Just now my landlord popped by to check the house for the winter - to set the boiler to heat up the water if none of us would be here, so the pipes don't freeze, and all that - and seemed surprised to see me home.
"Are you staying here over Christmas?"
Yes.
The incredulous reactions I get from people - aren't you going home* for Christmas? No. Why not? I don't want to. But - will there be people coming over? No. So you'll be all alone for Christmas? Yes. But - oh. Well. Happy Christmas then.
People seem unable to understand I'm actually looking forward to celebrating Christmas on my own.
All except my family, who are perfectly good with it. And there would be no use in me going home for Christmas anyway.
My Mum, despite not having to, being management and all, volunteered to help out on the wards she manages in the care home she works at. Her wards, being part of the care industry, are normally wildly understaffed as it is, let alone over the holidays. Even if she had intended on celebrating a family Christmas, she would have at least popped in for a few hours to help out - as she did two years ago, when I did go home for Christmas (if she were Catholic surely she'd have been sainted by now). Similarly, my stepfather will be working.
My Dad's been scheduled to work Christmas day, and his plans for Boxing day are similar to mine, as he told me yesterday. Being a lover of seafood, he'll make himself a lovely seafood platter and snack on that all day as he'll enjoy Boxing day on his own.
"Ilse," he said, "enjoy having time to yourself over the holidays as long as you can - this will be the first holiday in forty years I'll have to myself. Soon enough you'll have to spend Christmas day here, Boxing day there, then New Year's elsewhere."
My brother's come home from Alicante to celebrate Christmas, but he'll be spending it mostly with his girlfriend and her parents, so he'll be busy too.
In short, I don't have any strong reason to visit either of my parents over Christmas.
Last year, when I still lived in Leicester, during the seven-months winter, I fell ill just before Christmas, and then I'd also decided not to visit my parents for the holidays. Instead, I spent Christmas in bed with a bottle of wine and some delicious snacks, and went out into the snow for a long walk. I enjoyed that, and I intend to do the same this year - sans snow as they're not predicting any for the holidays, and perhaps also sans bed as I haven't got the flu this year, just a cold. I spent last year's New Year's sleeping off the flu; this year I might go into Leeds for a bit of a party.
It's wholly selfish, but there is no better way to celebrate the holidays than doing so completely on your own terms. Where you get to decide what wine to drink (none of that "oh yes but I've just opened a bottle of Merlot, I know you normally drink white but certainly you'll have a glass of red instead?"), what food to eat (no people around to pull faces at the Brussels sprouts because I actually like them, and will have them for Christmas. Along with delicious dishes of mushrooms in puff pastry and roasted cherry tomatoes with balsamic vinegar), what to watch on television (no "do you have to watch Doctor Who? You're the only one who likes it anyway, can't we watch something everyone enjoys?" - and also no talking during the show!) and what to do when.
It's hardly something to feel bad or sad over - I love my family and they love me, and if we'd wanted each other's company we could've done so. It's just that things like this don't have to be celebrated precisely over Christmas - last year instead I visited them in late January and we exchanged some gifts and had a nice get-together then. Christmas is in that regard merely a calendar date - doing stuff with your family should be possible any day of the year.
Plus, I've got the rest of my life to get stressed over celebrating the holidays with other people ;)
*Home to me is Leeds, but as long as I study people will probably assume that home is Hellevoetsluis / Oostvoorne. I'm not sure why.
Monday 23 December 2013
Saturday 30 November 2013
Vegetarian Split Pea Soup (Vegetarische Snert / Erwtensoep)
Today I found myself craving split pea soup, as I usually do around late November.
Last year, I posted a recipe for a meaty split pea soup, but, having decided to try and avoid eating meat, I needed to convert this to a vegetarian recipe.
This served another purpose: if I can somehow convert all my old family recipes to vegetarian recipes, I'll void all my excuses for not going vegetarian.
Also, the myths I posted last year are myths for a reason. Though the enamel soup pot thing is still true - I had my favourite fantastic one this year and I do taste a difference, if only psychologically.
Thus far, my vegetarian split pea soup seems to be turning out quite well - actually, I may like it better than my meaty soup - so here's the recipe. Also, a great thing about this is that it feeds loads of people or feeds a small amount of people for a long while, and shouldn't cost more than about 7 pounds in total, so it's also the ultimate budget food.
Ilse's Recipe for Vegetarian Split Pea Soup
Ingredients:
5l water
1kg dried split peas
2 leeks
1 big onion
half a box of white mushrooms*
3/4 of big celeriac (all of it if you're using a small one)
1 table spoon of mustard
half a stick of salted butter
six vegetarian stock cubes
salt and pepper
carrots
In a 5-litre soup pot, melt half the butter. Fry the sliced mushrooms; dice the onion and fry this too; slice the leeks and fry this (clean the leek beforehand!). Cube the celeriac (as finely as possible) and fry. Fry everything until nice and brown. Add the mustard and two stock cubes and the rest of the butter - leave until butter has melted. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Add half the split peas. Stir. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Stir. Add the rest of the split peas. Add 2l of water. Add the rest of the stock cubes. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Stir occassionally. Keep tasting and add salt to taste.
When almost done (that is, when the split peas have dissolved), add sliced carrots to taste (not too many, they sweeten the soup). Add salt and pepper to taste.
Ideally, make it cool down quickly and leave outside (if [near] freezing) or in the fridge overnight, then freeze or serve.
*I find it interesting that apparently I find it less insulting to my family recipe to use mushrooms to add a bit of an earthy, nutty flavour to the soup than I find it to use potatoes to thicken it. Perhaps because adding potatoes points to bad technique and using mushrooms enhances flavours. I don't know. Potatoes in split pea soup remain evil.
Last year, I posted a recipe for a meaty split pea soup, but, having decided to try and avoid eating meat, I needed to convert this to a vegetarian recipe.
This served another purpose: if I can somehow convert all my old family recipes to vegetarian recipes, I'll void all my excuses for not going vegetarian.
Also, the myths I posted last year are myths for a reason. Though the enamel soup pot thing is still true - I had my favourite fantastic one this year and I do taste a difference, if only psychologically.
Thus far, my vegetarian split pea soup seems to be turning out quite well - actually, I may like it better than my meaty soup - so here's the recipe. Also, a great thing about this is that it feeds loads of people or feeds a small amount of people for a long while, and shouldn't cost more than about 7 pounds in total, so it's also the ultimate budget food.
Ilse's Recipe for Vegetarian Split Pea Soup
Ingredients:
5l water
1kg dried split peas
2 leeks
1 big onion
half a box of white mushrooms*
3/4 of big celeriac (all of it if you're using a small one)
1 table spoon of mustard
half a stick of salted butter
six vegetarian stock cubes
salt and pepper
carrots
In a 5-litre soup pot, melt half the butter. Fry the sliced mushrooms; dice the onion and fry this too; slice the leeks and fry this (clean the leek beforehand!). Cube the celeriac (as finely as possible) and fry. Fry everything until nice and brown. Add the mustard and two stock cubes and the rest of the butter - leave until butter has melted. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Add half the split peas. Stir. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Stir. Add the rest of the split peas. Add 2l of water. Add the rest of the stock cubes. Add 1l of water. Bring to a boil. Stir occassionally. Keep tasting and add salt to taste.
When almost done (that is, when the split peas have dissolved), add sliced carrots to taste (not too many, they sweeten the soup). Add salt and pepper to taste.
Ideally, make it cool down quickly and leave outside (if [near] freezing) or in the fridge overnight, then freeze or serve.
*I find it interesting that apparently I find it less insulting to my family recipe to use mushrooms to add a bit of an earthy, nutty flavour to the soup than I find it to use potatoes to thicken it. Perhaps because adding potatoes points to bad technique and using mushrooms enhances flavours. I don't know. Potatoes in split pea soup remain evil.
Tuesday 26 November 2013
The Doctor Who 50th
NOTE: HERE BE SPOILERS FOR THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY EPISODE. IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN IT, DO NOT SCROLL DOWN BEYOND THE PHOTOS OF THE FOUR CLASSIC DOCTORS.
If you have talked to me at all in the last few weeks/months, it will not have escaped your attention that I had the incredible fortune to be allowed to attend the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Celebration at the ExCeL in London last weekend.
I've written before about how I am fairly susceptible to fandoms, but this was my first ever full fandom event. And I got to experience it with my Whovian friend Lisa. So that was all really cool.
Being a big fan of dressing up - if you manage to pull up late 1990s files for the Oostvoorne local library, you'll see that my most-borrowed book was one that had instructions on Halloween outfits, my favourite of those being a vampire cape; also, on the days where I don't feel like "ah, sod it, I'll wear something comfortable" I dress up like the persona I want to be for that day - I of course went all out on creating a costume.
My initial plans - back in June - were wildly ambitious. I would sew a full skirt that consisted of layers of leather (or fake leather, more likely), candy striped cotton, burgundy velvet and some black-and-grey chequered fabric. I would wear a white blouse and a red-and-white chequered corset or waistcoat. This would be combined with my tweed jacket, a burgundy tie, brown-and-white brogues, and a recorder.
Oh, and I would devote time to learning how to knit and then I would simply knit a 20-foot orange/purple/burgundy scarf (because I like Four's second scarf so much better).
Ironically, time got in the way of me creating this - in my mind still rather wonderful - Renegade Time Lord (The Oncoming Storm, the Valeyard, and all that) costume. All Doctors At Once.
Also I didn't like how it made me ignore so much of my favourite Doctor, the Second Doctor, who was, of course, played by Patrick Troughton whom I've since watched in The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Omen and a bunch of interview on YouTube and have come to appreciate as an actor beyond Doctor Who as well.
This is how my costume eventually turned out:
If you have talked to me at all in the last few weeks/months, it will not have escaped your attention that I had the incredible fortune to be allowed to attend the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Celebration at the ExCeL in London last weekend.
I've written before about how I am fairly susceptible to fandoms, but this was my first ever full fandom event. And I got to experience it with my Whovian friend Lisa. So that was all really cool.
Being a big fan of dressing up - if you manage to pull up late 1990s files for the Oostvoorne local library, you'll see that my most-borrowed book was one that had instructions on Halloween outfits, my favourite of those being a vampire cape; also, on the days where I don't feel like "ah, sod it, I'll wear something comfortable" I dress up like the persona I want to be for that day - I of course went all out on creating a costume.
My initial plans - back in June - were wildly ambitious. I would sew a full skirt that consisted of layers of leather (or fake leather, more likely), candy striped cotton, burgundy velvet and some black-and-grey chequered fabric. I would wear a white blouse and a red-and-white chequered corset or waistcoat. This would be combined with my tweed jacket, a burgundy tie, brown-and-white brogues, and a recorder.
Oh, and I would devote time to learning how to knit and then I would simply knit a 20-foot orange/purple/burgundy scarf (because I like Four's second scarf so much better).
Ironically, time got in the way of me creating this - in my mind still rather wonderful - Renegade Time Lord (The Oncoming Storm, the Valeyard, and all that) costume. All Doctors At Once.
Also I didn't like how it made me ignore so much of my favourite Doctor, the Second Doctor, who was, of course, played by Patrick Troughton whom I've since watched in The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Omen and a bunch of interview on YouTube and have come to appreciate as an actor beyond Doctor Who as well.
This is how my costume eventually turned out:
I would really like to say that there is something political about me making it into a female version with the skirt (and the fact that - really, my body shape will always reveal my biological sex), but the truth is that I simply found this skirt in a charity shop, squealed in delight and appropriated it. I prefer wearing skirts instead of trousers anyway.
Of course, this is still political in the sense that I apparently feel that in any case the gender identity of a fictional character is more than capable of being fluid. A female Second Doctor is still the Second Doctor, in the end.
But let's leave the gender politics for what they are, for this moment at least. They are really very important, but not central to this blog.
I loved dressing up like this. We saw loads of fezzes and full Eleventh Doctors (including that fabulous plum coat), loads of Fours and Tens, but I saw only really a handful of Second Doctors, which left me in the curious position of getting to scope out the "competition" and admiring their efforts at the same time. My coat wasn't right, which left me to admire this one guy who had managed to somehow find a proper morning coat that was slightly too big (I know where to get them - eBay - but that doesn't reduce the awesomeness of him having the right coat).
The Fourth Doctor scarves - so, so, so many - were all brilliant. I complimented a guy on his scarf and immediately afterwards I wondered whether "nice scarf!" is Whovian flirting. There was this woman in a fantastic TARDIS dress. Children in Silurian and Weeping Angel costumes - and so well-behaved!
And everyone was nice. Like, so nice. Lisa and I took a photo with this random couple we met whilst queuing for the TARDIS console photo - no idea who they are, but we had a really nice conversation to pass the time. Whilst I waited for a Classic Lounge panel, this American woman talked to me about her convention experiences overseas, and I just felt in awe at her brilliant stories.
We started our morning at the Stratford tube station, noticing children on the platform waving sonic screwdrivers around and grown men in 20-foot scarves and women in Dalek dresses. Good start.
