How are you, dear readers?
This is obviously a rhetorical question, since a blog is mostly a one-way communication channel. Still, how the hell are you? If you are unhappy, for instance if you live in a country where mixer taps are rarer than a unicorn in a paddling pool in Alaska after a nuclear meltdown, write to us and tell us about it! Or if you are happy, perhaps because you are in a country where hot water is pumped from underground and transported across the country in a massive communal grid, then don't hesitate to get in touch. As did for instance Audiologist Friend, that scion of hearing aids and toilet photography!
Audiologist Friend writes:
Här kommer veckans fångst. Det nya helt veganska fiket, praktiskt nog har det placerats granne med vår lägga* i rvk. Vad det heter? Vinyl såklart.
(Here is this week's catch. The new totally vegan café which has been conveniently placed next to our pad in Reykjavík. The name? Vinyl, of course.)
*We have never actually seen the word lägga used in this way before. We reckon it is either a colloquial term for lägenhet, "flat/apartment", or an autocorrect error. If you are familiar with this term, either because you are linguistically aware or because you are one of the cool kids, do not hesitate to get in touch and reduce our ignorance.
A charming vista of a hygienic and festive toilet
A friendly ladder serves as a reminder of the fallibility of human nature
Hubba! A close-up of the actual vinyl player with an actual speaker! One is highly likely, on regarding this picture, to erupt in an exhortation along the lines of, "Slave, cease your cymbal-playing this instant and book us a flight to Iceland!"
We have had occasion to reflect, recently, on the subject of family. Ours isn't prone to owning wicker, but otherwise we subscribe to many of the views expressed in this Festive Video.
It seems but a day or two since our last blog post, and yet how many things have happened! How much we shall have to tell! (And how much we shall have to conceal.)
Let us begin with some linguistic musings. We engaged in a discussion on the word forenoon with Shewee Fiend Friend, some days ago. The Oxford English Dictionary will have you believe that forenoon is a word still in common use, but we all know this is a bollocks suggestion. Nobody uses the word forenoon outside of Victorian novels, and this is a crying shame.
To speakers of other Germanic languages, which still retain the equivalent of the word, the discontinued use of the excellent word forenoon in English is a puzzle and an irritation. How is one supposed to express temporality when the language has been deliberately stripped of one of its most useful words? Scandiwegian languages, for instance, have the word förmiddag, and variations thereof, German has Vormittag, and Dutch has voormiddag.
Originally, various dictionaries inform us, forenoon, and its Germanic cousins, were used as synonyms to morning, ie the time before the afternoon - much as in modern English. However, in modern Germanic languages, the equivalent of forenoon is much richer than that.
Jonny, comparing himself to Colin Firth with not very much subtlety in a dark photo clearly taken well into the afternoon, says:
"I'm like a fine wine, getting more refined with age. Next stop, Mr. Darcy distinguished Gentleman.
[...] You can also add that my shot was in a toilet."
If you are a wanton female and you find yourself thinking, upon regarding this picture of Jonny, "HUNKA HUNKA!", then do get in touch. We say this not because we wish to be arrested for pimping, but because we happen to think that Jonny is a nice boy, despite his sometimes immature and often vulgar attitude.
(We say "wanton female" because a) the type of female who frequents this blog tends to veer towards the shameless spectrum, and b) although we are rampantly in favour of non-heteronormative constellations, we believe that chicks stand a greater chance of success with Jonny than dudes. Anyway. If you haven't seen it already, have a gander at this lonely hearts ad we did for Jonny once, and, if it rocks your boat, get in touch: theprivycounsellor [at] gmail.com.
On a related note, this interview made us go HUNKA HUNKA!)
When one for instance staggers into the kitchen, hungover and rueful, round 11 am, to attempt to make oneself tea without vomiting, it is clearly not morning. The morning, in civilised society, only lasts until about 10 am - as soon as you get into double digits, you are in the territory of the forenoon.
