ego.istic.org

I happened today to notice the following interesting rule in TSRGD, regulation 26:

The requirements conveyed by a road marking mentioned in paragraph (1) shall be that —

(a) subject to paragraphs (3) and (5), no vehicle shall stop on any length of road along which the marking has been placed at any point between the ends of the marking; and

(b) subject to paragraph (6), every vehicle proceeding on any length of road along which the marking has been so placed that, as viewed in the direction of travel of the vehicle, a continuous line is on the left of a broken line or of another continuous line, shall be so driven as to keep the first-mentioned continuous line on the right hand or off side of the vehicle.

The “road marking mentioned in paragraph (1)” is double white lines down the middle of the carriageway, indicating no overtaking (or no overtaking in one direction). (a) says that you can't park on either side, (b) says you can't overtake on the side with the unbroken line. What's interesting is the exceptions given just after:

5) Nothing in paragraph (2)(a) shall apply - […]

(c) to a pedal bicycle not having a sidecar attached thereto, whether additional means of propulsion by mechanical power are attached to the bicycle or not;

which is to say, parking of bikes or mopeds is allowed, even on the carriageway; and

(6) Nothing in paragraph (2)(b) shall be taken to prohibit a vehicle from being driven across, or so as to straddle, the continuous line referred to in that paragraph, if it is safe to do so and if necessary to do so - […]

(f) in order to pass a pedal cycle moving at a speed not exceeding 10 mph;

which is to say, you can only overtake cyclists on a road with double white lines if ⒈ the cyclist is travelling very slowly or ⒉ the lane is wide enough to pass without crossing the line.

I do not think very much of this rule. For a start, who knows about this exception? Most motorists don't even think of overtaking cyclists as overtaking, and will happily do so even where “No Overtaking” signs exist. Second, how is the motorist supposed to know whether the cyclist's speed is more or less than 10mph, and on what evidence would a court be able to judge afterwards (should it ever come to that)? Third, it encourages motorists to pass fast-moving cyclists far too close in order to not cross the central line.

To discourage this, I have to suggest that cyclists going down such roads faster than walking pace take up what's called “primary lane position”: that is, position themselves near the centre of the lane rather than near the edge of the carriageway.

The friendly souls at my band have thoughtfully provided me with the use of Podemski's Standard Snare Drum Method, one of the classics of percussion teaching. Perhaps this is a hint somewhat like your friends banding together to buy you a bar of soap, but I choose to interpret it more favourably than that. In any case, I freely admit that I'm not that hot on a (drum) kit, so I've resolved now to do something about it and actually practice the exercises in there for at least a straight hour per week, until I can do them all perfectly without thinking about it. Wednesday seems as good a night as any, so let's say that Wednesday night is drum night until I have to reschedule it. Let's also say that any practice of twirling my sticks round my fingers, like the pros do, is not counted as part of the hour. I have done my practice tonight, so you can start nagging at me next week.

I'm telling all of you this because it's often said that making your resolutions public gives you more motivation to stick to them. Also, as an introduction to a blatant advert: Sunday week, the 7th September, we will be playing with Royston Town Band, Ware Brass, and Fulham Brass Band at the Royston Picnic in the Park. It's free (bring your own picnic), and the music starts at 1400 in the Priory Gardens, Royston, about 13mi from Cambridge. Even if, like me, you don't like brass band music, it will make a good afternoon out, and of course the more people there cheering for CSD Brass the better it will be. If you're really lucky you may even get to see me drop my sticks.

I will, of course, report how it went here afterwards, but it won't be as good as being there in person to see it, so please do come along, bring your family and friends, and lend your support.

Back in Liverpool last Christmas I was reminded of how much more prevalent long hair is in Cambridge than other places. I was browsing idly in a shop when a young girl of some five or six years walked past with her father. She gave me a long, examining glance, and then distinctly said to her dad, in incredulous tones, “That man's got long hair.” Said parent shushed her and hurried away, leaving me no time to ask, “Have you never seen a man with long hair before?”