We got off the tube at the ExCeL, spotting Canary Wharf in the distance and me accidentally dropping my bag and exclaiming "oh bugger!" (if I'd been in character, it should've been "oh my word" or "oh crumbs" instead), which I really hope didn't offend the parents of the child standing near me.
We had to queue for our first panel, the SFX Panel, and no one complained about the queue other than "I wish they'd open the gate" and "ah, they've opened the gate" when they let us in. The SFX show was fantastic, with a 'break-away' Dalek being blown up (apparently, this Dalek has been used multiple times. It breaks away into nicely big chunks of Dalek armour and can easily be put together again. So it's basically a humpty-Dalekty) and a Cyberman being shot (with squibs! An adorable little boy dressed like Eleven, hardly taller than the great massive gun Rose used in The Stolen Earth, got to use exactly that gun to shoot at the Cyberman, while a woman in a TARDIS dress got to play the companion and fire the squib trigger). There was fire and lasers and fake snow and PHWOAR SO MUCH AWESOME.
Then Lisa and I both went on our separate adventure, she to take a picture with Jenna Coleman, I to attend the Classic Panel with William Russell and Carole Ann Ford.
We met up again afterwards to take the TARDIS Console picture and also snuck a photo of the TARDIS console itself.
Time passes so quickly, and at 1pm it was time to queue for the next show, the Regeneration Panel, which I had been most looking forward to, as it did not only contain the multicoloured Sixth Doctor, Colin Baker;
The rhotic Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy (sans spoons, unfortunately);
The beige Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison;
But also, the legendary Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker.
These four absolute LEGENDS got to talk at the audience for a good while about having been the Doctor, and the fandom now, and the 50th, and everything.
This was over far too quickly, but was followed by another big Panel, the Eleventh Hour, which had Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman, Steven Moffat (whom we disliked but came to like through this Panel) and the producer, Marcus Wilson.
This Panel made me really sad to see Matt leaving by Christmas, but then on the other hand we'll get Peter Capaldi, who I'm sure will blow us all away, judging by his *SPOILERS FROM HERE ON* appearance in the 50th.
Again, time for independent adventures: I sent Lisa off to another Classic Lounge panel and then I scurried off to queue to get William Russell to sign my copy of this month's Doctor Who Magazine.
All the while I stood in that queue, I had cool things to say in my head. Like, "William, you're so cool! Ian is my favourite companion!" and all that. But then I actually stood in front of him and my mind blanked and, in a move of self-protection, my mouth didn't want to speak either - which kept me from making a drawn-out 'EEEPP' sound.
So he signed my magazine
And then I took a picture with him
And he seems to be such a sweet man, he did seem so nice. I felt awful for not being able to say anything beyond "could you please sign my magazine and do you mind if this person here takes a picture?" but at least I didn't say anything embarrassing, which is perhaps something I should be sort of grateful for.
I then hurried off to follow Lisa in her adventure, which was to secure seats in the Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling Classic Lounge panel. This was brilliantly hilarious, with them cracking so many jokes and just generally seeming to have lots of fun.
We ended our ExCeL experience by attending a screening of Caves of Androzani pt 4 and then having a look about the display area where they had loads of stuff from the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff.
Like the Second Doctor costume.
But, as Time will do, we had to catch the tube to Greenwich to go to the O2 to watch the Day of the Doctor, which blew us away.
No, but seriously.
In 3D.
Especially the appearance of Tom Baker at the end (we hoped for jelly babies but were sadly deprived of this) made an impact, having seen him just hours before.
I personally am extremely happy that they're bringing back Gallifrey and the Time Lords. The Classic Series episodes where the Doctor visits Gallifrey are among my favourites (including the last episode of The War Games), especially the one where the Fourth Doctor basically waltzes in all arrogantly, demanding to take up his post as Lord President and it all turns out to have been a defence strategy (The Invasion of Time). There is something magical about this highly intellectual society living in what basically amounts to fear of the outside universe (I see parallels with academia).
Of course, the whole episode in itself feels a bit Deus Ex Machina, in the sense that suddenly, in one episode, the whole New Series is reset and the Doctor didn't kill all his people, he just thinks he did. But it was cleverly done, I think, and there were enough nods to the past to shut up my inner critic and just enjoy the ride.
And perhaps I should just watch it again.
On the way home we stopped by Burger King, which isn't in itself significant other than the fact that it led me to remark later that it had been "a brilliant day of Doctor Who and Burger King!" which had Lisa in a fit.
There were comments on facebook about a Sherlock teaser so once we were back at the hotel we fired up my computer to watch the teaser (and the teaser for the Christmas episode), then watch The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, which Lisa termed (I'm paraphrasing here), the real 50th Anniversary Celebratory show.
It was hilarious indeed, especially as our internet connection was, for lack of a better word, crap, and froze every minute or so, leaving us time to fully appreciate and laugh at each joke before we saw / missed the next one.
It also led to some minor facebook fangirling over Peter Davison (there are too many funny Tristan Farnon gifs on Tumblr) and Sylvester McCoy.
In short, I had a fantastic birthday weekend.
And let me now close by quoting and paraphrasing the First Doctor:
"Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.
Goodbye, readers.
Goodbye, readers.
Goodbye, my dears."
Saturday 2 November 2013
100th: Why Am I So Lucky?
This is my 100th post. And I have, again, changed the title of this blog - it has gone from Leicester Adventures to Committing Criminology to now, Committing Criminology & Loving Language because I am, indeed, loving Language but still committing Criminology every so often.
The tag line has changed too, and is now "A Criminologist doing an English Language PhD in Leeds" - which is basically what I'm doing, of course.
And I feel so lucky. How did I end up doing this? I can't wrap my head around it. I doubt it's a manifestation of the dreaded 'Impostor Syndrome' - because I don't feel like I'm not up to the job - but it's a good question nonetheless.
Yesterday, I attended a series of presentations the School of English uses to determine who should get a job with them/us (I feel uncomfortable still saying "us" at this point). This was fascinating - being able to see what everyone has done that qualifies them to get invited for such an interview. In the first place, one needs a good number of good publications. This makes sense, because a good researcher does, naturally, good research. Skills are essential too. But the main qualification that I felt was most important was coming across as a friendly person, capable of explaining stuff to others. And they were all really good at that. One of the presenters had a massive CV, with a brilliant and straightforward educational background and lots and lots of languages. Another had an intense list of publications and did a brilliant presentation too. Yet another had a fabulous list of industry-related jobs and qualifications. A fourth had precisely that pedagogical philosophy that I have come to appreciate as a student. The panel must've had a tough time deciding to whom to give the job.
Oh, and they were all women, which pleased me too. I'm not sure if this was reverse gender discrimination - if they had been all men, I do think I would have felt that way - but given their incredible qualifications, I do very well believe that gender had little to do with it.
We all had a Uni-provided lunch in the Douglas Jefferson room (which is gorgeous with dark wood panelling) and I had some chats with some of them - a chat about MOOCs, which was entirely enlightening and made me realise that I should look into some of them, and that MOOCs are far from the end of academia but instead enhance the experience. Distance Learning didn't kill the Universities, so why should MOOCs? I also had a chat with the author of a book I read, and it turns out she's a lovely person in real life - they were all lovely people, really - and I suddenly felt better about having made that slip when telling a prison guard at HMP Grendon that I'd found my visit brilliant, because her research is also related to human suffering and she used the word 'fun' to describe the process.
But it is fun. Human suffering is evil and wrong and everything, but the research process is so much fun. I can't believe I get to do it.
Everything's going so well, I feel like I'm waiting for something to go massively wrong because somehow I do believe there's only a finite amount of luck a person can have in a given time and surely I've used all of mine up by now?
I just keep on reading, and I love doing it. I've got a job test lined up with the City Council. And - as I keep on bragging about - I get to go to the Doctor Who thing in three weeks, and they published the Saturday guest list yesterday and IT. IS. AMAZING.
Seriously, things had better start going wrong or I'm going to start feeling paranoid.
The tag line has changed too, and is now "A Criminologist doing an English Language PhD in Leeds" - which is basically what I'm doing, of course.
And I feel so lucky. How did I end up doing this? I can't wrap my head around it. I doubt it's a manifestation of the dreaded 'Impostor Syndrome' - because I don't feel like I'm not up to the job - but it's a good question nonetheless.
Yesterday, I attended a series of presentations the School of English uses to determine who should get a job with them/us (I feel uncomfortable still saying "us" at this point). This was fascinating - being able to see what everyone has done that qualifies them to get invited for such an interview. In the first place, one needs a good number of good publications. This makes sense, because a good researcher does, naturally, good research. Skills are essential too. But the main qualification that I felt was most important was coming across as a friendly person, capable of explaining stuff to others. And they were all really good at that. One of the presenters had a massive CV, with a brilliant and straightforward educational background and lots and lots of languages. Another had an intense list of publications and did a brilliant presentation too. Yet another had a fabulous list of industry-related jobs and qualifications. A fourth had precisely that pedagogical philosophy that I have come to appreciate as a student. The panel must've had a tough time deciding to whom to give the job.
Oh, and they were all women, which pleased me too. I'm not sure if this was reverse gender discrimination - if they had been all men, I do think I would have felt that way - but given their incredible qualifications, I do very well believe that gender had little to do with it.
We all had a Uni-provided lunch in the Douglas Jefferson room (which is gorgeous with dark wood panelling) and I had some chats with some of them - a chat about MOOCs, which was entirely enlightening and made me realise that I should look into some of them, and that MOOCs are far from the end of academia but instead enhance the experience. Distance Learning didn't kill the Universities, so why should MOOCs? I also had a chat with the author of a book I read, and it turns out she's a lovely person in real life - they were all lovely people, really - and I suddenly felt better about having made that slip when telling a prison guard at HMP Grendon that I'd found my visit brilliant, because her research is also related to human suffering and she used the word 'fun' to describe the process.
But it is fun. Human suffering is evil and wrong and everything, but the research process is so much fun. I can't believe I get to do it.
Everything's going so well, I feel like I'm waiting for something to go massively wrong because somehow I do believe there's only a finite amount of luck a person can have in a given time and surely I've used all of mine up by now?
I just keep on reading, and I love doing it. I've got a job test lined up with the City Council. And - as I keep on bragging about - I get to go to the Doctor Who thing in three weeks, and they published the Saturday guest list yesterday and IT. IS. AMAZING.
Seriously, things had better start going wrong or I'm going to start feeling paranoid.
Wednesday 30 October 2013
Chicken Sateh / Kipsaté / Sate Ayam
I had chicken satay at a Thai restaurant the other day - I was quite happy to see that on the menu, it's perhaps my favourite chicken dish. But Thai chicken satay is not like the dish I've grown up on, which is the Indonesian version (well, one of the islands' version, but I'm too ignorant of Indonesia to know exactly which. Probably Java).
As luck would have it, I have a brilliant "Indisch" (Dutch-Indonesian fusion cuisine) cookery book, plus our family recipe for saté sauce. So I'll post it here for other people to make use of.
In the interest of vegetarianism (I'm currently contemplating actually making the move from a little meat to non-meat diet), I must post here that this dish also works well with tofu and chicken substitutes.
It can also be made with other meats, such as pork (babi), goat (kambing), shrimp (udang), and, for those so inclined (perhaps fewer Brits than Continental Europeans, who are far less difficult about horse meat), horse (kuda). Those are slightly different recipes though, and I restrict this recipe to chicken (ayam) / tofu / substitute only.
The Indische chicken sateh dish consists of two elements; the chicken and the sauce.
Chicken:
All you need to do for this is to cut chicken breast into cubes and stick it in a marinade to soak overnight.
Here's the marinade for 500 grams of chicken.
3 tablespoons of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce (if you can get it, ketjap manis. If not, dark soy sauce is a good enough substitute. The differences, though they are different, are fairly minor).
3 tablespoons of lemon juice.
2 tablespoons of peanut oil / vegetable oil (again, peanut oil is preferable, but vegetable oil works well enough).
1 teaspoon of pepper
salt to taste (remember soy sauce is already fairly salty)
So soak the chicken overnight in the fridge, then either shallow-fry the cubes or stick them on a skewer (wet the skewers if you're using wooden ones!), then on a grill.
Sauce:
Okay, so this is the family recipe for the simple version. The difficult version involves crushing peanuts to a powder and all that sort of nonsense. So this works well enough.
Get a small jar (300 grams) of smooth peanut butter. Not chunky. Smooth. It needs to be relatively oily too, so if you've got a 'dry' peanut butter, you need to add some peanut / vegetable oil to the recipe. You'll want to use half this jar.
Chop chillies, or use chilli paste - preferably sambal ulek/oelek, but that's so hard to get. Chillies and chilli paste work well too. Mix this with a pinch of ground ginger and a pinch of ground coriander.
Fry a diced and cubed onion with two chopped cloves of garlic (or more, if you like garlic). Add the spice mix. Then add the peanut butter and add milk and water, until everything has dissolved and the sauce has a sauce-like consistency. Add a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce, two tablespoons of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, and a 1 cm^3 cube of creamed coconut. Tweak the amounts of milk, peanut butter, chillies and spices until it is just the way you like it.