The distinction is important because saying you did, or intend to do, something in the forenoon, as opposed to the morning, can indicate a variety of things. It can indicate that there is no rush - that something doesn't need to get done till the forenoon; or that, as in the example above, one was so hungover that one didn't manage to do something until well into the forenoon; or that somebody was late, not arriving until the forenoon; or that one has no intention of doing something early in the morning but is set on waiting until the forenoon. The forenoon not only makes the language richer, but removes stress!
The word forenoon is of course a compound of the preposition fore and the noun noon. Noon is specific to English; other Germanic languages appear to retain variations of the word middag / Mittag, meaning, naturally, "middle of the day" (though if one is to believe the OED, the Norn language in Shetland appears to have been more perverse in this respect than others). Why English speakers have felt the need to take recourse to the word noon is beyond comprehension. (Regular readers are aware that we are rampantly mistrustful of Latin, especially when it is opposed to a Germanic language. Latin can be useful when one wants to compose witty slogans against mansplaining, but apart from that, we consider a Germanic tongue much more satisfying.)
We harbour strong antipathies towards the word noon at the Privy Counsel, and have done ever since we read somewhere that noon derives from the Latin nona, signifying the ninth hour. This only makes sense in a monastic system, where the day starts at three am. THREE A.M.! The notion of starting the day at three am should horrify and appal all right-thinking people.
When discussing the unreasonableness of this with Shewee Fiend Friend, we wondered how the hell this kind of system was supposed to work in northern Europe where there is no daylight until 8 am at the earliest, and sometimes not at all. Is one supposed to run around performing monastic duties in the dark? Isn't that dangerous? Wouldn't it be better if everyone stayed in bed until a reasonable hour? (At this point Shewee Fiend Friend, we are sorry to say, made a lewd and unscientific suggestion, which we by no means intend to repeat. The discussion took another direction entirely after that.)
Here is a gratuitous picture of Colin Firth in a bath-tub.
However, our opinion of the unreasonableness of the term noon was somewhat tempered on looking up the word in the OED. Apparently, says this soothing authority, noon originally denoted the hour around 3 pm. If this is the ninth hour, then clearly the day doesn't start until 6 am, which is a lot less horrendous than 3 am. Apparently, in the Roman system, the day started at sunrise. This, we feel, is reasonable, at least in winter.
Nobody seems entirely sure why noon changed from being at 3 pm to 12 o'clock. Possibly the time for ecclesiastical services moved, or work patterns changed after the BASTARD NORMAN* invasion.
Possibly we had some toilet pictures we had intended to show you, but once we start ranting we tend to produce quite long blog posts, and we hesitate to bore or exhaust our readers. Let us therefore content ourselves with telling you the joyous news that there is, actually, official information on the sorry state of British plumbing!
We came across, via Twitter, this blog, written by an American living in Britain. The author expresses her bafflement at the perversity of British plumbing in a way that is familiar to all readers of this blog. The traditional learning curve goes:
1) WTF? Why are there two taps? Why?
2) Oh thank God, there ARE mixer taps even in this fucked-up country
3) WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL THE WATER COMING OUT OF THIS SOI-DISANT MIXER TAP IS SEPARATED SO HALF IS BOILING HOT AND HALF FREEZING COLD THIS IS TOO DIABOLICAL FOR WORDS WHY WOULD SOMEONE DO THIS
4) This is hell
A witty and intelligent illustration of said learning curve is provided in this video.
Anyway, we learned from the blog mentioned above that there is actually a leaflet from Defra, the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, explaining the intricacies of the fucked-up-ness of British water tanks. Enjoy.
We've drunk a good litre of tea this forenoon and need to break now. But first - a festive video! We came across, via this article by Soraya Chemaly on the structural sexism affecting (the lack of) women's toilets, an excellent TED talk by the same author. We're not normally in favour of videos where people talk, preferring to read articles as this is faster and constitutes a more reasonable use of our time, but Soraya Chemaly's talk is thoughtful, intelligent, and funny, and based on solid research. We cannot recommend it enough.
*As all civilised people know, one cannot use the word "Norman" without prefixing it with the adjective "bastard".
