The text is about whether women can take communion while menstruating, and it decides yes.) Because one of the two camera rigs in the main digitisation room wasn't working and couldn't be repaired for a bit, the digi team were taking it in turns to come up for a palaeography lesson so that they could read and understand more of the things that come before them. It was very pleasant, as the Parker always is. Here is Suzanne gently taking them through some Half-uncial -- the Lindisfarne Gospels I think:
And here is Neil urgently expounding some difficult but interesting fifteenth-century English legal text about some people who went into a church with an ungoodly countenance, and then went on from there to do bad things:
Majiec is pulling a face at it.
2. Working on the tills at M&S and being a research fellow at a Cambridge college have more in common than you'd think. In both cases the major drawback of the job is dealing with stressed and angry people, and the major benefit the occasional acts of random kindness that revive one's hope for humanity. But the biggest similarity is the opportunity to acquire an insulating layer of personal fat. At M&S the nightly sale of "waste", food that couldn't remain on the shelves the next day, offered all sorts of goodies for irresistibly low prices, with the knowledge that what wasn't bought would go straight in the bin. And in college the availability of a full roast lunch every day makes it hard not to indulge, especially when you've had a hard morning and feel like you deserve it. Surrounded as I am here by gelaterie it's unlikely that I'm going to claw back any of the slimness I lost in these two jobs (not to mention comfort eating during my PhD years when no other comfort was available), and consequently I am utterly dreading summer. Apparently it can get up to 40 degrees in June. I don't like heat, I like cold. Already I am happily walking around in bare arms while the Italians are still swathing themselves in those quilted Michelin-man coats, and Federica has been laughing at me for having bought a big fan in preparation.
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