Yes, everyone, livejournal is back!!!!

And so I have three sets of interview questions, which I will answer as follows:

From loveandgarbage

1. Your LJ is always very interesting to read and you exhibit an eclectic range of interests. What has led you to have such a diverse range of interests; and do you feel that this range of interests led you to seek out your work, or your work led you to broaden your interests? ( answer )
   
2. Some years ago Updike wrote a novel entitled "Memories of the Ford Administration". What are yours? ( answer )
   
3. Given your analyses of SF book award winners do you think book awards reward the best novels, or are other factors at play? ( answer )
   
4. Which Wodehouse books would you recommend to someone new to his work? ( answer )
   
5. If you had the power to erase one film, one book, and one TV show from history with the consequence that no-one was aware they had ever existed what would you choose and why? ( answer )

From electricant :

1. What's the best thing about being a father? ( answer )
   
2. I get the impression you have friends dotted all over Europe. Is this the case? How do you go about maintaining long distance friendships with people in other countries? ( answer )
   
3. Why do you book blog? What do you get out of it? ( answer )
   
4. How do you feel about the way geek and sf communities sometimes characterise themselves as being full of people with autistic-spectrum-type tendencies? Do you think it raises genuine awareness of autistic spectrum disorders, or does it only create misunderstandings? ( answer )
   
5. How important is your career to you? If it all fell to pieces tomorrow how would you feel and what would you do? ( answer )

From ninebelow :

1. How on Earth do you find the time to read so many books? ( answer )
   
2. You got very angry about George Osbourne's off the cuff remarks about autism early in the year. What is the balance to be struck between holding people accountable for their remarks and avoiding public figures sticking entirely to vetted talking points? ( answer )
3. What is your favourite language? ( answer )
4. Can you ever imagine yourself going into politics (ie as an elected representative)? ( answer )
5. What is the worst book ever to win a Hugo or Nebula? ( answer )

As usual, if you would like questions, ask.

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The BBC had two completely different and completely incorrect pronunciations of the name of the NATO Secretary-General this morning.

1) "Yap de Hop Sheffer" /jæp də hɔp ʃɛfə/
2) "Djap de Hupe Sheffer" /dʒæp dɘ hʊ:p ʃɛfə/

It is of course "Jaap de Hoop Scheffer" /ja:p də ho:p sχɛfər/ but I expect he's used to it by now.

...I now know that the shortest sentence in Dutch containing all twenty-six letters of the alphabet is:

In Zweden vocht groepje quakers bij sexfilm.

(In Sweden a small group of Quakers fought at a sex film.)

My life is immeasurably enriched by that knowledge.

Thanks to whoever it was in Northern Ireland that sent me three music CDs as a belated birthday present!

But I don't recognise your handwriting, and so I have absolutely no idea who you are!

(Am trying to think of friends who live in NI and would know enough Dutch to write "Do Not Bend / Niet Vouwen AUB" on the envelope, but am really drawing a blank...)

I was hoping for someone to write one that would pick ten interests at random; but this will do.

LJ Interests meme results

1. ( belfast )
2. ( china miéville )
3. ( dutch )
4. ( h.g.wells )
5. ( james white )
6. ( literature )
7. ( monty python )
8. ( philip pullman )
9. ( scifi )
10. ( transdniestria )

Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.

Belgian taxes are an annual nightmare, but I smiled at one part of the instructions on the form:

Waar 2 kolommen zijn voorzien, moeten personen die alleen een aangifte indienen, steeds de linkerkolom invullen.	Where two columns are provided, persons submitting only one tax return must fill in only the left hand column.
Gehuwden en wettelijk samenwonenden van een verschillend geslacht die een gezamenlijke aangifte indienen, moeten de gegevens van de man in de linkerkolom en die van de vrouw in de rechterkolom invullen.	Married and cohabiting couples of different sexes who are submitting a joint tax return must put the data for the man in the left hand column and those of the woman in the right hand column.
Gehuwden en wettelijk samenwonenden van hetzelfde geslacht die een gezamenlijke aangifte indienen, moeten de gegevens van de oudste in de linkerkolom en die van de jongste in de rechterkolom invullen.	Married and cohabiting couples of the same sex who are submitting a joint tax return must put the data for the older in the left hand column and those of the younger in the right hand column.

Somehow it seems a special Belgian mixture of aspiration towards social equality, combined with insane bureaucracy.