Festive video - Soraya Chemaly, How Sexism Shapes Human Knowledge
[content note: extensive vulgarity and exaggerated use of dependent clauses]
We are feeling rather smugger than usual at the moment. Today is, we have been informed by reliable sources, the first of advent, which word, as our sanest and most normal friend, the OED, informs us, means, basically, "arrival".
Here's a magnificently unhelpful and unreadable screenshot from the OED, of questionable legal status.
This has nothing in particular to do with anything, except that the Privy Counsel is rather more fragrant and attractively lit than usual, being resplendent with various lights and varieties of pine needles. Also we find ourselves marvelling at the sheer HELPFULNESS of PEOPLE, to the point where our eyes are shining with joy and appreciation in a rather sickening and repugnant manner.
Not just any people, obviously. Not the bickering couple behind us in the supermarket queue earlier today, or Australian Friend's psychotic boss, or the gobsmackingly rude people who daily congregate on Swedish trains. But for instance all the people who rallied round when we had to write an insanely boring essay on organisational theory.
It strikes us as surreal that one can send a whingeing message to, say, Sheewee Fiend Friend, complaining about the indignity of having to write a boring essay on organisational theory, and wondering if she might know of any good books offering a feminist critique of neo-liberal politics*, and receiving, on the very same day, a whole damn reading list! We would like to extend our thanks to Shewee Fiend Friend, Shewee Fiend Friend's list-compiling friend, and all the other friends and relatives who gathered round and offered support and drinks during this difficult time.
Some attractive lighting at the Privy Counsel, representing the unholy trinity of intellectualism, alcoholism, and hardening the fuck up.
Apart from all the usual friendly encouragements like the sending of pictures of Elvis, the advocation of alcoholism as a way forward with academic writing, the exhortations to calm the fuck down, etc, we have had some rather marvellous news** from Australian Friend, who writes:
LOLL my cousin told me there's this expression in Australia I haven't heard before wherein if someone is whingeing you suggest that they take a 'concrete pill' - so that you can HTFU
HTFU, as all educated people know, is a delightful concept encompassing brio, zest, and chutzpah. The acronym stands for Harden The Fuck Up, and was popularised by Heath Franklin in his legendary imitation of the Australian gangster Chopper Read. Concrete pill! Hurrah!
Speaking of hardening the fuck up, we have a delightful message from Jonny. That loveable young idiot writes:
Decided to smash some gender stereotype barriers with this rather lovely bath. Rain is pounding on the window and I have to say I'm relaxed as f*ck. [Not pictured: massive lob-on]
Jonny being relaxed as fuck.
*The essay was supposed to be about organisational theory, but we reckoned we would end up decidedly less likely to throw ourselves out of the window in a desperate fit of depression and despair if we instead decided to engage in feminist critique of neo-liberal politics. If you can't laugh, what can you do?
**We believe we had, when setting out to write this blog post, an idea of linking this news to the concept of advent, remembering, from far-off school days, that "advent" was supposed to mean "good news" or similar. According to the OED, however, it doesn't, and we must conclude that our teachers were heartless harpies who lied to us to serve their own selfish ends.
We meant to post, for our Festive Video, The Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends, but then we remembered that the Beatles of that phase were rather smug, repulsive people, and so we decided on this delightful Swedish Christmas song from the early '90s, that pinnacle era of culture and refinement, instead.
Our sincerest contrafibularities! We have no memory of what we were doing on the day (ranting, no doubt, and perhaps drinking rum - possibly at the same time), but the Privy Counsel turned five on 18 October!
Five years! If we had had cake to celebrate with, it would most likely have looked like this.
Things have been grim of late. So grim, in fact, that we have repeatedly felt the need to google pictures of syphilis symptoms, just to remind ourselves that there are things we don't suffer from (although one Privy Counsel member does in fact harbour a case of bona fide genital herpes - however, we intend to stay true to our promise to keep the identity of this person a secret to our dying day (said promise does not, obviously, prevent us from dropping tantalising hints solely for our own amusement)). There are some good ones, for instance, here (do a page search for "syphilis", then click on the links).
The marvellous thing, though, about having access to a loose collective of intellectuals, connected by social media, is that something wonderful is bound to turn up sooner or later.
