pumpkinstrokemarrow

Might have been a good idea on the beach yesterday. Despite carefully covering those bits which poked out from under the umbrella with towels, the towels slipped when I nodded off and the offside of the right calf is now rather pink.

After beach, finished off the second reading of Craig on Germany (see June 12th & 14th). A substantial read with 764 pages of text plus another 61 of appendices and index. Much better written than Steinberg, despite the fact that Craig is also mainly a US person. Perhaps the differance is a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

But he takes no prisoners. The book has no maps or illustrations at all. Craig clearly assumes that the sort of person who is fit to read his book has access to maps and illustrations of his own. Then the book has quite a few chunks of quote in the original German, with translation in an appendix, but rather more small chunks of German embedded in the text without any translation at all. And even a small number of small chunks of French.

I thought I was lucky in coming across a concise Collins in a charity shop for £1.99, but actually what it did was reveal the poverty of one word translations from a language of which one knows nothing. One gets the general idea but the whole cloud of meaning which the use of the German word is presumably intended to carry with it is missing. Unlike French, of which I know enough for at least some of the cloud to get across the channel. One plus point is that I now know that lametta, cropping up in a jingle about Goering, are either tinsel decorations used at Christmas or razor blades. An Italian diminutive derived from a word meaning a blade.

In other ways a rather depressing read, coming away with the idea that the whole sorry mess of German history 1850-1950 was the result of the 100 year failure to integrate the very heterogenous bits of Germany into a modern state, after the fashion, let us say, of the UK or the US. With the consequent need to provide the plebs with bread and circuses in the form of foreign adventures. More or less inevitable given the bizarre starting point. Next stop the thirty years war to see if that has the answer.

Having done with Craig, interested to read in the newspaper of giant killer seaweed in Brittany, seaweed which has, it seems, killed two wild boars. The item did not explain how the seaweed did it, but it did explain that President Sarkosy has asked the Heritage Council to rule on whether the contribution to global cooling by the seaweed (it has a very high carbon entrapment rate) outweighs the contribution to global mammalian diversity by the boars. Greenpeace and the WWF are briefing counsel.