Perhaps it was a good job I didn't, for it was entirely possible she hadn't. Living in Cambridge, it's easy to forget how rare long hair on men is elsewhere. Of my male friends, there are three (excluding me) with hair long enough to put in a ponytail, and another few with shoulder-length hair.

When I decided to grow my hair out, I read a website about the long hair experience by Bill Choisser. Among other advice, it has a section on the social aspects of long hair. (This page does go a bit over the deep end in places, but writing for the internet has that effect on us all.) It addresses many men's fear of being mistaken for a woman. This only happened to me once, while I was bending down to unlock my bike and only my hair was visible. It also deals with being refused jobs because of long hair. This has never happened to me, and my hair is much more businesslike in a neat ponytail than it was when it was short and scruffy. It claims that wearing long hair is always deciding to buck the trend, and no matter how well you keep it and how stylish you look, you will always be in the minority: there is no “magical place” where most men have long hair.

Mr. Choisser evidently had never been to Cambridge. It's still not the case that most men here have long hair, but it is definitely more of a mainstream choice. In the gatherings of mathmo types I frequent, long-haired men easily outnumber long-haired women. (But then, we outnumber women in total as well.) Any employer who had a hair length policy would simply be doing himself out of good employees.

Towards the end, he claims that men grow their hair out for two reasons. The first is for other people: to follow a trend, or (in Cambridge at least) to identify yourself with a social group. The second is for yourself: because you feel that long hair is part of your identity, just like transvestitism or Welshness. He is, of course, making an ‘us and them’ dichotomy, trying to draw the ‘real longhairs’, like the ‘real cyclists’ or ‘real dog-walkers’, out from the Johnny-come-lately Sunday longhairs; I am sorry to have to say that I fit into neither category.

I grew my hair for the same reasons I grew a beard as a second-year undergrad: curiosity and laziness. Actually, that's not quite true. Growing a beard, although I'd been toying with the idea, was triggered when I bought a pair of sunglasses and my friend told me that all I needed to go with them was a beard and a Porsche. I didn't get quite as far as the Porsche, but the beard was somewhat cheaper to obtain, and in any case, easier than shaving. Whereas I eventually got fed up of my family telling me to lose the beard as it made me look like Peter Sutcliffe (which it did somewhat), they had very little to say on the subject of my hair. My grandmother, who had of course seen the persecution of hippies in the sixties, worried that it might make it hard for me to get a job; she still does, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Now that my curiosity is satisfied, long hair is more of a convenience than anything else. It's nice being able to just tie it back when I get up in the morning rather than faff about with combs and/or gel. It means not having to spend time and money on getting it cut or clipped, and I never have a bad hair day. The only real disadvantage is that it takes longer to dry when I have a shower. Also that little girls from remote parts have trouble believing their eyes.

Sitting in a train on the Eurotunnel, we had a good view of the car in front: a couple with two children. After some minutes, my aunt remarked, “They aren't her children.” I readily agreed with her assessment. What tipped her off was that the couple was very lovey-dovey, petting and gazing into each other's eyes in such a way that indicated their relationship was much younger than the eight years or so of the kids. It was the man of the couple who was the first to answer whenever one of the children wanted attention, so it seemed (to my aunt) reasonable to suppose they were his from a previous relationship. Further, something in his manner led her to think that they didn't live with him normally, and the circumstances of being on a trip abroad, as well as the fact that almost always it is the mother who gets landed with the kids in case of divorce, made this a plausible hypothesis.

In fact, I had already reached a similar judgement, for different reasons. Parents usually behave, by definition even, in a familiar manner with their children. Changing of nappies, raps on the knuckles, tickles, hugs: these and many more unnamed acts of physical contact are a syndrome of (that is, a set of observable behaviours associated with) parental intimacy. (I use “intimacy” in the wider sense here and throughout, not as a euphemism for sex.) In this family, the father clearly showed such intimacy: he was comfortable lifting the kids up for a better view of something, or clipping them gently round the ear, or simply stepping over them when they got under his feet (as children are wont to do). But his lady-friend was not. She was unfailingly polite with the children, and smiled at them, and spoke softly, but she was very hands-off. She dealt with them exactly as one deals with other people's children: she pussy-footed around them.