This cake would also not be incongruous at the Privy Counsel.
Also Australian Friend surpassed herself in rampant intellectualism and invented a new word! Quizzlement - you heard it here first! The definition of the adjective is as follows: "Quizzled. adj. The state of perplexed beguilement imposed by a person on her admirer, through an act of mischievous ambiguity."
Then we suddenly remembered that BLOODY HELL WE HAVE BEEN GOING FOR FIVE YEARS. Let us tell you the story of the origins of the Privy Counsel!
This totally appropriate cake just screams "THIS ONE! YES! LET'S HAVE IT!"
Once upon a time, there was a country full of crap plumbing. Let's call it "Britain". Said crap plumbing was the cause of a pretty much constant stream of grumbling, mumbling, and outright ranting. One night, in the pub, Enlightened Friend suggested that we stop ranting and start a blog, if only to spare our friends from having to constantly listen to us moaning and bitching. We thought the notion was an excellent one, and set to enthusiastically, publishing no less than three posts on the first day.
The first post was called, bravely, Mixer Taps - the Controversy, and was short but loquacious. It said, simply:
Most British people see no need for mixer taps, as when they do exist, they don't work anyway. The rest of the world disagrees. The controversy continues.
Huzzah - our very first image!
Blog post number two, sporting the witty title Toilet Paper - Puppy Love (setting the tone for our happy habit of punning in an unrestrained manner), discussed the insane British obsession with quilted toilet paper. This groundbreaking essay posed the question:
Where does the British obsession with soft toilet paper come from? Why does bog roll have to be quilted? (Of all things, why quilted?) Is it due to the humiliations suffered during the Second World War, when millions of Britons were forced to keep a stiff upper lip while wiping their bottoms with newspaper?
FUCK OFF, PUPPIES.
The third blog post on this auspicious date, The Victorians - An Edifying History Lesson, described the Victorians as "a barbaric people who delighted in such unhygienic and downright dangerous practices as sideburn cultivation, wall-to-wall carpet installation, and lace-curtain twitching". Needless to say, this is now the standard view of the Victorians in all respectable academic circles.
Victorian toilets - pretty, but violently unsound.
After these initial - one could even say probing - posts, we moved swiftly on to reviews of museum toilets, starting with the Yorkshire Museum. We remember lurking nervously with the huge, clunky and LOUD camera we used to carry around in those days, on a wet October day.
Mission accomplished without us being reported to the police or even, surprisingly, being openly accused of being perverts, we continued with the Castle Museum, where we spotted what is possibly the most amusing sign in the entire universe; a sign that perfectly summarises the unbridled lunacy of British plumbing:
This sign unfortunately doesn't exist anymore.
Believe us, we have been back to check.
Pretty soon we were reviewing places like the disabled toilet at the Centre for Medieval Studies in York, and it didn't take long before we achieved legendary status among the depraved, the socially awkward, and the intellectual (i.e. our friends, and maybe five other people who clearly need to get off the internet and get a life).
We noted happily that this was "a toilet fit for Medievalists".
And now we've been at it for five years!
When we started this blog, it was specifically to rant about crap plumbing, because Privy Counsel HQ was situated in the UK, where people seem have a hard time realising that the 19th century like, ENDED. Now that we are more Scandiwegian-oriented, we have very little to complain about, plumbing-wise, and have taken to rant more about other things, like feminism. It appears that human rights is another area where people have a hard time realising that the 19th century ended and that we are, in fact, living in the 21st century now. It would be nice, we think, if everyone could at least step into the 20th century, both in terms of plumbing, and human rights.
We would like to take this opportunity of getting embarrassingly sentimental, weepy, and vapid, and expressing our heartfelt thanks to all our friends and comrades! Some of you have been with us from the start, some have joined along the way. Without the Privy Counsel Friends (and assorted cronies, hangers-on, and passive bystanders) sending us toilet photos, ranting with us, and dispatching emergency pictures of Elvis when times get tough, this bog blog really would not be possible.
Now, let's have a festive video before we embarrass ourselves further. We've had this one in a previous post, but really, can you ever get enough rum? Well, quite.
