Good things: an update

Some more good things have come to my attention:
1. OneNote. It makes me happy, and I haven't even started using the tagging features yet. As was the arrangement of a new folder, some highlighters and some pads of very nice paper to my GCSEs, so computer note-taking programs are to my adult life, i.e. a vital propaedeutic. This one is the best so far.

2. Shakedown by the Freemasons -- a two-disc mix of their own songs and their remixes of other people's. Since it is now not worth listening to anything that Beyonce has recorded until the Freemasons have redone it I thought I'd check this out. It is very good. It's at just the level of energy I need to crunch charters. Did you know that the Old English place-name element hamm means 'land hemmed in by water or marsh; wet land hemmed in by higher ground; river meadow; cultivated plot on the edge of woodland or moor'? I do. But the Freemasons have been helping me to bear it.

3. I went to a nice symposium on Monday, and I think it helped me to refine what is necessary for a conference, etc, to be that rare thing, enjoyable, and an impetus towards scholarship, rather than making you want to give it all up and become an accountant. The vital ingredient is best expressed by the concept "convention". Think of trekkies dressing up in their enthusiasm as Spock or Picard. Now you want the same sort of thing but with academics. Instead of pointy ears or velour jumpsuits à la Zapp Brannigan, you need people who are truly interested in their subject in a borderline obsessive way. The sense that they are among the only other people in the world who care as much as they do, and who will not judge them for this, should fill them with a sense of gratitude and relief which does much to break the ice. (Anglo-Saxonists are the geeks of medievalists, and charter scholars are the geeks of Anglo-Saxon history.) They also need to be nice people. And they need to be so interested that status becomes an irrelevancy, and no one cares about looking stupid when there are interesting queries to be followed. I finished my paper on Monday by asking the people there (it helps that I knew every one of them, Anglo-Saxon charters being a small world) three questions, which produced some very interesting lines of enquiry for me to follow up. Now if only I could justify doing following them, instead of dissecting Anglo-Saxon charter boundaries.

4. This is good too. Achoo!