Serve over the chicken cubes, or with chips, or over nasi goreng or other rice dishes, or whatever you like because you'll want to stick this peanut sauce on just about everything.
And that's it. Bon appétit.
As luck would have it, I have a brilliant "Indisch" (Dutch-Indonesian fusion cuisine) cookery book, plus our family recipe for saté sauce. So I'll post it here for other people to make use of.
In the interest of vegetarianism (I'm currently contemplating actually making the move from a little meat to non-meat diet), I must post here that this dish also works well with tofu and chicken substitutes.
It can also be made with other meats, such as pork (babi), goat (kambing), shrimp (udang), and, for those so inclined (perhaps fewer Brits than Continental Europeans, who are far less difficult about horse meat), horse (kuda). Those are slightly different recipes though, and I restrict this recipe to chicken (ayam) / tofu / substitute only.
The Indische chicken sateh dish consists of two elements; the chicken and the sauce.
Chicken:
All you need to do for this is to cut chicken breast into cubes and stick it in a marinade to soak overnight.
Here's the marinade for 500 grams of chicken.
3 tablespoons of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce (if you can get it, ketjap manis. If not, dark soy sauce is a good enough substitute. The differences, though they are different, are fairly minor).
3 tablespoons of lemon juice.
2 tablespoons of peanut oil / vegetable oil (again, peanut oil is preferable, but vegetable oil works well enough).
1 teaspoon of pepper
salt to taste (remember soy sauce is already fairly salty)
So soak the chicken overnight in the fridge, then either shallow-fry the cubes or stick them on a skewer (wet the skewers if you're using wooden ones!), then on a grill.
Sauce:
Okay, so this is the family recipe for the simple version. The difficult version involves crushing peanuts to a powder and all that sort of nonsense. So this works well enough.
Get a small jar (300 grams) of smooth peanut butter. Not chunky. Smooth. It needs to be relatively oily too, so if you've got a 'dry' peanut butter, you need to add some peanut / vegetable oil to the recipe. You'll want to use half this jar.
Chop chillies, or use chilli paste - preferably sambal ulek/oelek, but that's so hard to get. Chillies and chilli paste work well too. Mix this with a pinch of ground ginger and a pinch of ground coriander.
Fry a diced and cubed onion with two chopped cloves of garlic (or more, if you like garlic). Add the spice mix. Then add the peanut butter and add milk and water, until everything has dissolved and the sauce has a sauce-like consistency. Add a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of ketjap manis / dark soy sauce, two tablespoons of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, and a 1 cm^3 cube of creamed coconut. Tweak the amounts of milk, peanut butter, chillies and spices until it is just the way you like it.
Serve over the chicken cubes, or with chips, or over nasi goreng or other rice dishes, or whatever you like because you'll want to stick this peanut sauce on just about everything.
And that's it. Bon appétit.
Sunday 13 October 2013
On the Benefits of an Interdisciplinary Education
Whenever UC Roosevelt explained the concept of 'liberal arts and sciences' to (prospective) students and their parents, some people often drew on the medieval and Renaissance concepts of the 'trivium' - grammar, logic and rhetoric - and the 'quadrivium' - arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy - which together are supposed to make up a full education.
Naturally, today's demands have changed education - especially music and astronomy are often left out of general education, although some schools may offer music as an elective art class and some schools may touch briefly on astronomy in science classes. Nevertheless, the point remains that a full education should entail the mastery of several subjects rather than just one.
This concept is not wholly foreign to Universities - just consider the recent founding of a number of liberal arts colleges in the Netherlands (UC Utrecht - 1998, UC Maastrict - 2002, Roosevelt Academy/UC Roosevelt - 2004, Amsterdam UC - 2008, Leiden UC The Hague - 2010, Erasmus UC - 2013).
For a very long time, people were considered to have been educated up to a sufficient level if they could read, write and pay their bills.
People were considered well-educated if they had a profound theoretical knowledge of a certain topic. But in today's world, where all information known to humankind is a screen-swipe at a rainy bus stop away, even if this is generally used to look at videos of Star Wars-sourced lyrics set against a capella renditions of John Williams soundtracks (it never gets old), this just isn't enough. People need to go back to the idea that a good education contains a bit of everything - the current day-reading&writing&maths.
UCR puts it that '[t]he Liberal Arts and Sciences educational concept is based upon the idea that today’s most complex problems can no longer be solved with a mono-disciplinary approach.' (http://www.ucr.nl/about-ucr/Pages/Liberal-Arts-and-Sciences.aspx), EUC says that '[t]o be successful in today’s evolving world, one must be literate in a host of arenas.' (http://www.eur.nl/euc/liberal_arts_sciences/introduction_las/), while AUC states it best when it writes that '[t]oday's society is in a constant state of flux, and our future leaders need to be flexible, creative thinkers, able to cope with the complexity of the issues facing the world. A liberal arts and sciences education is an excellent foundation in this context. In addition to factual knowledge, a liberal arts and sciences education prepares you to become a multilingual, informed and engaged global citizen, with well-developed intercultural competences, able to read intelligently, think critically and write effectively on the processes shaping our world.' (http://www.auc.nl/about-auc/about-liberal-arts--sciences/liberal-arts-sciences.html).
I do, however, recognise that changing education for the best takes a very long time (changing it for the worse, however, is much easier - but building always is more effort than destroying); it's already been 15 years since UCU was founded and only now the UC-movement has gained enough momentum to be recognised by people outside HE. So to help this process, let me list some advantages we interdisciplinarians have over those monodisciplinarians.
1. If we are in Arts, we can still do maths / if we are in Science, we can still deconstruct pop culture.
There are, of course, many other things we are also capable of, depending on the modules we took, but the fact that we will have had to pass modules in fields only tenuously related to our major (if that) means that we have a good theoretical knowledge of our major (that's what it's our major for) but also that we haven't been allowed to give up on basic capabilities such as doing maths and analysing poetry. I'm not saying a Literature major should be able to do calculus at the level of an astrophysicist, or the astrophysicist to understand all the subtleties of 'he was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage' (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 20), but I am nevertheless saying that interdisciplinarians can do more than just their major. We are inherently mixed methods rather than either quant or qual - we grasp SPSS as much as we grasp doing an ethnography.
2. We learn / study more flexibly.
This is related to the point above and naturally differs per person, but the fact that we have been forced to study different things means that we will have had to develop ways to deal with different topics, meaning that we are likely to be familiar with a whole range of study methods. This, in turn, will quite likely have prepared us to deal with having to learn new things later in life. We may have majored in one field, but our study skills make it easy for us to pick up knowledge in other fields too.
3. We can keep up an intelligent conversation.
This is not to say that monodisciplinarians can't - of course they can - but we are perhaps more comfortable than they are in doing so. We in Arts can still discuss time travel with a Science-friend, who is equally capable of keeping up a conversation on misogynist ideology in mainstream media (without saying profoundly stupid things).
4. We look at things in different ways.
A philosopher with modules in economics, a mathematician with modules in sociology - it works. Instead of continuing on the well-worn paths, we are able to apply concepts from other fields and translate our own ideas into other fields, thus finding ways of thinking outside the box, of approaching matters from different angles. This may not necessarily make us more creative, but it does make us less derivative.
Crossing fields is incredibly daunting, but being able to do so will keep not just Academia fresh and flexible, but industry too.
5. We don't have to give up interests.
While the first four make us good employees/entrepreneurs, this one is perhaps more to our own benefit. Not having to give up your other interests can change your life. I shall take myself as case in point: when I was 17, I really wanted to study Law. I was going to study Law, too, at Tilburg University. Had I gone on to study law, I would now be starting my internship at a law firm, probably having specialised in Family Law and intending to be a divorce lawyer, although I find Criminal Law much more interesting - Family Law is the safer option. But instead I got to combine Law with Economics and a bit of Politics, as well as Media Studies, Rhetoric and Stylistics, and I got to attend a book club and a literature and linguistics discussion group - so now I'm doing a PhD in English looking at UK news media (re)presentation of corporate fraud instead of learning how to tell people what's in it for them if they decide to get divorced. I dare say I am much happier than I would have been in the alternative scenario, if only because I get to do everything I find interesting, instead of just some little bit of it.
So, to summarise; we interdisciplinarians are flexible, hard-working, fast-learning, creative, intelligent and, importantly, happy people. There may be a fallacy here - did our interdisciplinary education make us so, or did we so start out so and chose an interdisciplinary education because of it? It is probably a bit of both, but fact remains that an interdisciplinary education is something to be supportive of.
Of course, interdisciplinarity does have its downsides. It is incredibly hard work - UCR used to advise that the average week in the semester entailed 56 hours of course-related work. I sometimes joke that my love for my alma mater is the result of Stockholm Syndrome. In order for it to be effective, class sizes should be limited - this could go both ways, as it would improve employment for academics but may be quite expensive if ill-organised. And it is difficult to explain what exactly you're doing - which is fine if you're just talking to your gran at a birthday, but is perhaps a little more difficult when you're looking for a job and have to say "yeah, uhm, look, I did major in Science but since I took modules on Physics and Engineering and IT and Mathematics it's basically equivalent to having studied Computer Science", or even worse, when you're a politician trying to make a point that Higher Education funding should not be further cut (which would get you my vote) and have to say "yes, look, I know it is not incredibly clear what our students are being trained for but I can assure you that they will be incredibly capable at whatever they end up doing" - saying you're training n lawyers, p surgeons and q historians (or, even more political, that you're training x STEM-field students, who are obviously a worthwhile investment because of the clear-cut monetary value of STEM-research - I have briefly covered this before, I promise to expand on it some other time) is much more likely to earn you the approval of other politicians. Perhaps monodisciplinarians with only one interest are happier being monodisciplinary.
And sometimes being interdisciplinary makes us a bit arrogant because it makes us think we know it all.
But it's worth it. Because ask yourself - would you rather have a GP who is really good at her job, or a GP who is really good at her job who also understands what she is doing when she votes during elections? A computer engineer who is really good at fixing your computer but also understands when the media are trying to manipulate him? An investment banker who is brilliant at handling your portfolio or one who is brilliant at handling your portfolio and also understands ethics?
Naturally, today's demands have changed education - especially music and astronomy are often left out of general education, although some schools may offer music as an elective art class and some schools may touch briefly on astronomy in science classes. Nevertheless, the point remains that a full education should entail the mastery of several subjects rather than just one.
This concept is not wholly foreign to Universities - just consider the recent founding of a number of liberal arts colleges in the Netherlands (UC Utrecht - 1998, UC Maastrict - 2002, Roosevelt Academy/UC Roosevelt - 2004, Amsterdam UC - 2008, Leiden UC The Hague - 2010, Erasmus UC - 2013).
For a very long time, people were considered to have been educated up to a sufficient level if they could read, write and pay their bills.
People were considered well-educated if they had a profound theoretical knowledge of a certain topic. But in today's world, where all information known to humankind is a screen-swipe at a rainy bus stop away, even if this is generally used to look at videos of Star Wars-sourced lyrics set against a capella renditions of John Williams soundtracks (it never gets old), this just isn't enough. People need to go back to the idea that a good education contains a bit of everything - the current day-reading&writing&maths.
UCR puts it that '[t]he Liberal Arts and Sciences educational concept is based upon the idea that today’s most complex problems can no longer be solved with a mono-disciplinary approach.' (http://www.ucr.nl/about-ucr/Pages/Liberal-Arts-and-Sciences.aspx), EUC says that '[t]o be successful in today’s evolving world, one must be literate in a host of arenas.' (http://www.eur.nl/euc/liberal_arts_sciences/introduction_las/), while AUC states it best when it writes that '[t]oday's society is in a constant state of flux, and our future leaders need to be flexible, creative thinkers, able to cope with the complexity of the issues facing the world. A liberal arts and sciences education is an excellent foundation in this context. In addition to factual knowledge, a liberal arts and sciences education prepares you to become a multilingual, informed and engaged global citizen, with well-developed intercultural competences, able to read intelligently, think critically and write effectively on the processes shaping our world.' (http://www.auc.nl/about-auc/about-liberal-arts--sciences/liberal-arts-sciences.html).
I do, however, recognise that changing education for the best takes a very long time (changing it for the worse, however, is much easier - but building always is more effort than destroying); it's already been 15 years since UCU was founded and only now the UC-movement has gained enough momentum to be recognised by people outside HE. So to help this process, let me list some advantages we interdisciplinarians have over those monodisciplinarians.
1. If we are in Arts, we can still do maths / if we are in Science, we can still deconstruct pop culture.
There are, of course, many other things we are also capable of, depending on the modules we took, but the fact that we will have had to pass modules in fields only tenuously related to our major (if that) means that we have a good theoretical knowledge of our major (that's what it's our major for) but also that we haven't been allowed to give up on basic capabilities such as doing maths and analysing poetry. I'm not saying a Literature major should be able to do calculus at the level of an astrophysicist, or the astrophysicist to understand all the subtleties of 'he was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage' (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 20), but I am nevertheless saying that interdisciplinarians can do more than just their major. We are inherently mixed methods rather than either quant or qual - we grasp SPSS as much as we grasp doing an ethnography.