The weather is finally showing an inclination to stop being freakishly nice, and to behave in a way that causes us not to scowl suspiciously.
Nothing works our paranoia into a frothy, lathery sweat like an uninterrupted series of nice days. What's this in aid of, then, we ask ourselves, peering moodily at the blue skies. This feeling of ease and well-being is usually a sign that things are about to go tits-up, we mumble, giving the merry sunshine the evil eye. This will never end well, we whisper gloomily, and mentally throw rocks at the provokingly perky songbirds.
The great thing about shit weather is that it gives one licence to drink obscene amounts of tea and huddle in a dark room, without having that irritating feeling that one should be doing something healthy and productive outdoors, like taking one's heart and arteries for a brisk walk, or declaiming Shakespeare sonnets to orphans in a wooded glade, or gawping at knuckle-bitingly ugly pieces of sculpture at the local park, while placing bits of wood in strategic places to provide shelter for a near-extinct species of beetle. (Read about a similar feeling of sunshine-related angst here.)
When the skies are grey and one can practically hear the werewolves howling on the moors, one can quite legitimately give the world outside the finger, sit down with a large whisky, and concentrate on looking at pictures of Caitlin Moran, and sending toilet photos to one's local bog blog. Here's one that Feisty French Friend took recently at the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris:
Nobody does chic like those pesky Parisians! We find ourselves emitting a rugged Woof! In fact, a woof might not be enough to express the strength of our feelings about this stylish and pleasant bog - we might need to resort to a lusty HOWL!
Other things that can occupy one on dark autumn days is observing linguistic intricacies on signs inside toilets, and giving in to heedless, reckless, unrestrained language nerdery. (Our unrestrained-nerdery juices got flowing to a quite staggering extent at the weekend, when we engaged in an epic tour of medieval churches with Tudor Friend, which may or may not have included semi-perverse ogling of medieval wall paintings and church-wall graffiti.) This sign, for instance, observed in a staff toilet in a school in Malmö, says:
Hygglo! Vinterkräksjukan är på väg! Det enda och bästa sättet att skydda sig [mot] smitt[a] är enkel[t][:] Tvätta händerna noga efter varje toalettbesök.
(Be a brick! Winter vomiting disease is on its way! The only, and the best, way to protect yourself from infection is simple: Wash your hands carefully after you've been to the toilet.)
Hygglo! Wash your damn hands!
The word "hygglo" denotes a person who is decent, hygglig. It is unfortunately not listed in the Bible of Swedish-language nerds, SAOB, being presumably a recent creation; probably a 20th-century one. (Work began on SAOB in 1898, and the editors are currently at the letter T. The comparisons to Rowan Atkinson's frenzied attempts to rewrite Dr Johnson's dictionary in Blackadder, agonising over the word aardvark while going quietly insane, are naturally numerous.)
Hygglo, ending with an o, follows the same pattern as other descriptive nouns like fyllo (short for fyllerist, "drunk"), miffo (short for missfoster, "freak"), fetto ("fatso"), lyllo (short for lyckost, literally "lucky cheese", or, rather more prosaically, "lucky person"), favvo (short for favorit, "favourite") and - a favourite of ours - pretto (short for pretentiös, denoting a pretentious person). The state of being a hygglo is perhaps best translated as being a brick. Hygglo, in short, when spotted on a toilet sign, is the kind of word that causes your average language nerd to do a little handwashing jig and start whistling, then walk around in a suspiciously jaunty way for the rest of the afternoon.
Speaking of winter vomiting disease, we couldn't believe that all of the internet hadn't managed to come up with a winter vomiting disease meme, so we made one, just for you:
Someone had to.
You're welcome.
At the risk of changing the subject abruptly (no, no, it's ok - we mentioned Caitlin Moran at the beginning of the blog post, meaning this qualifies as a continuous theme, or leitmotif), we just wanted to share this picture of Caitlin Moran's column in last Saturday's Times Magazine.
