when a stranger calls

So someone calls us at just after 4am and hangs up. Of course I am immediately awake, seemingly forever. All possibilities of why someone would call at that time blaring in my head, with the loudest of all: they dialled the wrong number. If I accidentally called the wrong number at 4am - there are probably more people doing that than at 4pm, when you think about it - I would probably just hang up too, and hope that, like us, the person at the other end doesn't know how to figure out how to call back/ find out the number that called. Although I am still tossing that one up. Actually, if I was the kind of person prone to calling people at 4am, any people, I might get my number 'withheld' from caller ID.

I have been bedridden, largely, for the last 3 days. Yesterday I felt really good and tried to do things like vacuuming and then felt like someone with a wearying and nauseating illness really quickly and had to lie down. On the plus side I have had time to do things like read George R Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins' 1960 book on the 19th century Viennese art historian Camillo Sitte, which I have long wanted to do, and could have done very easily at any time really since only about half of it is readable book (the rest is bibliographies etc). Then I started on their translation of Sitte's Der Stadtebau. (This is a little like watching the director's commentary before watching the film, but in this instance it actually makes it more interesting). According to the Collinses - and I suppose taking them on wholesale unquestioningly is to be as bad as the people they criticise - Sitte's ideas on planning and public space were entirely perverted in a French translation undertaken by one of his disciples just before he died. Sitte, for reasons unclear, approved of the translation entirely, and the Collinses say that not only does a lot of it completely invert the meaning of the original, much of it is a cut-up misch-masch in terms of structure. Also, a lot of the original illustrations were replaced in subsequent editions and most of Sitte's original references to Viennese/ German-speaking area places and spaces were swapped with French examples. This French translation, for some reason, served as the basis for the much-delayed English translation 40 years after Sitte's death. Until the Collinses came along and apparently rectified it all.

It is amazing to think such things happen, though they happen all the time naturally. Sitte's text is known as one of the founding monographs (apparently written in 17 nights of furious labour!) of modern town planning, and presumably those of his ideas which took hold did so through British and other European planners and planning advocates who read him in the original - apparently Raymond Unwin was one of these, and it would appear (or at least many believe) Sitte meant a lot to Unwin when it came to the built form of Hampstead Garden Suburb, for instance. According to the Collinses, anyone who was looking for Sitte's ideas in anything but the original German work during the time at which he was held to be most 'influential' (a word which makes me grit my teeth) would find only an unusual bastardisation of them in most editions.

Since I haven't read all of the Collins' Sitte, I'm not going to go into what these ideas are.

They do make an intriguing, unsourced and unsubstantiated, reference to him being commissioned to prepare plans for Melbourne and Adelaide. By whom, how and why, is my question. I wonder.