Denseman on the Rattis is my old harbour for stray thoughts: the things that do not quite belong on my other blogs, in my professional life or in the small domestic weather-system of social media.
I write here when a subject is too personal for Arc of Prosperity, too un-recipe-like for Our Recipes, too miscellaneous for The Last Revolution?, or simply too odd to be left lying about unsupervised. The result is a loose mixture of language, politics, books, travel, Scotland, Denmark, Europe, technology, food, gardening, old memories and whatever else happens to drift in with the tide.
I am Thomas Widmann, a Danish-German linguist, lexicographer and computer-minded word person. I spent 17 years in Scotland and now live on Funen, where I work with language, dictionaries and digital tools. That probably explains the recurring themes: words, borders, identities, recipes, scripts, old countries, new technologies and the strange ways people organise their lives, often against the advice of both reason and history.
This blog has existed in various forms for a long time. It used to be more central to my online life. These days it is more of a back room, a notebook, an archive and an occasional newspaper from my own small parish of the internet. Some posts are polished essays. Some are fragments. Some are here because they amused me and needed somewhere to live.
The title is old, slightly obscure and retained partly out of sentiment, which is a respectable human weakness when practised in moderation. Think of the blog as an old harbour where strange ships still dock.