As CatMo points out, the Times puts its writers' words behind a paywall in order to ensure that plebs like us can't read them without paying, with the rather marvellous result that journalists continue to get paid and are able to produce quality work without starving to death in the gutter, or being replaced by robots. The picture is therefore quite grainy, and the words are not available in an online form. But if you have the patience, enlarge it on your screen and enjoy the sheer holy joy that is a newspaper column by Caitlin Moran. (Or, if you don't have the patience, join your local library, like Jonny just did, and enjoy all of CatMo's columns for free, while vigorously appreciating the tax-funded miracle that is a public (or indeed pubic) library.)
What men need to know about women: 1) We're scared of you, and 2) Fuck off.
Oh hell, we need a festive video. Here's one incorporating a new word that we learned while playing Cards against humanity with Tudor Friend and some of her excellent and highly festive cronies last weekend. We'd say dogging is an admirable activity for rainy days, wouldn't you?
Well, strike us pink with a medium-sized bath towel if there isn't a lot of stuff happening! We thought things couldn't get any more exciting after Feisty French Friend sent us photos of her renovated bathroom, and Tudor Friend shared an article about what happens when you run out of toilet roll onboard a Virgin train - and then, whoosh! even more events occurred! Being protective of our readers' mental health, we won't overload you with everything all at once, but rest assured that there are lots of posts, full to the brim with rampant enthusiasm, vim, and brio, coming in the near future.
For now, let's quickly look at Feisty French Friend's renovated bathroom, before we get too distracted and/or our short-term memory deteriorates even further. France is in the news today, and we reckon French intellectualism could do with some solidarity.
We just learned a new French expression, and we're not afraid to use it: Putain de bordel de merde, but that is a lovely toilet! Note the water-saving brilliance!
(See more examples of the indiscriminate use of French expressions here.)
We approve hugely of this shower, which has two shower heads! This arrangement gives one the option of using the stylish-but-impractical-for-people-wearing-glasses-or-not-wishing-their-hair-wet wall-mounted shower head, or the sane and normal attached-to-a-flexible-hose variety. (Get more ranting on this subject here.)
We wonder if it takes a French person to renovate a bathroom into a glorious manifestation of intellect combined with stylishness? Perhaps we are confusing Feisty French Friend with her bathroom (for Feisty French Friend can, verily, be described as "a glorious manifestation of intellect combined with stylishness"), but this ability to achieve chicness fused with rampant intellectualism appears to us particularly French.
However, that's not to say that a similar design can't be achieved by other nations - does Feisty French Friend's bog remind us of something? Of course it does! It reminds us of a photo by Justin Townes Earle, that notorious American singer of songs, which we published back in the days before we ran out of songs we could denominate Toilet Songs, and write special posts about. This particular Toilet Song post was called Toilet Song - Harlem River Blues, and was pretty festive, as Toilet Song posts go. The toilet in the photo is, as you can see, remarkably similar to the French one above, with its practical yet beautiful tiles. However, its charm is perhaps best described as rugged, rather than intellectual.
Hastening towards the end of this blog post, therefore, we've got a festive video which we find corresponds well with reality, especially the bits about how beer is good and people are crazy (you know what we mean, you darling, fucked-up bitches).
Festive video - Billy Currington, People Are Crazy
Related Reading
A similar water-saving toilet from the Museum of Wine in Chinon, photographed by Quasi-Intellectual Friend: On the Nature of Academic Friendships
(This is rather a favourite post of ours, actually - it's the one in which we describe our friends as "fruitcakes". Because what's not to love about fruitcake!)
You know how, some days, the only combination of words that accurately describes one's existence is Tod und Verzweiflung? Today, however, is a great day, for today we can say, with utter confidence: "Pah! We laugh in the face of danger. We drop ice cubes down the vest of fear!"