2. We learn / study more flexibly.
This is related to the point above and naturally differs per person, but the fact that we have been forced to study different things means that we will have had to develop ways to deal with different topics, meaning that we are likely to be familiar with a whole range of study methods. This, in turn, will quite likely have prepared us to deal with having to learn new things later in life. We may have majored in one field, but our study skills make it easy for us to pick up knowledge in other fields too.
3. We can keep up an intelligent conversation.
This is not to say that monodisciplinarians can't - of course they can - but we are perhaps more comfortable than they are in doing so. We in Arts can still discuss time travel with a Science-friend, who is equally capable of keeping up a conversation on misogynist ideology in mainstream media (without saying profoundly stupid things).
4. We look at things in different ways.
A philosopher with modules in economics, a mathematician with modules in sociology - it works. Instead of continuing on the well-worn paths, we are able to apply concepts from other fields and translate our own ideas into other fields, thus finding ways of thinking outside the box, of approaching matters from different angles. This may not necessarily make us more creative, but it does make us less derivative.
Crossing fields is incredibly daunting, but being able to do so will keep not just Academia fresh and flexible, but industry too.
5. We don't have to give up interests.
While the first four make us good employees/entrepreneurs, this one is perhaps more to our own benefit. Not having to give up your other interests can change your life. I shall take myself as case in point: when I was 17, I really wanted to study Law. I was going to study Law, too, at Tilburg University. Had I gone on to study law, I would now be starting my internship at a law firm, probably having specialised in Family Law and intending to be a divorce lawyer, although I find Criminal Law much more interesting - Family Law is the safer option. But instead I got to combine Law with Economics and a bit of Politics, as well as Media Studies, Rhetoric and Stylistics, and I got to attend a book club and a literature and linguistics discussion group - so now I'm doing a PhD in English looking at UK news media (re)presentation of corporate fraud instead of learning how to tell people what's in it for them if they decide to get divorced. I dare say I am much happier than I would have been in the alternative scenario, if only because I get to do everything I find interesting, instead of just some little bit of it.
So, to summarise; we interdisciplinarians are flexible, hard-working, fast-learning, creative, intelligent and, importantly, happy people. There may be a fallacy here - did our interdisciplinary education make us so, or did we so start out so and chose an interdisciplinary education because of it? It is probably a bit of both, but fact remains that an interdisciplinary education is something to be supportive of.
Of course, interdisciplinarity does have its downsides. It is incredibly hard work - UCR used to advise that the average week in the semester entailed 56 hours of course-related work. I sometimes joke that my love for my alma mater is the result of Stockholm Syndrome. In order for it to be effective, class sizes should be limited - this could go both ways, as it would improve employment for academics but may be quite expensive if ill-organised. And it is difficult to explain what exactly you're doing - which is fine if you're just talking to your gran at a birthday, but is perhaps a little more difficult when you're looking for a job and have to say "yeah, uhm, look, I did major in Science but since I took modules on Physics and Engineering and IT and Mathematics it's basically equivalent to having studied Computer Science", or even worse, when you're a politician trying to make a point that Higher Education funding should not be further cut (which would get you my vote) and have to say "yes, look, I know it is not incredibly clear what our students are being trained for but I can assure you that they will be incredibly capable at whatever they end up doing" - saying you're training n lawyers, p surgeons and q historians (or, even more political, that you're training x STEM-field students, who are obviously a worthwhile investment because of the clear-cut monetary value of STEM-research - I have briefly covered this before, I promise to expand on it some other time) is much more likely to earn you the approval of other politicians. Perhaps monodisciplinarians with only one interest are happier being monodisciplinary.
And sometimes being interdisciplinary makes us a bit arrogant because it makes us think we know it all.
But it's worth it. Because ask yourself - would you rather have a GP who is really good at her job, or a GP who is really good at her job who also understands what she is doing when she votes during elections? A computer engineer who is really good at fixing your computer but also understands when the media are trying to manipulate him? An investment banker who is brilliant at handling your portfolio or one who is brilliant at handling your portfolio and also understands ethics?
Wednesday 2 October 2013
Living in Leeds and Starting the Research
When I came home from Uni yesterday, I was feeling particularly giddy; things are going quite well, and I am absolutely enjoying it.
You see, this week is the week that I officially started, and it's my fourth week of living in Leeds, so I'm more or less settling into a routine - and it's a routine that feels just right.
I really, really like Leeds. Leeds is technically a city and so I shouldn't like it - I don't like cities - but it doesn't feel big to me at all. It feels right. I can take a train from Headingley station (which, incidentally, I noticed was used in the pilot episode of DCI Banks, which I watched on ITV Player yesterday evening) and be in the city centre in 10 minutes. And there I find all the shops I could want or need - vintage and retro shops, fabric shops, shoe shops, bookshops, everything. I love the architecture - very redbrick Industrial Revolution urbanisation thing, there. I can cycle to the centre too and be there in 30 minutes.
Cycling to the Uni takes 12 minutes (15 when it's raining, as it is today), on a reasonably flat road (only one significant incline and even that one is not very steep) with fairly wide bicycle lanes. The Uni itself - or, well, the bits where I have to go, really - is wonderful. The School of English, on Cavendish Road - I'm typing this from its second floor computer cluster - has beautiful period features. There's a coffee shop nearby that does decent black coffee. It's only a bit further to the Parkinson Building (the one with the white tower that you see when you type 'University of Leeds' in Google Images), where the Brotherton Library is which has so.many.books and a wonderfully art deco interior. There's a bicycle repair shop on campus (yes, really) and there's lectures in a fascinatingly ugly but complex building (the Roger Stevens) which has M.C. Escher-esque staircases.
And I like Headingley. I like the shops that are only half a mile from my house and I like my house and my housemates (except when they wake me up at 5am). I like how the bus from Headingley to the Uni only costs a pound.
So now that I have drawn the background - the landscape, if you will - I shall tell you what a first week of a PhD at the School of English of the University of Leeds is like.
I met my fellow PhD students last Thursday during the Induction. The Induction more or less precisely serves this purpose; meet your - coursemates? colleagues? - and the Department/School. Naturally, there was a bunch of practical information too - Leeds PhDs are provisional for their first year and have to be 'upgraded' (well, technically it's 'transferred', but 'upgraded' sounds so wonderfully scifi) to PhD, to MPhil if the work is not up to PhD standard, or be asked to try again in three months or simply withdraw. So, technically, we are all Provisional PhD candidates until we are upgraded.
This morning ended with some drinks, and then an informal campus tour which was cut short by everyone deciding to have pints at the SU.
On Monday, the real work started. I audited a seminar and two lectures - yes, that is also possible at Leeds, if you can work it out schedule-wise and with your supervisor and the module coordinator - and attended another School reception. The seminar was my supervisor's undergraduate Stylistics seminar, which I basically audit because though I already took Stylistics in my undergraduate at UCR, new angles are always useful. I will not attend all, though. One of the lectures was for the Power of Language module, which is fascinatingly fascinating. I suppose I will draw most of my inspiration from this module.
Tuesday was a day for the Uni's 'Starting your Research Degree'-workshop, which, like most one-day workshops I have attended so far, involved post-its. I did, however, get some useful information out of it - mainly practical, though it did inspire me to go home and do a mindmap for my research. The mindmap ended up quite elaborate. I also audited a Forensic Linguistics seminar, which again I found fascinating.
Today, then, is finally a day for starting the work. And it's difficult. I don't know where to start. I'm supposed to have a formal meeting with my supervisor next week, but I want to have an idea of what I'm doing before I go there. I decided, eventually, to go philosophical; drag my more philosophically-inclined books to Uni, and work from there. My main aim is to find a politico-philosophical justification of my research interest, as my research is highly dependent on political context and I feel I need a solid grounding there.
As I often do, I reached for Lon Fuller's assertion that communication is the basic necessity for human survival and worked from there. I am currently working on justifying my position that establishing morality and (de)criminalising types of behaviour is dependent not just on legislation but also on public discourse (such as the media), which explains why it is important to understand the mechanisms of public discourse - and looking at media representation of corporate fraud as linked to the global economic crisis is one way of doing so. Of course, this position is far from controversial - of course people's opinions are changed based on what they hear and read and with and to whom they talk. But precisely because this 'of course' feels so much like common sense, I need to find out how and why this is so.
This may not end up in the final thesis. Heck, it is week 1, it will most likely not end up in my thesis. Will I end up including Cesare Beccaria's idea that judges get to judge because of a direct or indirect agreement of those subject to the law? Probably not. But it's good to look into it regardless.
I know I'm not studying anything that will tangibly help humanity. I am not curing HIV or Cancer, I am not building jetpacks or lightsabers or hoverboards, I am not figuring out how to travel to whatever planet is most like Gallifrey and I am not developing a truth serum. I am an idealist, and as such I want to understand the language of justice, and justice through language.
You see, this week is the week that I officially started, and it's my fourth week of living in Leeds, so I'm more or less settling into a routine - and it's a routine that feels just right.
I really, really like Leeds. Leeds is technically a city and so I shouldn't like it - I don't like cities - but it doesn't feel big to me at all. It feels right. I can take a train from Headingley station (which, incidentally, I noticed was used in the pilot episode of DCI Banks, which I watched on ITV Player yesterday evening) and be in the city centre in 10 minutes. And there I find all the shops I could want or need - vintage and retro shops, fabric shops, shoe shops, bookshops, everything. I love the architecture - very redbrick Industrial Revolution urbanisation thing, there. I can cycle to the centre too and be there in 30 minutes.
Cycling to the Uni takes 12 minutes (15 when it's raining, as it is today), on a reasonably flat road (only one significant incline and even that one is not very steep) with fairly wide bicycle lanes. The Uni itself - or, well, the bits where I have to go, really - is wonderful. The School of English, on Cavendish Road - I'm typing this from its second floor computer cluster - has beautiful period features. There's a coffee shop nearby that does decent black coffee. It's only a bit further to the Parkinson Building (the one with the white tower that you see when you type 'University of Leeds' in Google Images), where the Brotherton Library is which has so.many.books and a wonderfully art deco interior. There's a bicycle repair shop on campus (yes, really) and there's lectures in a fascinatingly ugly but complex building (the Roger Stevens) which has M.C. Escher-esque staircases.
And I like Headingley. I like the shops that are only half a mile from my house and I like my house and my housemates (except when they wake me up at 5am). I like how the bus from Headingley to the Uni only costs a pound.
So now that I have drawn the background - the landscape, if you will - I shall tell you what a first week of a PhD at the School of English of the University of Leeds is like.
I met my fellow PhD students last Thursday during the Induction. The Induction more or less precisely serves this purpose; meet your - coursemates? colleagues? - and the Department/School. Naturally, there was a bunch of practical information too - Leeds PhDs are provisional for their first year and have to be 'upgraded' (well, technically it's 'transferred', but 'upgraded' sounds so wonderfully scifi) to PhD, to MPhil if the work is not up to PhD standard, or be asked to try again in three months or simply withdraw. So, technically, we are all Provisional PhD candidates until we are upgraded.
This morning ended with some drinks, and then an informal campus tour which was cut short by everyone deciding to have pints at the SU.
On Monday, the real work started. I audited a seminar and two lectures - yes, that is also possible at Leeds, if you can work it out schedule-wise and with your supervisor and the module coordinator - and attended another School reception. The seminar was my supervisor's undergraduate Stylistics seminar, which I basically audit because though I already took Stylistics in my undergraduate at UCR, new angles are always useful. I will not attend all, though. One of the lectures was for the Power of Language module, which is fascinatingly fascinating. I suppose I will draw most of my inspiration from this module.
Tuesday was a day for the Uni's 'Starting your Research Degree'-workshop, which, like most one-day workshops I have attended so far, involved post-its. I did, however, get some useful information out of it - mainly practical, though it did inspire me to go home and do a mindmap for my research. The mindmap ended up quite elaborate. I also audited a Forensic Linguistics seminar, which again I found fascinating.
Today, then, is finally a day for starting the work. And it's difficult. I don't know where to start. I'm supposed to have a formal meeting with my supervisor next week, but I want to have an idea of what I'm doing before I go there. I decided, eventually, to go philosophical; drag my more philosophically-inclined books to Uni, and work from there. My main aim is to find a politico-philosophical justification of my research interest, as my research is highly dependent on political context and I feel I need a solid grounding there.
As I often do, I reached for Lon Fuller's assertion that communication is the basic necessity for human survival and worked from there. I am currently working on justifying my position that establishing morality and (de)criminalising types of behaviour is dependent not just on legislation but also on public discourse (such as the media), which explains why it is important to understand the mechanisms of public discourse - and looking at media representation of corporate fraud as linked to the global economic crisis is one way of doing so. Of course, this position is far from controversial - of course people's opinions are changed based on what they hear and read and with and to whom they talk. But precisely because this 'of course' feels so much like common sense, I need to find out how and why this is so.