Children are the same in school: they play rough-and-tumble games, and push each other around, and shake people's shoulders to get their attention. But as they grow up, they develop a sense of personal space. They learn not to touch, to keep their hands to themselves. As they do, their parents' physical shows of affection begin to trouble and embarrass them. Public hugging is no longer acceptable. Kisses are way out of line. It's only as they grow yet older and learn the use of contact in courting and romantic affection that they again lose their reluctance to be touched.

But of course, physical contact doesn't have to be either familial or sexual. Go to any busy meeting-place like a pub or a park, and you'll soon see some friends greeting each other with a hug, or a slap on the shoulder, or even a continental peck-on-the-cheek. These are displays of affection just as much as a couple of lovers running fingers through each other's hair. Try doing a martial art, a contact sport, acting, or dancing, without being completely comfortable with touching and being touched by the other participants, and see how far you get.

I am glad my aunt and I discussed this family on the train, as it drew to my attention the odd contrast: while the woman used physical contact to establish intimacy with her beau, it was the lack of physical contact—the discomfort—with the children that made plain her lack of intimacy with them.

This gave me an example to illustrate a principle I have for a long time believed: that physical intimacy between friends is a mirror for social intimacy, that is, for how close the friendship is. Just as you can often spot close friends by how they have shed their formality of speech—referring to each other by nicknames, criticising ideas without fear of giving offence, perhaps jocularly insulting each other—so, I believe, can you spot them by how they have shed their inhibitions about physical intimacy.

This is why the team-building activities so beloved of certain types of managers are usually physical rather than intellectual in nature. After a team of colleagues has rafted down some white-water, or built a bridge over a swamp, or tried to accomplish some task without unlinking arms, or whatever other silliness is involved; then the ‘ice’ of personal space is broken, and they'll be much less squeamish about squashing together behind a server to examine it, and much less worried about treading on each other's toes, both literally and figuratively.

There are those who believe that overfamiliarity causes relationship problems, and that “a hedge between neighbours” is a wonderful thing; perhaps the correlation between the increasing ease of being in contact with each other that mobile phones and the internet have brought and the increasing isolation that some people reportedly feel, supports their view. At the same time, there are those who believe that you go to work to work, not to make friends, and that colleagues should maintain a distance.

But those two groups of people are not my friends. They are not the people I tickle to get their attention. They are not the people who walk home from the pub in each other's arms for support. They are not the people who test to find out who can give whom a piggy-back for the greatest distance. They are the people who don't know what to do with their hands when riding pillion on a motorbike. They are the people who wear long sleeves in the hottest weather to avoid showing their forearms. They are the people who won't give their stepchildren a hug.

The following is a guest post by a friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous. It's slightly away from the usual topics of my blog, but I found it interesting and I hope you will too.

Animé “fansubbing” - the practice of fans translating a newly released show themselves, creating subtitles for it, and distributing the result, before an officially translated version is available - is indisputably very different from how it was 20, 15, or even 10 years ago. Gone are the videotape decks and months spent hunting down obscure programs, and so to a large extent is the shady, “inner circle” nature of those who practice it¹. Certainly, any group of people who between them can muster enough Japanese to understand the show, enough English to edit this into a coherent script, and enough patience to do subtitle timing and video encoding, together with the small degree of internet-savvy needed to find the programs for doing these last and a source for the “raw”, untranslated episodes, can set themselves up as a fansub group, pick a show, and be on an equal footing to those who’ve been doing this for years.

Naturally, there are both good and bad aspects to this.