We have defeated the vicious attempts of the Privy Counsel archive to confuse us, ruin our equanimity and make us into gibbering wrecks (or "a gibbering wreck", depending on how many of us one decides there are, and whether we are using the royal we or just an ordinary plural). We have found the elusive "New Year's email"! As regular readers will remember, pictures from the famed New Year's email turned up during one of our archive raids back in August, and we wrote, on the occasion, with touching bewilderment:
As you may suspect, the Privy Counsel picture archive is a total fucking mess. (Read all about the pheasant situation here and here.) There is stuff that's been in there so long we can no longer identify it. Like pictures from German Friend labelled "New year's email", for instance. "What email?" we ask ourselves, squinting in the light of the guttering candle. "And, crucially," we further ponder, taking a quizzical swig from our hipflask, "from what year?"
We won't go into details of the bravery displayed by the Head Privy Counsellor as we battled against skeletal hands, spiders, and mysterious murderous monks (fuck knows what they were doing in our archive) - suffice to say, we found the email! Behold - an amusing vignette from German Friend! (Look out for interspersed Scandiwegian vocabulary; German Friend is multi-lingual and multi-talented. Oh, and did we mention he just got a dog? We don't know a lot about it at present, only that it isn't called Doris. We'll keep you updated.)
[...] Meanwhile in [German Friend]-land the Christmas and New Year edition 2013 was pretty good.
I can put some blame on Blighty for blighting a small portion of my stay back home, as on December 23, still in London, I had to pedal through puddles of monstrous extent, errands, presents, etc, you know, and the shoes, the brown shoes got soaked. Horror. Never really recovered, not till the next day, departure day, anyway, and so, as a good man only owns two pairs of shoes at most at any one time, I had worn "them ole boots", looking strong and masculine, but under the surface, literally, having a blister party! A 5-hour walk with hyperactive 70-year-old min pappa in Berlin didn't help the matter. New shoes were bought on New Year's Eve (how come nobody ever mentions New Year's Adam? Not fair!).
Anyway, back in Hamburg for nyår, some peeps from here (London) and there (Germany) joined me and we partied on down in the Washington Bar (you don't have to know this place, but if you are ever in Hamburg looking for a spot to party, I can recommend it. "Klein aber oho", as we say in tyska!).
[...] A pink-tinted necessary with head rests for male customers! "Kopf hier." Don't fall asleep though, the room is fully armed, pistols dangling menacingly overhead!
A DJ's wild phantasy at Hamburg's Washington Bar. Blue is so 2014. We love the look. And the decks. And the Boombox. Not so much the blur of the pictures. Sorry. Poop.
"Kopf hier." Jawohl!
One could, if one were so inclined, make any number of rude jokes incorporating the word "gun".
Close-up of the simple but poignant instructions. We do love clear signage!
We have no idea what's going on here.
Or here.
Or, for that matter, here.
This isn't, frankly, much clearer.
It looks, however, like German Friend had an excellent Silvester!
We had an amusing and oh! so intellectual conversation with German Friend recently about the German word Trümmerfrauen, and are delighted to note that the word Trümmeris incorporated in the libretto of today's festive video! We're at risk of feeling so smug about this that we have to stop writing immediately, before our head explodes.
Festive video - Patricia Petibon, Der Hölle Rache Kocht in Meinem Herzen (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Heigh ho, another religious festival is upon us. We woke up this morning feeling like we'd been hit by a bus - the phrase "death warmed up" sprang to mind with alarming alacrity. Considering the symptoms, we decided that we were suffering from either a) tertiary syphilis, b) post-traumatic stress, or c) a vile hangover. Recalling yesterday's events, we then deduced that c) was the most likely cause of our malaise, though we haven't absolutely ruled out a) and b).
Be that as it may, we consider ourselves, as usual, blessed in having such helpful, intellectual friends. Intellectual Friend, especially, has been more than usually rampant in his intellectualism recently. Round about Christmas time, we made a remark about Jebus, a dude who, we understand, is frequently implicated in religious high days and holidays. This remark caused Intellectual Friend to go off on a philological rant of remarkable, almost alarming, intellectual pizzazz. We reproduce it here, with permission:
Enjoyed very much your report from that family church venture: many wholehearted blessings on your role models! [Editor's note: said indomitable role model would be granny who, with unwavering fortitude, insisted on complaining loudly about how boring the Christmas sermon was, ignoring all hints from relatives that the preacher was standing right behind her.] Also, this sparks two philological remarks. Firstly, I appreciate quite deeply those typically Germanic and (I think) especially Scandinavian verbal structures which effect some kind of messing about the intransitiveness of intransitive verbs, like "sjunga julen in". Another among many would perhaps be "to die into the mountain", cf. Eyrbyggja saga [editor's note: deyja í fjöll].