This may not end up in the final thesis. Heck, it is week 1, it will most likely not end up in my thesis. Will I end up including Cesare Beccaria's idea that judges get to judge because of a direct or indirect agreement of those subject to the law? Probably not. But it's good to look into it regardless.
I know I'm not studying anything that will tangibly help humanity. I am not curing HIV or Cancer, I am not building jetpacks or lightsabers or hoverboards, I am not figuring out how to travel to whatever planet is most like Gallifrey and I am not developing a truth serum. I am an idealist, and as such I want to understand the language of justice, and justice through language.
Sunday 22 September 2013
Flammkuchen
Sorry that it's been so long. Anyway.
My 100th post is coming up, so it's time for an overhaul - that's why from now on you'll find my blog under a different url, committingcriminology.blogspot.com - this is also because it's no longer Leicester Uni Adventures as I'm no longer a student at Leicester. Expect further changes in the next couple of weeks.
I now live in Leeds, or in Headingley to be exact, in a house with five other students - third years, fascinating from an anthropological point of view - and have not been up to much lately other than attend Leeds Uni's Crime Fiction conference, and taking the train to Manchester to see Kristy, who's moved to Oxford this week (somehow Manchester ended up the easiest place for us to meet, long story). I like Headingley, it's a nice place, half a mile from shops (ten minute walk, which is great because I've had something like Fresher's Flu the last few days and I'm quite capable of starving myself if I don't feel like going to the shops - half a mile is just the right distance for me to not have an excuse to go out) and with a great public transport connection to Leeds city centre (and the Uni, of course). My housemates seem friendly enough, so that's cool too.
It's been a bit sunny too, yesterday and today, and Kristy gave me a lovely photo book of our trip this summer, so all in all I was reminded of Heidelberg - and with memories of Heidelberg come memories of Flammkuchen. It's not a difficult thing to make, so I decided to give it a shot today. The traditional version first, I'll make the veggie one next weekend (I do think I prefer the veggie version, to be honest - the traditional one is a little heavy. You'll see why). As coincidence has it, today the Dutch newspaper I regularly read online has a fairly big thing on the German elections. I suppose it's a bit of a German day today then.
You'll need the following equipment:
A measuring cup
Baking paper
Baking tray
Optional:
Mixing bowl
Mixer
Rolling pin
Ingredients:
Dough:
200 grams (7 ounces) plain four
110 millilitres water (tap water is fine)
1 teaspoon salt
1.5 teaspoon olive oil
Traditional toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche (Sainsbury's has some decent ones, also 50% less fat ones but I was being unhealthy with it anyway so went for the full-fat one)
100 grams diced bacon (I diced two rashers of thick-cut smoked back bacon, but it depends on your own tastes. I suppose smoked bacon is better than unsmoked in this case though, despite being bacon even smoked has enough difficulty to hold its own in this dish)
Half a diced onion (or however much you want - I like onion, but don't need it to overwhelm me. Also these are big, big onions I'm using. Just make sure it properly covers your dough)
Vegetarian toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche
Cherry tomatoes
Rocket
Pesto
Onion optional (I don't recommend it, this combination has more delicate flavours than the above sturdy one, but to each his or her own)
Pine nuts (they make everything better)
Preheat the oven to 230 - 250 Celsius (depending on how long you want it to take and whether you mind checking up every minute if you do it really hot)
So, you start by making a dough - in a mixing bowl with a mixer, or on the counter top with your hands if you like it messy. Hands and surface must be clean. You simply slowly (a bit at a time) add water to the flour, which makes for a dense and sticky ball of dough. Add the salt and oil, which makes it extremely sticky and a bit stringy too. Don't get dough on your shirt, and if you do, keep your shirt on until you're done because you don't want to make more than one dirty. If you're making a messy dough (like I did), you'd be better off wearing an apron.
Stretch the dough on the paper on the baking tray - with your fingers if you don't have a rolling pin (or perhaps with your fingers even if you do, because this is really sticky dough and will most likely stick to the pin rather than your paper). Get it nice and thin without any holes.
Spread the crème fraiche on the dough. You'll get a fairly thick layer, but that's how it's supposed to be. Sprinkle on the onions and bacon, or your other toppings (you can stick your bacon and onions in a frying pan first for a bit if you so prefer). It's supposed to look a bit like this:
Stick the tray in the oven and bake for about 15 minutes (do check often because it's fairly easy to cook this thing to a crisp, which is such a waste of a good dish). Once it's done it looks like this:
Eat. Recommended for drinks is a lager (personal recommendation is a nice, clear Heidelberger 1603 but if I did that here I'd probably end up the same as whenever I get my mum to bring me a bottle of a nice French wine I used to drink during holidays in France - it never tastes as good as it did there) or a dry white wine that holds its own. If going for non-alcoholic (I may be living in the UK now but even for me 2 in the afternoon of a regular Sunday is a bit early), keep it simple with a (sparkling) mineral water.
Enjoy it. I know I am :)
My 100th post is coming up, so it's time for an overhaul - that's why from now on you'll find my blog under a different url, committingcriminology.blogspot.com - this is also because it's no longer Leicester Uni Adventures as I'm no longer a student at Leicester. Expect further changes in the next couple of weeks.
I now live in Leeds, or in Headingley to be exact, in a house with five other students - third years, fascinating from an anthropological point of view - and have not been up to much lately other than attend Leeds Uni's Crime Fiction conference, and taking the train to Manchester to see Kristy, who's moved to Oxford this week (somehow Manchester ended up the easiest place for us to meet, long story). I like Headingley, it's a nice place, half a mile from shops (ten minute walk, which is great because I've had something like Fresher's Flu the last few days and I'm quite capable of starving myself if I don't feel like going to the shops - half a mile is just the right distance for me to not have an excuse to go out) and with a great public transport connection to Leeds city centre (and the Uni, of course). My housemates seem friendly enough, so that's cool too.
It's been a bit sunny too, yesterday and today, and Kristy gave me a lovely photo book of our trip this summer, so all in all I was reminded of Heidelberg - and with memories of Heidelberg come memories of Flammkuchen. It's not a difficult thing to make, so I decided to give it a shot today. The traditional version first, I'll make the veggie one next weekend (I do think I prefer the veggie version, to be honest - the traditional one is a little heavy. You'll see why). As coincidence has it, today the Dutch newspaper I regularly read online has a fairly big thing on the German elections. I suppose it's a bit of a German day today then.
You'll need the following equipment:
A measuring cup
Baking paper
Baking tray
Optional:
Mixing bowl
Mixer
Rolling pin
Ingredients:
Dough:
200 grams (7 ounces) plain four
110 millilitres water (tap water is fine)
1 teaspoon salt
1.5 teaspoon olive oil
Traditional toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche (Sainsbury's has some decent ones, also 50% less fat ones but I was being unhealthy with it anyway so went for the full-fat one)
100 grams diced bacon (I diced two rashers of thick-cut smoked back bacon, but it depends on your own tastes. I suppose smoked bacon is better than unsmoked in this case though, despite being bacon even smoked has enough difficulty to hold its own in this dish)
Half a diced onion (or however much you want - I like onion, but don't need it to overwhelm me. Also these are big, big onions I'm using. Just make sure it properly covers your dough)
Vegetarian toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche
Cherry tomatoes
Rocket
Pesto
Onion optional (I don't recommend it, this combination has more delicate flavours than the above sturdy one, but to each his or her own)
Pine nuts (they make everything better)
Preheat the oven to 230 - 250 Celsius (depending on how long you want it to take and whether you mind checking up every minute if you do it really hot)
So, you start by making a dough - in a mixing bowl with a mixer, or on the counter top with your hands if you like it messy. Hands and surface must be clean. You simply slowly (a bit at a time) add water to the flour, which makes for a dense and sticky ball of dough. Add the salt and oil, which makes it extremely sticky and a bit stringy too. Don't get dough on your shirt, and if you do, keep your shirt on until you're done because you don't want to make more than one dirty. If you're making a messy dough (like I did), you'd be better off wearing an apron.
Stretch the dough on the paper on the baking tray - with your fingers if you don't have a rolling pin (or perhaps with your fingers even if you do, because this is really sticky dough and will most likely stick to the pin rather than your paper). Get it nice and thin without any holes.
Spread the crème fraiche on the dough. You'll get a fairly thick layer, but that's how it's supposed to be. Sprinkle on the onions and bacon, or your other toppings (you can stick your bacon and onions in a frying pan first for a bit if you so prefer). It's supposed to look a bit like this:
Stick the tray in the oven and bake for about 15 minutes (do check often because it's fairly easy to cook this thing to a crisp, which is such a waste of a good dish). Once it's done it looks like this:
Eat. Recommended for drinks is a lager (personal recommendation is a nice, clear Heidelberger 1603 but if I did that here I'd probably end up the same as whenever I get my mum to bring me a bottle of a nice French wine I used to drink during holidays in France - it never tastes as good as it did there) or a dry white wine that holds its own. If going for non-alcoholic (I may be living in the UK now but even for me 2 in the afternoon of a regular Sunday is a bit early), keep it simple with a (sparkling) mineral water.
Enjoy it. I know I am :)
Monday 2 September 2013
What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots?
Today I read an article in De Volkskrant (well, its online version) that I thought so good that I felt it needed to be translated. It's an incredible example of how sexism is still pervasive and why sexism is just STUPID AS HELL.
The original article (http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/13166/Joyce-Brekelmans/article/detail/3502529/2013/09/02/Wat-is-het-toch-met-borsten-dat-mensen-er-zo-raar-van-gaan-doen.dhtml) is by Joyce Brekelmans and was published on www.volkskrant.nl on 2 September 2013.
'What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots?'
It isn't the case that Joyce Brekelmans would like to become a member of the SGP [Dutch Fundamentalist Christian Party] or the Woudrichem Fishing Club, but sometimes someone just needs to say out loud that it is pure bullshit to not be allowed to do something just because you're a girl.
It never occurred to me to want to become a member of the fishing club of Woudrichem, but it's incredibly lame that I'm not allowed to do so in any case because I'm a girl.
I don't think having a meat-rod is a necessity to sit on a fold-up stool on the waterside whilst looking into the distance, donning a stupid cap. You also don't need a third leg to play football, but when she was a child, my sister still wasn't allowed to play with the local football club. She could play with the boys a bit futher away - good for them, because she was awesome at it - but when she started puberty it was all over. Breasts as the ultimate off-side [translator's note: don't think "off-side" offers the same connotations as "buitenspel" (which also means being put outside the game in Dutch) but I decided for a literal translation here].
What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots? When last week, Bits of Freedom activist Ancilla Tillia tried to awaken the Netherlands to privacy issues, she was told that as an ex-Playmate she had no right to complain. As if the Google-ranking of her nipples has anything to do with the policies of Ivo Opstelten [Dutch minister of Justice and Safety], about which she was expressing her concerns. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention in Biology class, but as far as I am aware, taking off your jumper does not equal a frontal lobotomy.
My own naked everything isn't available for publicity, but if I would ever want to draw attention to these two important issues, I would hope to be able to continue doing my work after that. Whatever the Gordons [Dutch telly persona] of this world think of that.
In 2013 there are still people who are so incredibly scared of the magical effect a pair of women's breasts have that they keep trying to forbid girls participating in things. Even in the Netherlands, where we, in comparison to a majority of women, men and children all over the world have an incredibly privileged situation. Isn't it somewhat bizarre that I was forced to do gymnastics in PE whilst the boys got to play football? That I wasn't allowed a job in the Tour de France-crew because "women would mess up the social atmosphere"? That, as a student, I was not allowed to work as a barmaid because working the bar was guys' work and girls had to do the waitressing? That a guy friend of a girl friend now joins his father-in-law to the Freemasons because his daughter, who would love to accompany her father, isn't allowed in?
And then we still are in a privileged situation, as for instance the Afghani Malala would gladly change places. It would just have been nicer to have known beforehand that those pleasant boobs - which I once desperately wished for - could be such party poopers. It isn't that the membership of the Dutch Fundamentalist Christian Party, the Woudrichem fishing club or the group of people that Gordon thinks have a right to speak out against privacy invasion is very appealing, but sometimes someone just has to say out loud that it is pure bullshit that you are not allowed to do something just because you're a girl.
The original article (http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/13166/Joyce-Brekelmans/article/detail/3502529/2013/09/02/Wat-is-het-toch-met-borsten-dat-mensen-er-zo-raar-van-gaan-doen.dhtml) is by Joyce Brekelmans and was published on www.volkskrant.nl on 2 September 2013.
'What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots?'
It isn't the case that Joyce Brekelmans would like to become a member of the SGP [Dutch Fundamentalist Christian Party] or the Woudrichem Fishing Club, but sometimes someone just needs to say out loud that it is pure bullshit to not be allowed to do something just because you're a girl.
It never occurred to me to want to become a member of the fishing club of Woudrichem, but it's incredibly lame that I'm not allowed to do so in any case because I'm a girl.
