Frag mich nicht, ich bin nur ein Mädchen

Strange thing about March: I had been expecting things to get a lot quieter here, and that they did. But even so, the month has gone like snow off a dyke—not much time left at all! And April looks set to be quite busy, happily so. I'm going to see Flora next week, I can't wait!! An epic traversing of the Alps. Not having seen friends and relatives, apart from Mum, in the flesh for a while, it's been odd, almost like the pictures of people in your mind's eye are a little smudged... This might just be peculiar to me. It happens even when I haven't seen our dog Danny in a few weeks; he becomes a smudgy, waggy, black and tan mass of hair and enthusiasm, how awful. This might speak of inattentiveness to my environment more than anything else. Anyway, proper excited! And then Mum is planning to return with my sister the weekend following, and there's talk of visiting Prague and/or Berlin with the girls here. And, apparently, because I and the Italian biologist Cristiana are both leaving the group at the end of April, and my birthday falls somewhat fatefully then, we have to organise a big party. We'll have a firework show and a brass band, no question. We'll hire the whole Mensa, and Cristiana can cover several tables with antipasti, pasta, gelati, panettone, prosecco, and I'll make... Mince and tatties. I never take long to describe typical Scottish cuisine... Although explaining haggis is a bit of a stumbling block. For expediency, I've taken to describing it as a really fat sausage, filled with oatmeal, fat and a range of organs. But still, I love it just the same. So, you wait for buses, and... an Airbus potentially arrives. But all of it sounds great! I can recuperate when I get home.

Good news on the project front: I managed to isolate a single compound apparently completely purely, its NMR spectra are delightful! Yep, it looked like it would be a piece of Schokoladenkuchen to solve. I'll tell you, I'll probably go looking for a good portion of that when/if we solve it... It´s harder than it looked! We seem to be coming really close when comparing our ideas to predicted ones, but not quite getting there. It´s really like doing a jigsaw—it's addictive, you don't want to leave it until you've tried everything you can think of at the time. Hopefully we're not that far away! And maybe it´s even novel... Isn't it exciting, to think that nothing is actually 'novel', that everything in Creation is known and accounted for but that things are always being revealed to us, and we learn more about the Creator by them?

I'm definitely an amateur in this Lent business (c.f. Nutella above). Some folk give up almost everything 'fun'; giving up sweet things is common. Today after lunch, we went to get some coffee—I went for a hot chocolate, thinking, 'yus, win, nae (or nae much) caffeine!' But, when chocolate is often something people give up, it didn´t seem like I was foresaking much. Guido, fellow coffee-up-giver, had a chai latte without coffee. That sounds a bit better. But I'm a first-timer, mind. I've surprised myself, but I don't think I really miss coffee now, and I seem to be quite alert, even more so, without it. Or, maybe, my standards have been raised so much that the instant coffee in my room isn't so appealing anymore. British readers, we're really quite crude in our drinking habits compared to Continentals! Here, instant coffee is considered the lowest of the low; tea is a delicate business, commonly involving fruits and herbs. Tetley, milk and sugar? Na ah. But I have found decaf black tea which I obviously splodge with milk. But drink out of a glass mug. Not entirely the philistine.

Looking forward to people returning in April: my neighbour Uli will be back from having been in Ireland, interested to hear how she found it! And the other Julia will also be back from 'holiday' (science students don't seem to really get time off here, either having exams to prepare for or practical placements—we really have a fine time of it, having all those months off in summer in Scotland!). Found out this week that I'm going to have to move out of my room here on my birthday, will be memorable in a way! Also, I wonder if I'll have the right to a holiday, even though on foreign soil, when Will and Kate get married the next day. Surely. I'll have Lizzie on the phone to them here, if not.

There are many words and catchphrases from the lab which stick in my mind. When Bayern München lost to Inter Milan last week, Susanne (decidedly not a Bayern fan) periodically sang "zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus" (pull off Bayern´s Lederhosen) to the tune of Yellow Submarine. Daniel in the lab next door is a bit of a character. He quotes from the German version of the Simpsons, where Homer says, "Ich bin so klug! K-L-U-K!" (a bit like, "I'm so clever! C-L-E-F-E-R!"). And when someone asks his opinion, he says in falsetto, "Frag mich nicht, ich bin nur ein Mädchen" ("Don't ask me, I'm just a little girl"). I might start using it myself.

Die Kaffeetage sind vorbei...