My second remark is about Jebus, a dude who indeed tends to be laboured on and on about in sermons and related contexts a tad more than warranted by the Christian mythology and tradition as a whole. This remark I think I shall now split into two sub-remarks.
The first of these is that I wonder whether you were aware, when saying Jebus, that the implied derogativeness of such a name would actually reach very deep dark bottoms in a Polish context, if used, because
1) the -us suffix can be used in Polish as a pseudo-Latin suffix which, when added to native words, is a bit like -ard in drunkard but tinged with fleeting connotations of the referent being a potential asshole, and
2) because jeb- is a common Polish verbal root among the lower classes with the primary denotation "to fuck", and furthermore the root is otherwise mysteriously rare in other languages, although it can be shown to derive from Proto-Slavic *jebati with the same meaning, and a related proto-verb was an iterative ("to fuck repeatedly"?). Indeed the root is of very great antiquity while also evidencing remarkable semantic stability. A PIE [editor's note: Proto-Indo-European] root *yebh- can even be confidently posited, also referring to some kind of proto-fucking, since there are cognates in Sanskrit: yabhati "to fuck", also a reduplicated form yiyapsatiwhich was a desiderative ("to desire to fuck"??).
The Polish etymological dictionary whence this word-wisdom mostly springs from also offers examples of late medieval personal names or nicknames Jebak, Jebyl and Jebur (the latter was euphemistically glossed by a later lexicographer as "keen towards women"), consolidating the hypothetical potential of a name Jebus in Polish for signifying "Fucker". An interesting coincidence, if coincidence it is, which I thought you might perhaps appreciate (and indeed you would be the only person I know who could appreciate its potential multivalence).
My second sub-remark is that there certainly is a need to renew many of the pagan-derived Christian traditions and beliefs fallen into oblivion, and to talk more about the demons, monsters, Gandalf-like vs Balrog-like angels, etc. Regarding this I was pleased to hear the priest at the end of the Polish Yule mass embark on an elaborate and clearly archaic curse-like prayer for the flock to be shielded against the evil forces and the hosts of Satan and all the malicious sprites who hover around or lurk greedy to bind or devour the good souls, and may they be knocked down into the dark pits of hell, and so on. Also those maledictions, together with the festiveness of the also archaic carols, made up for the predictably boring over-sweet sermon.
On that note, let us have a look at the not-archaic-in-the-slightest toilets at Lund Cathedral. We have mentioned before the charitable determination of the good people of Lund Cathedral in providing visitors with facilities in which to achieve physical cleanliness, while simultaneously striving towards spiritual purity. Please excuse the sideways pictures - consider them a parable on love and forgiveness.
An angelic combination of physical and spiritual perfection!
The twin coat-hooks symbolise, possibly, the duality of the good-evil dichotomy.
An exemplary door-handle, easy to operate with one's elbow.
Useful for lepers who have lost a hand or even an entire arm.
The pure white colour of these paper towels symbolises their virginity.
There
are lots of weird Bible quotes, but this is a surprisingly normal one:
"Like cold water to a weary soul is good news
from a distant land." This excellent mixer tap, of course, allows one to choose between hot, cold, or an almost infinite range of pleasant in-between temperatures.
Funnily enough, Semi-Intellectual Friend has been rampantly semi-intellectual lately, and alerted us to this useful advice from the Bible, which you may wish to contemplate:
13 And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee: 14 For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy: that he see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee.
There. Next time you find yourself in need of a latrine trench, you don't have to hesitate, but can confidently get on with digging, safe in the knowledge that the good Lord is pottering around your camp, making sure that nobody's getting up to any naughty sodomy, incest, or shellfish consumption.
Happy Easter, ladies and gentlemen! There are more philological rants from Intellectual Friend coming soon!
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