I don't think having a meat-rod is a necessity to sit on a fold-up stool on the waterside whilst looking into the distance, donning a stupid cap. You also don't need a third leg to play football, but when she was a child, my sister still wasn't allowed to play with the local football club. She could play with the boys a bit futher away - good for them, because she was awesome at it - but when she started puberty it was all over. Breasts as the ultimate off-side [translator's note: don't think "off-side" offers the same connotations as "buitenspel" (which also means being put outside the game in Dutch) but I decided for a literal translation here].
What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots? When last week, Bits of Freedom activist Ancilla Tillia tried to awaken the Netherlands to privacy issues, she was told that as an ex-Playmate she had no right to complain. As if the Google-ranking of her nipples has anything to do with the policies of Ivo Opstelten [Dutch minister of Justice and Safety], about which she was expressing her concerns. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention in Biology class, but as far as I am aware, taking off your jumper does not equal a frontal lobotomy.
My own naked everything isn't available for publicity, but if I would ever want to draw attention to these two important issues, I would hope to be able to continue doing my work after that. Whatever the Gordons [Dutch telly persona] of this world think of that.
In 2013 there are still people who are so incredibly scared of the magical effect a pair of women's breasts have that they keep trying to forbid girls participating in things. Even in the Netherlands, where we, in comparison to a majority of women, men and children all over the world have an incredibly privileged situation. Isn't it somewhat bizarre that I was forced to do gymnastics in PE whilst the boys got to play football? That I wasn't allowed a job in the Tour de France-crew because "women would mess up the social atmosphere"? That, as a student, I was not allowed to work as a barmaid because working the bar was guys' work and girls had to do the waitressing? That a guy friend of a girl friend now joins his father-in-law to the Freemasons because his daughter, who would love to accompany her father, isn't allowed in?
And then we still are in a privileged situation, as for instance the Afghani Malala would gladly change places. It would just have been nicer to have known beforehand that those pleasant boobs - which I once desperately wished for - could be such party poopers. It isn't that the membership of the Dutch Fundamentalist Christian Party, the Woudrichem fishing club or the group of people that Gordon thinks have a right to speak out against privacy invasion is very appealing, but sometimes someone just has to say out loud that it is pure bullshit that you are not allowed to do something just because you're a girl.
Sunday 1 September 2013
Making a Mochary of Tax Law*: My Dissertation
I handed in two hard copies of my dissertation last Friday. I still have to hand in a digital copy on Blackboard, but I haven't the courage. I keep wondering - what if it's not good enough? What if my conclusion is too weak, what if my argumentation is not solid, what if my literature review is flawed, what if my methodology is unsound? The only thing that I do not worry about is whether my sample size is large enough - 488 articles is definitely large.
This is the capstone of my Master's degree - an MSc, that is, no matter how often it is called an MA - and I just want to finish it properly. I am hoping for a Merit, as that would put me at a Merit degree, but at this point I would even be happy with a Pass, just so I can pass my degree. It is dreadfully scary to hand in a body of work consisting of 20,000 words which will determine whether you will receive a Postgraduate Diploma or that actual Master of Science-degree in January. But I suppose I must.
I very much enjoyed doing the research. Stuck behind a desk for hours on end, reading about corporate crime and tax law and corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis? Yes please! Messing about with SPSS, trying to get results that make sense and then actually getting those? Hell yes! Reading articles, thinking "this looks quite objective, doesn't it?" and then, when looking beyond the surface, noticing that "oh hey, this isn't objective at all!". Noticing that news writing contributes to a vicious cycle of social stratification, finding out news is all economics and politics and dominant ideology. Realising that the language of news writing works to negotiate the social contract. Fascinating.
But that's all very abstract, and hard to put into words - therefore hard to properly maintain when you're trying to cut down from 28,000 to 20,000 - and then the fear that you've lost depth, strength, solidity, soundness, and gained flaws. I hope to put that right in my PhD, win back my depth and solidity, but 100,000 words is still not very many when you're dealing with something so interesting as this, which is both so abstract and practical. But let us focus on the practical findings of my dissertation for now.
My research question was how UK newspapers portrayed the tax avoidance of Facebook, Starbucks, eBay, and such companies - multinational companies - and the backlash. This is extremely recent stuff, as the story broke in October 2012 and has still not finished, and it struck me as odd for it was not actually a proper news story. It was big, true, but the general readerships could hardly be expected to *care* about multinational companies working within the bounds of international commercial regulations. A corporation's main goal is profit, and it will do everything it is allowed to do to get that profit. So there is no novelty in this, and no novelty should equal no news. Besides, even when corporations do break the rules of international commerce, the backlash is hardly as large as it was now. Cartels? An article in the finance sections of broadsheets, perhaps a follow-up, that's it. Child labour? Myeah, that'll generate some outrage, some people will turn to companies that aren't known for using child labour, and some politicians might say "shouldn't do that!", nothing big though. Environmental crimes? Difficult - Shell's crimes in Nigeria hardly make the papers at all, but the BP oil spill generated quite some fuss. But, you know, that was dead fish and the Gulf of Mexico and stuff. Proximate drama. But taxes?
Taxes?
(Sorry, been wanting to use this meme for a while now)
No one gives a shit about taxes. If anything is written about taxes, it's about how you can save on your tax payments by minding this this and that category. And as no one knows how corporation tax works, other than that corporations have to pay a certain percentage of their profits, few people usually care. After all, some of these companies haven't been paying taxes for literally years and only now it generated outrage.
So that's all interesting, but that's all context. My question was, how did they portray it? Did the newspapers make a big fuss? Did they side with the outrage or with the papers? Judging from the fact that the OECD was considering changing regulations and that people kept being outraged, I hypothesised that yeah, these newspapers will be stirring up a fuss. But their reporting initially seemed quite balanced. Objective. As newspapers are supposed to report things.
So I did a corpus analysis of all articles and took 7 articles for a critical discourse analysis. I'll not go into the specifics here, email me for a PDF copy if you want one, but what I found was that yeah, these newspapers were kicking up as much as a fuss as the politicians calling Google 'evil' and those protesters calling for boycotts of Starbucks. In fact, they seemed to be the instigator of some of the outrage, by for instance only presenting those opinions which said that these "multinational corporations should pay their fair share of UK corporation tax" (this is a composite sentence of the main lexical items the corpus program showed me. Absolutely fascinating).
The next question, of course, is why. But I just spent 20,000 words detailing how UK newspapers to an extent criminalise the otherwise legal behaviour of not paying your taxes where you are not obliged to pay your taxes. The moral question of whether a company should be obliged to pay taxes in territories where they make billions of pounds of revenue, but where they do not technically, according to the OECD regulations of the taxation of multinational corporations, have to pay taxes, has been answered, by these papers, with a "Yes". But why? Why now?
This will have to do with the economic crisis, I hypothesise. So the next research question will be how the portrayal of corporate fraud (or crime, but that's perhaps too broad for 100,000 words) in the UK has developed over the course of the global economic crisis. But that's for my PhD. And something I can't wait to get started on.
*This is taken from a Starbucks-related pun in The Mirror. I loved it, and it has become the title of my dissertation. Tabloid puns are the best.
This is the capstone of my Master's degree - an MSc, that is, no matter how often it is called an MA - and I just want to finish it properly. I am hoping for a Merit, as that would put me at a Merit degree, but at this point I would even be happy with a Pass, just so I can pass my degree. It is dreadfully scary to hand in a body of work consisting of 20,000 words which will determine whether you will receive a Postgraduate Diploma or that actual Master of Science-degree in January. But I suppose I must.
I very much enjoyed doing the research. Stuck behind a desk for hours on end, reading about corporate crime and tax law and corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis? Yes please! Messing about with SPSS, trying to get results that make sense and then actually getting those? Hell yes! Reading articles, thinking "this looks quite objective, doesn't it?" and then, when looking beyond the surface, noticing that "oh hey, this isn't objective at all!". Noticing that news writing contributes to a vicious cycle of social stratification, finding out news is all economics and politics and dominant ideology. Realising that the language of news writing works to negotiate the social contract. Fascinating.
But that's all very abstract, and hard to put into words - therefore hard to properly maintain when you're trying to cut down from 28,000 to 20,000 - and then the fear that you've lost depth, strength, solidity, soundness, and gained flaws. I hope to put that right in my PhD, win back my depth and solidity, but 100,000 words is still not very many when you're dealing with something so interesting as this, which is both so abstract and practical. But let us focus on the practical findings of my dissertation for now.
My research question was how UK newspapers portrayed the tax avoidance of Facebook, Starbucks, eBay, and such companies - multinational companies - and the backlash. This is extremely recent stuff, as the story broke in October 2012 and has still not finished, and it struck me as odd for it was not actually a proper news story. It was big, true, but the general readerships could hardly be expected to *care* about multinational companies working within the bounds of international commercial regulations. A corporation's main goal is profit, and it will do everything it is allowed to do to get that profit. So there is no novelty in this, and no novelty should equal no news. Besides, even when corporations do break the rules of international commerce, the backlash is hardly as large as it was now. Cartels? An article in the finance sections of broadsheets, perhaps a follow-up, that's it. Child labour? Myeah, that'll generate some outrage, some people will turn to companies that aren't known for using child labour, and some politicians might say "shouldn't do that!", nothing big though. Environmental crimes? Difficult - Shell's crimes in Nigeria hardly make the papers at all, but the BP oil spill generated quite some fuss. But, you know, that was dead fish and the Gulf of Mexico and stuff. Proximate drama. But taxes?
Taxes?
No one gives a shit about taxes. If anything is written about taxes, it's about how you can save on your tax payments by minding this this and that category. And as no one knows how corporation tax works, other than that corporations have to pay a certain percentage of their profits, few people usually care. After all, some of these companies haven't been paying taxes for literally years and only now it generated outrage.
So that's all interesting, but that's all context. My question was, how did they portray it? Did the newspapers make a big fuss? Did they side with the outrage or with the papers? Judging from the fact that the OECD was considering changing regulations and that people kept being outraged, I hypothesised that yeah, these newspapers will be stirring up a fuss. But their reporting initially seemed quite balanced. Objective. As newspapers are supposed to report things.
So I did a corpus analysis of all articles and took 7 articles for a critical discourse analysis. I'll not go into the specifics here, email me for a PDF copy if you want one, but what I found was that yeah, these newspapers were kicking up as much as a fuss as the politicians calling Google 'evil' and those protesters calling for boycotts of Starbucks. In fact, they seemed to be the instigator of some of the outrage, by for instance only presenting those opinions which said that these "multinational corporations should pay their fair share of UK corporation tax" (this is a composite sentence of the main lexical items the corpus program showed me. Absolutely fascinating).
The next question, of course, is why. But I just spent 20,000 words detailing how UK newspapers to an extent criminalise the otherwise legal behaviour of not paying your taxes where you are not obliged to pay your taxes. The moral question of whether a company should be obliged to pay taxes in territories where they make billions of pounds of revenue, but where they do not technically, according to the OECD regulations of the taxation of multinational corporations, have to pay taxes, has been answered, by these papers, with a "Yes". But why? Why now?
This will have to do with the economic crisis, I hypothesise. So the next research question will be how the portrayal of corporate fraud (or crime, but that's perhaps too broad for 100,000 words) in the UK has developed over the course of the global economic crisis. But that's for my PhD. And something I can't wait to get started on.
*This is taken from a Starbucks-related pun in The Mirror. I loved it, and it has become the title of my dissertation. Tabloid puns are the best.
Wednesday 28 August 2013
Room-hunting in Leeds
Today was a bit of a scary day. I went up to Leeds to "survey" the city and find a place to live for next year.
I was plagued by all the possible what-ifs: What if I can't find a nice place? What if I don't like the city? What if I don't like the uni? What if - what if - what if.
Nevertheless, I insisted on beginning positively, to let confirmation bias do its work so I would like everything.
And I did.
So I got on the train at Leicester and found someone had taken my reserved seat - one of my pet peeves. Great start. But the Derby to Leeds train was good, so that helped. The train arrived at Leeds station and I disembarked.
It may sound silly, but I find the impressions stations make on me very important. If I don't like the city's station, I will view the city in a somewhat negative light. It's the reason I like Rotterdam so much - I mean, Rotterdam's a nice city to begin with, but I'm in awe of its new central station. But the station was good - big, multi-track (not Leicester's rather sad 4 tracks), plenty of shops. It's got a pub. So, good one there.
I had given myself 2 hours to wander about a bit, discover the centre, before my Unipol appointment, so I decided to explore Starbucks. Pretty building, good iced caramel macchiato.
The centre has plenty of chain shops, the big ones, and also a few small shops, nice arcades and parades. And relatively few closed sites, so I take it the local economy is - well, in a fairly healthy shape. More plus points. Negative point was that I only discovered a WH Smith's, I do prefer Waterstones.
With half an hour left to kill, I looked at my map to see whether there were other places I could walk to that may be worth exploring. So I popped into the Art Gallery. And this more or less sealed the deal on the city for me.