I learned a very good German word on Monday, more of a concept, actually: der Schweinehund. Auf Englisch: pigdog. What´re ye on about, I hear you scraich. Ok, as it is, it can mean swine, as a derogatory term - I´m not that big a user of the word swine, I´d probably naturally go for something more infantile just so I could giggle, and enjoy the all too transient giggly-tummy feeling. Possibly, it´s been a wise choice to lean away from paths in life which would take me into debating chambers, obviously for this reason alone in my case. Ahem. But I learned about the innere Schweinehund: the pigdog within. You see, there´s this fellow inside you who is always happy to persuade you to be lazy, to choose easy options when it might do you good to try harder ones. When you make an effort to do something, especially when you´ve been tempted otherwise, you beat the Schweinehund. Maybe I´m overlooking an English equivalent, but I quite like this. Something is at work to make you complacent; you can take action to fight and overcome it. It made me look back at Romans 7:17, where Paul says that it´s not him that´s doing the wrong thing (or not doing the right thing), but sin living in him... And reminded me of how I find the last part of chapter 7 difficult to relate to verses like 1 John 3:6, as far as continuing to sin goes. Maybe there are commentaries on this, I need to look.

Yes, so, things carry on, pretty well I think. Continually realising I´m very fortunate in many things - you know what I said a while ago about being bombarded with German even despite my poor ability to reply in kind, and knowing it to be a good thing though sometimes difficult? It turns out that that isn´t the experience of every native English speaker who has come here. Some find that even when they start a conversation in German, they are usually replied to in English. It´s very understandable and commendable that some Germans will be keen to use the opportunity to practise their English. I think the problem is when the English speaker starts to believe that their efforts in German aren´t being considered worthy of being engaged with... That could stunt confidence, and actually hurt, even though it is likely totally not intended to do so. This is, astoundingly, not an issue I´ve experienced enough to be affected by it in this way. Maybe I´m even guilty of allowing an uneven balance between my German practice and the English practice of those I speak with. I share a kitchen with an English language student who probably wishes I´d ask ´how are you?` rather than ´wie geht´s?` at least once in a while. It´s difficult to find a balance, as with anything. And I´m only here for the shortest of times - I´m sure things will only get better for the other native-Englishers who are all here for longer.

Hopefully, in the next week or so, I´m going to be able to identify some compounds, even if they aren´t exactly the ones we´re after (though there´re signs that we might have tracked down at least one of those!) - it´s taken a lot longer than I´d expected to whittle fractions down and purify them, but I´m getting excited to be close to actually putting a finger on a compound (not literally, these grubby paws ain´t gonna thwart results at this late stage). Wherefore hast the time gone? Even more hopefully, there´s still enough left not to have any loose ends by the time I have to leave...

Did I mention how much more hugging seems to go on here than at home? I think the further south you go, in Europe at least, the less personal space you can expect to be entitled to. Haha. Sometimes this prudish Brit among prudish Brits is quite alarmed at how compressed queues are in shops. But mostly, it´s nice. At church, maybe especially, a lot of people hug when they meet and depart, every Sunday. At this church at least, there seems to be a determination to live like a family, really: a man called Niels spoke to me for just a couple of minutes before the service one Sunday, then invited me and others to lunch the same day. When I met him the next Sunday, we hugged. Having met twice in history. I know I´m no hug ambassador, but I´d say that normally in Scotland, you have to earn your hugs, especially if you´re a young woman and the other is a married man. Like, you have to have gone through a challenging experience with someone else such that your shared endurance brought you closer (c.f. eating doughnuts without licking your lips), or you have to be in the same family. The second doesn´t always hold, day on day... Sometimes Hogmanay on Hogmanay. But in this case, I don´t think I did much hug-earning, by my usual thinking. I think I just showed up as a sister in Christ. I think it´s been wonderful to be shown that we can be, and ought to be, closer. The flipside to this was the account of a woman at church´s experiences of living in the north of England for a few years: she said that she couldn´t understand why people would stand a metre away from you when talking, or, if you sat down beside someone at a bus stop, they would move away. After a few months, someone put their arm on her shoulder when speaking to her, and she nearly fainted in relief. Funny, but don´t doubt it´s true. Before I put my foot in it again, I know that not all British people are guarded in the way this suggests; some people are veritable hug merchants, some aren´t and yet are some of the warmest you will meet here.

It´s Lent, and I thought that since I am in a place where apparently a lot more people observe it than at home, I should try to tag along. Some people go all out: Guido, one of the PhD supervisors, is giving up meat, coffee, sweets, television... I have decided to cut out just coffee. Big deal for me, you know. Except, I sort of cheated/modified my plans: it´s not a good idea to stop drinking coffee abruptly, if you have been quite a moderate to heavy user. Ahem. So, I decided I´d have one cup a day for a week... And now, until Easter, I´m a cold turkey. This here is to be my staple for the ensuing:

Apple tea. Yumm-eeee.