Just did a radio interview, live, in Dutch. Doing live stuff is something I can generally manage OK but when it's in a foreign language it's a bit more intimidating. I thought I had slipped several times and they went back to the ex-Belgian prime minister a bit sooner than I had expected to finish the piece. Oh well, I thought, chalk it down to experience; shame to have started the week with a weak performance in public, but there you go.

Then I was cheered up immensely by an email from a Dutch friend:

Ik heb me al die tijd niet gerealiseerd hoe goed je nederlands is, bijna beter te verstaan dan je engels, omdat je dat zo snel spreekt.
Bij deze mochten we elkaar weer eens tegenkomen, dan weiger ik verder engels te praten.

So she says she will never speak in English to me again, because my Dutch is easier to understand, because I talk too fast. A slightly barbed compliment, but I will accept it anyway.

Listening to the audio verison of "Fury from the Deep" episode 1 on my way to work, I was intrigued by the accent of one of the characters; he sounded distictly African, and I wondered if this might be the first example of a black character in a Doctor Who story set in contemporary Britain (let alone the future)?

However it turned out that the character, van Lutyens, was supposed to be Dutch; he even finishes his first scene with a Verdomme! (recorded in the script as "mutters his reply in Dutch"). The actor, John Abineri, was apparently fluent in German, but that doesn't explain the accent in this case.

I suppose it's simply that to a British audience in 1968 (and indeed to a British actor) a South African accent sounded more realistically "Dutch" than a Dutch accent would have done. This was, after all, years before the UK joined the EEC. (I never saw "Van der Valk", which started in 1972; did its Dutch characters have accents? Or was it all played as if everyone spoke perfect English? Which of course is not totally unrealistic for Amsterdam.)

Another for the blogroll:

http://www.dunglish.nl/

9) Avonturen van een Nederbelg: Een Nederlander ontdekt België by Derk-Jan Eppink

Derk-Jan Eppink is a Dutch journalist who covers Belgian politics for one of the main Flemish papers, De Standaard. He bills himself as the first Dutchman since 1830 to have taken a serious interest in Belgium, which can't be entirely true, but he writes very amusingly about it. I learnt more about this country from this book in the last week than I had done over the rest of the five years we have been living here.

His first couple of chapters will endear him to his Flemish readers, as he lays into the Dutch for their uptight, complacent attitudes (and particularly into the Hague, where he had spent his previous journalistic career). Then in 1995 he moves to Belgium, and tries to get to grips with a completely different political culture, where "you don't see things that are there, and you see things that aren't there", where "a detour is the quickest way to your destination".

On a weekend visit to a prominent politician, Eppink is horrendously embarrassed by his own poor riding skills. Meeting the Queen of the Belgians, Eppink's bow tie almost falls off and he is horrendously embarrassed (especially when it does fall off a few seconds after their conversation finishes). When he drops in on ex-Prime Minister Mark Eyskens (a nice guy who I've met through work) in his seaside cottage, a financial scandal breaks and Eppink is horrendously embarrassed. Covering a cycle race with two visiting Spanish journalists, their driver turns out to be utterly incompetent and... you get the idea.

Self-righteousness rather than embarrassment creeps into the longest chapter in the book, about his relationship with Guy Verhofstadt who has been Belgian Prime Minister since 1999. He chronicles Verhofstadt's rise to power within his own party, his disappointment in the 1995 elections, and his victory in 1999, helped by the previous government's mishandling of the Dutroux case and the chicken scandal. This is punctuated by a series of rows between him and Verhofstadt, each of which is resolved over lunch in an Italian restaurant near the Belgian parliament. (Oddly enough the one restaurant they go to which isn't Italian, La Rotonde, is one I often went to in my previous job, as long as someone else was buying lunch; my then boss was the brother of the publisher of this book.)

So a fun book, about politics, about journalism, about the clash of cultures "divided by a common language" (gescheiden door een gemeenschappelijke taal), a little bit about what it means to be European, a lot about how the Flemings look to a sympathetic outsider. (Eppink actually lives in Leuven, not far from here.) I enjoyed it.

Finally, I'm very pleased with myself for reading a whole 240 pages of book in another language. I haven't done that since my then girlfriend persuaded me to read L'Étranger by Albert Camus in about 1987. And I haven't had to read anything in Dutch (other than official forms and children's school reports) since 1980. Large parts of this book are untranslatable, rather like the word "ilunga" from the Tshiluba language, so it will remain inaccessible to most of the world. But I think he was really only writing for this small country, and for its even smaller number of fans from outside.