I'm not a fan of modern art, not at all, so the first few rooms, with fairly non-sensical modern art sculptures were a bit disappointing. But there's one room there with proper art. And it happens to hold two paintings I've always liked.
Tissot's The Bridesmaid
and Leighton's The Return of Persephone, which was either in my Latin or Ancient Cultures text book in secondary school and is always in my mind whenever someone mentions Persephone or pomegranate seeds.
.jpg/435px-FredericLeighton-TheReturnofPerspephone(1891).jpg)
So, I signed the contract (after a thorough read, of course!) and paid my deposit, and now I can pick up the key next week and move in. Pretty scary but also very very exciting.
I spent the remaining 2 hours before my trains would leave wandering about the uni campus, just to see whether I could like it. And by God, did I like it!
I was plagued by all the possible what-ifs: What if I can't find a nice place? What if I don't like the city? What if I don't like the uni? What if - what if - what if.
Nevertheless, I insisted on beginning positively, to let confirmation bias do its work so I would like everything.
And I did.
So I got on the train at Leicester and found someone had taken my reserved seat - one of my pet peeves. Great start. But the Derby to Leeds train was good, so that helped. The train arrived at Leeds station and I disembarked.
It may sound silly, but I find the impressions stations make on me very important. If I don't like the city's station, I will view the city in a somewhat negative light. It's the reason I like Rotterdam so much - I mean, Rotterdam's a nice city to begin with, but I'm in awe of its new central station. But the station was good - big, multi-track (not Leicester's rather sad 4 tracks), plenty of shops. It's got a pub. So, good one there.
I had given myself 2 hours to wander about a bit, discover the centre, before my Unipol appointment, so I decided to explore Starbucks. Pretty building, good iced caramel macchiato.
The centre has plenty of chain shops, the big ones, and also a few small shops, nice arcades and parades. And relatively few closed sites, so I take it the local economy is - well, in a fairly healthy shape. More plus points. Negative point was that I only discovered a WH Smith's, I do prefer Waterstones.
With half an hour left to kill, I looked at my map to see whether there were other places I could walk to that may be worth exploring. So I popped into the Art Gallery. And this more or less sealed the deal on the city for me.
I'm not a fan of modern art, not at all, so the first few rooms, with fairly non-sensical modern art sculptures were a bit disappointing. But there's one room there with proper art. And it happens to hold two paintings I've always liked.
Tissot's The Bridesmaid
and Leighton's The Return of Persephone, which was either in my Latin or Ancient Cultures text book in secondary school and is always in my mind whenever someone mentions Persephone or pomegranate seeds.
So I was already sold on the city before having seen any houses. I attended my 3pm meeting, and Charlotte from Unipol took me to see four properties. The first one was one I'd already seen on the website and was very eager to see - indeed, this was my first choice. It was really good too, nice location, nice greenery, loads of space, good rent - but slightly old kitchen and bathrooms. The second had only one room left, and was in another nice location, less greenery but closer to shops and the uni (marginally), good rent, and really new kitchen and bathroom (2012!), but slightly less well-placed bedroom. Lots of storage space, though. And loads of sockets.
Third and fourth were both really close to the uni and shops, good rent still, but the space and fittings weren't as great as on the other two. Also, they didn't offer as great a space to store my bicycle - it may be old and rickety, but she's too good still to just leave in the street.
So I was taken back to the Unipol office and left to myself to make a decision. And it was a tough one. Eventually, however, I settled on the second one. It's got a lounge anyway, so if I get fed up with my room I can come out and be social; but kitchen and bathrooms are really important to me; I'm always moaning about the state of either. I'm also always moaning about distance to shops (and am very gleeful when I'm close), so although the bedroom didn't fulfil all my desires, the rest of the house makes up for this in a major way. Plus, it's got a BBQ spot.
So, I signed the contract (after a thorough read, of course!) and paid my deposit, and now I can pick up the key next week and move in. Pretty scary but also very very exciting.
I spent the remaining 2 hours before my trains would leave wandering about the uni campus, just to see whether I could like it. And by God, did I like it!
This is the building you see most often when Google Image-searching 'University of Leeds'. It's very impressive. Like the bell tower. Also, there's a Blackwell's nearby. I'm pleased.
Just a general impression. Properly redbrick ;) So that's cool. And I like the style of it, it's pretty. And greenery! I love greenery.
So, in general I quite liked the campus. There are also some modern buildings that don't really do it for me, but I'll just try and stick to the pretty side ;) I'm very much looking forward to starting.
On my way back to the station I passed City Hall:
Also very impressive, and quite indicative of the sort of fancy architecture that marks Leeds city centre. And guess what! I found a Waterstones.
So all in all, I'm happy. I like the city, I like the uni, and I've come back home clutching a contract for a proper room in Leeds. Can't wait to move! :D
Monday 12 August 2013
Monopolies
Note: I had planned to post this yesterday, but unfortunately couldn't due to WiFi issues. So I'm posting it now.
The good thing about travelling is that it leaves you plenty of time to think – if you're at least travelling by slow methods such as a train or a coach, as we are. This is also what puts me in favour of what I suppose I should call a new Grand Tour, although that's a topic for another time.
I spent four hours on a coach yesterday travelling from Prague to Vienna on a bit of a bumpy road, winding between hills and mountains and lakes trillions of trees. Certainly this would inspire anyone to good thoughts – Kristy and I had a very clever conversation over dinner yesterday about the global economic crisis.
I have before cited Lon Fuller's notion that the most basic of all human duties is the maintaining of channels of communication – certainly I am still very much taken with his ideas of the Morality of Duty vs the Morality of Aspiration. Today, I wish to elaborate a bit more on why I am so taken with the idea that the basic duty is communication.
I have also been reading Crime and Economics, which is a wildly fascinating book that explains that crime is indeed just behaviour that turns out to be criminal, and that there is long-term utility and short-term utility, and that what makes people decide which one to do is will-power. As with most economic terms, 'will-power' is slightly undefined – as is 'utility' – but it makes for a wonderfully useful concept to think with.
What I find interesting is the idea that government has the 'monopoly to violence', or is the only party that can legally, justifiably actively use violence – if certain conditions are met. We citizens are only justified in using violence in self-defence. So I've been running with that idea, too, taking it to an abstract level – if certain parties have certain rights and privileges that other parties do not, those parties have, to some extent, a monopoly*.
As, if I remember correctly, game theory, or at least industrial economics dictates, monopolies are inherently unstable – as the rights and benefits (profits) are usually appealing to other parties as well, these other parties will try to get a slice of that pie too, which leads to all sorts of strategies on the part of the monopolists until the monopoly collapses – in political terms, revolution. Unless, of course, the other parties consent to the monopoly, in which case they will not challenge it – I suppose this must then be part of the social contract.
This is where I believe communication comes in. And why arts and humanities are important. Governments have, as we know, been trying to cut funding to arts and humanities research, claiming it is not important as it does not lead to the betterment of humanity, like science does – of course, biomedical science cures cancer and engineering invents cleverer hoovers and chemistry creates better shampoos and astrophysics – well, astrophysics is just really, really cool.
And if people's only argument in favour of arts and humanities is that is makes life prettier, that's not very convincing.
Of course, life would be horribly bland if we all lived in utilitarian grey concrete flats and ate only pills that held all vitamins and minerals and drank only water and spent the ideal part of the day working and the rest resting in perfectly engineered beds and all lived healthily to be 165. Quite dystopian. So I suppose the aesthetic value of arts and humanities is not to be underestimated.
But there is also value in the communicative side of humanities. What use would perfectly engineered computers and mobile phones have if we did not use them to communicate?
And then what is the use of communication?
Negotiation. All of it.
Negotiating what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is dreadfully ugly – which is, in the first case, of course what law is for, but also fairy tales and Hollywood blockbusters and literature. See a Renaissance painting with sinners being punished in Hell? Negotiating what was wrong in that era – what was considered sinful. Dante writes that he came across classic authors in Hell's ante-chamber – they weren't evil people, according to him, but they were still wrong in not being Christians. J.K. Rowling makes Voldemort the villain – he is hateful, angry, delights in killing people and thinks all non-magic and non-pureblood-magic people are lesser people.
By extension, these are also our channels to communicate who has a right to what monopoly – or who has a right to what, anyway. How Twitter led to the Arab Spring is of course a very clear and explicit example of this negotiation, but other less explicit works negotiate the rights of powerful groups – such as governments – just as well.
Think of my favourite novel, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. People were outraged over it – of course they were, Dorian spends the majority of the time being a hedonist and delighting in all sorts of “immoral” pleasures, not in line with, to steal a line from Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady - “middle class morality” (which is precisely why it's my favourite). But yet Dorian still dies at the end.
And arts and humanities research is important in uncovering these negotiations. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Which is why I have taken such a liking to Linguistics and Stylistics, I suppose, because it helps uncover what texts say.
But I'm afraid that this could just as well be a reason to cut funding for humanities, as funding is usually done by the wealthier and thus more powerful parties, who'd I'm sure gladly stay in charge, as it is a reason to increase funding, as in the end I do believe it would lead to fairer distributions of just about every commodity, as it would destabilize most monopolies. Short-term utility vs long-term utility.
In the end, I think this is the more philosophical reason why I like my dissertation topic. Why I like corporate, white-collar and organised crime. These are Sutherland's Crimes of the Powerful, and by researching how these are constructed textually, such monopolies can be discovered and perhaps eventually be re-negotiated. But that's the idealist in me, my long-term utility – my other reason is that it's just really very exciting, and that's very short-term indeed.
In any case, I suppose I should read more philosophy, I'm sure there's plenty of ideas there already that say what I've just said, or that can introduce to me a new angle to think about. For now, however, I'll stick to researching whether Starbucks not paying UK corporation tax is bad or really really very evil.
*In strict economic terms, a monopoly is when one company or one party has an almost absolute control over the supply of a certain good or service. My use of the word 'monopoly' is slightly wider, to indicate a majority control over a certain commodity or privilege, not just by one party but by a certain group – a cartel, if you will.
***
I spent four hours on a coach yesterday travelling from Prague to Vienna on a bit of a bumpy road, winding between hills and mountains and lakes trillions of trees. Certainly this would inspire anyone to good thoughts – Kristy and I had a very clever conversation over dinner yesterday about the global economic crisis.
I have before cited Lon Fuller's notion that the most basic of all human duties is the maintaining of channels of communication – certainly I am still very much taken with his ideas of the Morality of Duty vs the Morality of Aspiration. Today, I wish to elaborate a bit more on why I am so taken with the idea that the basic duty is communication.
I have also been reading Crime and Economics, which is a wildly fascinating book that explains that crime is indeed just behaviour that turns out to be criminal, and that there is long-term utility and short-term utility, and that what makes people decide which one to do is will-power. As with most economic terms, 'will-power' is slightly undefined – as is 'utility' – but it makes for a wonderfully useful concept to think with.
What I find interesting is the idea that government has the 'monopoly to violence', or is the only party that can legally, justifiably actively use violence – if certain conditions are met. We citizens are only justified in using violence in self-defence. So I've been running with that idea, too, taking it to an abstract level – if certain parties have certain rights and privileges that other parties do not, those parties have, to some extent, a monopoly*.
As, if I remember correctly, game theory, or at least industrial economics dictates, monopolies are inherently unstable – as the rights and benefits (profits) are usually appealing to other parties as well, these other parties will try to get a slice of that pie too, which leads to all sorts of strategies on the part of the monopolists until the monopoly collapses – in political terms, revolution. Unless, of course, the other parties consent to the monopoly, in which case they will not challenge it – I suppose this must then be part of the social contract.
This is where I believe communication comes in. And why arts and humanities are important. Governments have, as we know, been trying to cut funding to arts and humanities research, claiming it is not important as it does not lead to the betterment of humanity, like science does – of course, biomedical science cures cancer and engineering invents cleverer hoovers and chemistry creates better shampoos and astrophysics – well, astrophysics is just really, really cool.
And if people's only argument in favour of arts and humanities is that is makes life prettier, that's not very convincing.
Of course, life would be horribly bland if we all lived in utilitarian grey concrete flats and ate only pills that held all vitamins and minerals and drank only water and spent the ideal part of the day working and the rest resting in perfectly engineered beds and all lived healthily to be 165. Quite dystopian. So I suppose the aesthetic value of arts and humanities is not to be underestimated.
But there is also value in the communicative side of humanities. What use would perfectly engineered computers and mobile phones have if we did not use them to communicate?
And then what is the use of communication?
Negotiation. All of it.
Negotiating what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is dreadfully ugly – which is, in the first case, of course what law is for, but also fairy tales and Hollywood blockbusters and literature. See a Renaissance painting with sinners being punished in Hell? Negotiating what was wrong in that era – what was considered sinful. Dante writes that he came across classic authors in Hell's ante-chamber – they weren't evil people, according to him, but they were still wrong in not being Christians. J.K. Rowling makes Voldemort the villain – he is hateful, angry, delights in killing people and thinks all non-magic and non-pureblood-magic people are lesser people.
