
So I have the domain name, the webspace, and now I am fixing up wordpress, and moving everything over from blogger. Slowly, but slowly, I’ll begin the process of building a website around it. If I can work out how, without spending major spondulicks that I don’t have on dreamweaver.
So, I finished my PhD thesis. Three weeks ago now, actually. It’s deeply odd – especially now I’ve stopped being quite so maniacally busy and actually get to sleep in and do nothing in the mornings. I’m trying really hard not to get lazy, but to get up and do stuff – even if it’s only reading through the really large pile of novels I want to read out in the garden with a pot of coffee.
I think I’m happy with it, the thesis I mean. It’s not quite the thesis I wanted to have written, I think; and it’s certainly not the thesis I proposed to write four years ago (which was going to cover constitutional evolution from Sulla downwards, in 80,000 words. ahahahahaa), but I think it should pass, and I’m mostly proud of it. I could have spent another month or two refining it, but you know what – I would have gone stark staring bonkers. So I let it go. I think by the time I viva I’ll be ready to go back in and really shiny it up. I *am* proud of the theory and I’m 99.99% sure it works – it’s just the expressing it in the discussion of the texts where the problems come, because there are two major-very-interlinking strands, and it all gets a bit complicated writing-wise.
I am just back from a weekend in Leeds visiting old university friend and her husband, and meeting their 10 week old boy. It was a very nice weekend, with catching up and the chance to read three novels, but frankly, having watched her parent wee George, I have come to the conclusion that I am clearly not unselfish enough to have children and actally raise them properly (as opposed to packing them up in a wicker basket and popping them on a bus across Africa with me).
I really do just like my lifestyle of being able to trot wherever far too much. If a suitable consenting adult would like to sign up to come along, I would be ok with that, but children aren’t so much consenting as dragged. I was listening to Fi talking about how she only wants to go back to work part-time, and would rather not go back to work at all than go back full time while he’s small and my head was just yelling, “I could never do that.” And I barely have a career (this PhD thing is supposed to help with that, though).