Singled out for a lot of criticism of late is the fact that far less of the show is actually translated than of old. The presence of Japanese honorifics (-san, -chan, et al.) in subtitles barely rates a mention in reviews; the viewer is expected to simply know the meaning of e.g. “Onee-san” or “Hai”. Sometimes I have been the first to criticise - the decision by many of the groups who subtitled Death Note to leave the term shinigami untranslated, for example, was unforgivable - there is a single, obvious, accurate, unambiguous translation as “death god”, and while the cultural connotations of “gami” may not be precisely those of “god”, neither are the gods of Egypt precisely the same as those of the Vikings. But, having seen things from the “other side”², the situation is often a lot less clear-cut.

For the “triple-A” shows of any year, there will often be intense competition among sub groups, and here there is no excuse for anything less than a full translation. But these are not the shows whose translation is being criticised; on the whole, the “community” rises to meet this standard; a present-day example would be gg’s superb translation of the second series of Code Geass, with not a stray honorific to be seen. The shows with lower quality translations are the “mid-tier” series which, we should not forget, simply did not get translated during the “good old days”. The explosion in fansubbing coincides with an explosion in the number of shows actually being produced - and inevitably, these lower end shows do not have the same standard of translator working on them. Quite often there will be only a single group or even a single person covering the show (indeed, many series over the years has been left partially complete, as fallings-out among groups, real-life problems or just dissatisfaction with the show has lead the one group working on the show to abandon it).

In this situation, as a translator unable to find a reasonable translation for a particular piece of Japanese idiom, what am I supposed to do? If I could leave the translation to someone more capable I would do so in a heartbeat, but the reason I’m doing the show at all is because if I don’t, no-one else will. The practice of leaving words untranslated is often slammed for being elitist and inaccessible for those new to animé, but surely far more elitist would be to leave these less popular shows the exclusive preserve of those fluent in Japanese. As I see it, there are three options:

1. Give a poor English translation which loses a substantial part of the meaning. I feel that this would be a betrayal³ of the original author - I make their work appear (to my English-speaking audience) more simplistic and less well-phrased than it actually is. It also makes it much harder for an interested viewer or future collaborator to improve on my present work, since I’ve destroyed some of the meaning.

2. Give a “literal” English translation of the phrase, possibly with a “TL note” explaining the alternate meaning. This is a defensible option, and probably what I would do were I working in isolation, but viewers as a whole seem to find such notes a lot more distracting than I do. (I’d love to hear any more views on this; if I can get support for this approach I’ll adopt it in my work.) And to leave an overly literal translation without a translation note is, I would argue, worse than leaving the Japanese phrase, because in the latter case an unfamiliar viewer at least knows there is something to look up, and has the original Japanese to ask their friends about.

3. Leave the phrase in Japanese, again with or without a TL note (more a question of taste than anything else, though personally I detest untranslated Japanese without a note - as a competent English speaker, if I cannot understand your subtitles without consulting an external reference, they hardly qualify as a translation); a far from ideal option, but, under the circumstances, the best of a bad job.

Perhaps the best solution would be to admit that the material is too difficult for me, and leave it for when I am a better Japanese-speaker. But the best way to learn something has always been by doing, and it would seem churlish to make my attempts at translation, flawed as they are, and sit on them rather than releasing them for the world as a whole. Should someone better come along I will gladly drop my series, and direct whatever viewers I may have managed to gain to them. But until then, I refuse to believe that my efforts are worse than no translation at all.

Every untranslated word in something I release is a point where I have failed as a translator. But that would be no less the case with any of the other solutions I can see, and concealing my faults by such means would only make them harder to deal with. I will happily take advice, and while I won’t follow every editorial suggestion I receive, I will always consider and respond to them. But unless you are willing to step in yourself, do not tell me to stop trying to translate, and if you object to my leaving a word in Japanese, tell me how I could have handled it better.

1. Those who wish to read this entire post as an allegory about the Assassins’ guild are more than welcome, and I would be interested to hear their conclusions ↩

2. By which I mean I have begun trying some fansubbing of my own. Those who know me will be able to obtain the finished product when and if it comes into existence ↩

3. Those who feel such phrasing is melodromatic should consider³ that, as a group who are doing something which is thoroughly illegal and yet convinced they are doing the right thing, fansubbers have a more highly conditioned sense of honour than many. ↩