By extension, these are also our channels to communicate who has a right to what monopoly – or who has a right to what, anyway. How Twitter led to the Arab Spring is of course a very clear and explicit example of this negotiation, but other less explicit works negotiate the rights of powerful groups – such as governments – just as well.
Think of my favourite novel, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. People were outraged over it – of course they were, Dorian spends the majority of the time being a hedonist and delighting in all sorts of “immoral” pleasures, not in line with, to steal a line from Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady - “middle class morality” (which is precisely why it's my favourite). But yet Dorian still dies at the end.
And arts and humanities research is important in uncovering these negotiations. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Which is why I have taken such a liking to Linguistics and Stylistics, I suppose, because it helps uncover what texts say.
But I'm afraid that this could just as well be a reason to cut funding for humanities, as funding is usually done by the wealthier and thus more powerful parties, who'd I'm sure gladly stay in charge, as it is a reason to increase funding, as in the end I do believe it would lead to fairer distributions of just about every commodity, as it would destabilize most monopolies. Short-term utility vs long-term utility.
In the end, I think this is the more philosophical reason why I like my dissertation topic. Why I like corporate, white-collar and organised crime. These are Sutherland's Crimes of the Powerful, and by researching how these are constructed textually, such monopolies can be discovered and perhaps eventually be re-negotiated. But that's the idealist in me, my long-term utility – my other reason is that it's just really very exciting, and that's very short-term indeed.
In any case, I suppose I should read more philosophy, I'm sure there's plenty of ideas there already that say what I've just said, or that can introduce to me a new angle to think about. For now, however, I'll stick to researching whether Starbucks not paying UK corporation tax is bad or really really very evil.
*In strict economic terms, a monopoly is when one company or one party has an almost absolute control over the supply of a certain good or service. My use of the word 'monopoly' is slightly wider, to indicate a majority control over a certain commodity or privilege, not just by one party but by a certain group – a cartel, if you will.
Tuesday 6 August 2013
Heiligenberg (or: In Praise of My Walking Shoes)
I got up early this morning to climb the Heiligenberg - that is, I dragged myself out of bed at 7:45, put on my walking shoes and went up and down to the baker around the corner to pick up two croissants.
I dropped one off at the hotel and ate the other whilst crossing the Market to get to the Alte Brücke. You see, many people wrongly assume I don't like sports - but I do, I like walking, swimming, horseback riding, dancing... but those are, unfortunately, all sports for which equipment and/or other participants and/or environment are expensive or hard to find. But I really enjoy walking, have always done so, and I couldn't bear to leave Heidelberg without a shield for my old hiking stick (I've grown out of it in the meanwhile as I last used it when - 12, I think, but it's a nice thing anyway), which meant walking. I've done my research, and the Heiligenberg was supposed to be the one with the abandoned monasteries on top. I like monasteries too, so that's a nice two-birds-one-stone situation.
So I set off to the Alte Brücke at 8:05 and briskly tried pacing up the Schlangenweg. I ran out of breath halfway through. But then finding your ideal speed is always tricky, so I slowed down and admired the lovely views over Heidelberg from the Philosophenweg. Halfway through the Philosophenweg, just beyond (from Schlangenweg) Liselotteplatz, there's a small path that leads to stairs which lead to another path up the mountain. And so I followed that, always with the sun above me so I kept to the Heidelberger side of the mountain. I zigzagged up the hill, making the 400-or so metre ascent into a walk of a few kilometres.
Halfway up there's a tower, the Bismarckturm, from which there's a quite nice view over the city. That's also the point where my calves started aching slightly, though my feet felt surprisingly well. Of course, the trick is to keep going - over my whole walk, I suppose I took only a handful of minute-breaks and two 10-minute breaks. I didn't particularly like the Bismarckturm, as it seemed to have been used by people for barbeques and drinking. It was a bit of a mess, so I walked on.
Finally on top of the hill (09:22), I had the loveliest view of the Heidelberger Altstadt - I arrived at the remains of the Sankt Stephans Kloster, or the Saint Stephen's Monastery. It wasn't very big, but it had a nice little tower. Quite sweet, actually.
This lady and her daughter started blabbing at me in German, but as I don't get much further than - "Durfen wir bitte bezahlen?" I couldn't make much sense of them, nor could they of me as neither spoke English or Dutch. Pity really.
I then passed a parking space to get to the Nazi amphitheatre. I'd been told it was up there, but I wasn't prepared for how big it actually was. I felt slightly - angry, actually, that those stupid people defiled this pretty mountain by building this stupidly big thing. It was suppose to hold about 8000 people, and it had this very 1930s design to it. Fascinating but quite unsettling.
What I did like, however, was the Sankt Michaels Kloster, or the Saint Michael's Monastery. It's an old location, as it's built on the site of an old Roman temple - of which the outline is still visible in the middle of the monastery chapel - and this castle, of which the outlines are no longer visible but which did contribute to the rather odd shape of the monastery. It had two towers and it was really big - and I was there all on my own.
Imagine this - it's 10 in the morning, around you there's only tall trees, bees and spiders and ants and grasshoppers and birds, the sun's already beating down and you're all by yourself in the vast ruins of this late Dark Ages monastery.
When I entered the Western Crypt, for a moment there I was convinced it was haunted, even if I don't believe in such things.
But I got to investigate that whole monastery all by myself for about half an hour, always narrowly avoiding spider webs and going deaf from the buzzing and chirping of the bees and the crickets, before other people showed up. I then sat down for another rest before beginning my descent and picked up some bits of orange rock that I first took for pottery - but then I figured, they're orange, they're curved, they're consistent, and I was sitting next to the ruined walls of a Dark Ages monastery. They were probably roof tile shards. But that was cool anyway.
I then began my descent, and as I wanted to go a different way from the way I came up, and as I didn't have a map nor a compass, I figured I'd try to walk following the sun.
Now, I was in the Scouts for a few years as a child and I know enough of the sun's trajectory to make an educated guess as to what time it is, but I never properly walked following the sun before, and in any case not during Summer Time.
But I managed to more or less safely get down. Descending is quite frustrating, especially when you've got winding paths and you're anxious to get down and take off your shoes and you see the next bit of path about ten metres below. I did once make the mistake of thinking that the bit of hill in between was level enough for me to get down safely - I then promptly slid for about four metres, me meanwhile making up my obituary and hoping people would say nice things about me - before I came to a standstill and then managed to safely get the remaining bit down to the next path. So, advice - paths are there for a reason and Little Red Riding Hood was advised not to leave the path for a good reason too.
But I got safely back down by 11:24 (I checked) and only a small bit off - I'd wanted to emerge by the Alte Brücke again, but instead emerged by the dam a few dozen of metres upstream. For the last bit I'd followed a small stream down, figuring that all water needs to go down anyway and as I was on the Neckarside, it'd probably flow to the Neckar (it did). So, that was fun.
And here's where the praise of my walking shoes comes in - I'd been walking for about 3.5 hours. Uphill and downhill. I'd been wandering about monasteries. And then I got a text from Kristy to meet her for lunch. I thought of my feet. They didn't hurt. Unheard of. But, they didn't. So we met for lunch and though I didn't feel like moving much, my feet were fine. We actually managed to still visit the Karzer (student prison) and the Uni Museum and a bookshop before going back to our hotel.
It wasn't until I took off those shoes that I felt my feet ache. And they're fine again now. So, those shoes - best money I've ever spent.
And the Heiligenberg - I climbed it. And I bought myself a shield for my walking stick as a reward. Surely it must've done a lot of good in doing away with the PALA social calories?
I dropped one off at the hotel and ate the other whilst crossing the Market to get to the Alte Brücke. You see, many people wrongly assume I don't like sports - but I do, I like walking, swimming, horseback riding, dancing... but those are, unfortunately, all sports for which equipment and/or other participants and/or environment are expensive or hard to find. But I really enjoy walking, have always done so, and I couldn't bear to leave Heidelberg without a shield for my old hiking stick (I've grown out of it in the meanwhile as I last used it when - 12, I think, but it's a nice thing anyway), which meant walking. I've done my research, and the Heiligenberg was supposed to be the one with the abandoned monasteries on top. I like monasteries too, so that's a nice two-birds-one-stone situation.
Alte Brücke
So I set off to the Alte Brücke at 8:05 and briskly tried pacing up the Schlangenweg. I ran out of breath halfway through. But then finding your ideal speed is always tricky, so I slowed down and admired the lovely views over Heidelberg from the Philosophenweg. Halfway through the Philosophenweg, just beyond (from Schlangenweg) Liselotteplatz, there's a small path that leads to stairs which lead to another path up the mountain. And so I followed that, always with the sun above me so I kept to the Heidelberger side of the mountain. I zigzagged up the hill, making the 400-or so metre ascent into a walk of a few kilometres.
View over Heidelberg from Bismarckturm
Halfway up there's a tower, the Bismarckturm, from which there's a quite nice view over the city. That's also the point where my calves started aching slightly, though my feet felt surprisingly well. Of course, the trick is to keep going - over my whole walk, I suppose I took only a handful of minute-breaks and two 10-minute breaks. I didn't particularly like the Bismarckturm, as it seemed to have been used by people for barbeques and drinking. It was a bit of a mess, so I walked on.
Finally on top of the hill (09:22), I had the loveliest view of the Heidelberger Altstadt - I arrived at the remains of the Sankt Stephans Kloster, or the Saint Stephen's Monastery. It wasn't very big, but it had a nice little tower. Quite sweet, actually.
St Stephen's Monastery Chapel
This lady and her daughter started blabbing at me in German, but as I don't get much further than - "Durfen wir bitte bezahlen?" I couldn't make much sense of them, nor could they of me as neither spoke English or Dutch. Pity really.
Amphitheatre
I then passed a parking space to get to the Nazi amphitheatre. I'd been told it was up there, but I wasn't prepared for how big it actually was. I felt slightly - angry, actually, that those stupid people defiled this pretty mountain by building this stupidly big thing. It was suppose to hold about 8000 people, and it had this very 1930s design to it. Fascinating but quite unsettling.
St Michael's Monastery - Roman temple outline
What I did like, however, was the Sankt Michaels Kloster, or the Saint Michael's Monastery. It's an old location, as it's built on the site of an old Roman temple - of which the outline is still visible in the middle of the monastery chapel - and this castle, of which the outlines are no longer visible but which did contribute to the rather odd shape of the monastery. It had two towers and it was really big - and I was there all on my own.
Imagine this - it's 10 in the morning, around you there's only tall trees, bees and spiders and ants and grasshoppers and birds, the sun's already beating down and you're all by yourself in the vast ruins of this late Dark Ages monastery.
Western Crypt - illuminated by the flash
When I entered the Western Crypt, for a moment there I was convinced it was haunted, even if I don't believe in such things.
St Michael's Monastery
But I got to investigate that whole monastery all by myself for about half an hour, always narrowly avoiding spider webs and going deaf from the buzzing and chirping of the bees and the crickets, before other people showed up. I then sat down for another rest before beginning my descent and picked up some bits of orange rock that I first took for pottery - but then I figured, they're orange, they're curved, they're consistent, and I was sitting next to the ruined walls of a Dark Ages monastery. They were probably roof tile shards. But that was cool anyway.
I then began my descent, and as I wanted to go a different way from the way I came up, and as I didn't have a map nor a compass, I figured I'd try to walk following the sun.
Now, I was in the Scouts for a few years as a child and I know enough of the sun's trajectory to make an educated guess as to what time it is, but I never properly walked following the sun before, and in any case not during Summer Time.
But I managed to more or less safely get down. Descending is quite frustrating, especially when you've got winding paths and you're anxious to get down and take off your shoes and you see the next bit of path about ten metres below. I did once make the mistake of thinking that the bit of hill in between was level enough for me to get down safely - I then promptly slid for about four metres, me meanwhile making up my obituary and hoping people would say nice things about me - before I came to a standstill and then managed to safely get the remaining bit down to the next path. So, advice - paths are there for a reason and Little Red Riding Hood was advised not to leave the path for a good reason too.
Little stream
But I got safely back down by 11:24 (I checked) and only a small bit off - I'd wanted to emerge by the Alte Brücke again, but instead emerged by the dam a few dozen of metres upstream. For the last bit I'd followed a small stream down, figuring that all water needs to go down anyway and as I was on the Neckarside, it'd probably flow to the Neckar (it did). So, that was fun.
And here's where the praise of my walking shoes comes in - I'd been walking for about 3.5 hours. Uphill and downhill. I'd been wandering about monasteries. And then I got a text from Kristy to meet her for lunch. I thought of my feet. They didn't hurt. Unheard of. But, they didn't. So we met for lunch and though I didn't feel like moving much, my feet were fine. We actually managed to still visit the Karzer (student prison) and the Uni Museum and a bookshop before going back to our hotel.
Karzer
It wasn't until I took off those shoes that I felt my feet ache. And they're fine again now. So, those shoes - best money I've ever spent.
And the Heiligenberg - I climbed it. And I bought myself a shield for my walking stick as a reward. Surely it must've done a lot of good in doing away with the PALA social calories?
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