1) the Italian course I was trying to enrol on has been cancelled. This is bad because my Italian is actually getting worse at the moment, as I point my brain at Old English boundary clauses. The other day I saw the words "in merce" on an Italian shampoo bottle and immediately thought "ah, in mærce, 'in the boundary', or possibly a scribal error for in mersce, 'in the marsh'". This is not good. Yesterday when Federica asked me whether Jack the Ripper was really a relation of Queen Victoria, and I said I didn't think we would ever know for sure at this distance, and she said surely as a historian I had to believe in the possibility of recovering past facts, I found it very hard to sustain the conversation even to the limited extent I would have managed a couple of weeks ago. It's a good thing she's here, with her combined curiosity and forceful assertions, making me try to express difficult things.
2) I went to a guest lecture at the Residenza, partly because I was interested and partly because I felt it might be politic to show my face, given that I don't live there. (I asked a question for roughly the same reasons, which made me feel a bit bad.) Now I can see that an hour on Origen's Christology and Soteriology might not be the most engrossing thing ever for many people, but it was disgracefully rude how some people were chatting and blatantly reading books. To daydream or make some unrelated notes is one thing, but to talk or completely ignore the lecture seems very rude to me. It wasn't a primarily Italian audience, but a very international one, and the English-speakers were the worst. I thought the lecture interesting myself, mostly because I was sincerely shocked by Origen's heterodox views. My uncle (the sensible, nice one) was once asked to be part of a sermon series at St Alban's Abbey on My Favourite Heretic, and chose Origen. Recently someone tried to persuade me that Mariology, which I'm afraid I have a tendency to interpret in old-fashionedly Freudian terms as rooted in men's wishing that their own mother was a virgin, is an essential part of incarnational theory (I remain unconvinced); so I asked the speaker about Origen's Mariology. He didn't really have one, apparently, so either that goes to show that it's not necessary at all, or that not having a Mariology was where he went so terribly wrong.
3. I went to the HyperCo-op (pronounced eeper-co-op), which is right next door to the Residenza. When I go to supermarkets I take my backpack to carry things home in and to save on damage to the earth in the form of plastic bags. At the HyperCo-op, however, if you take in any bag at all they put it in a large blue plastic bag and heat seal it shut. Then at the checkout you have to rip your backpack free hurriedly, destroying the plastic bag beyond possiblity of reuse. This annoys me.
4. Also I've been feeling daftly homesick, though not for Cambridge. At Cambridge I miss good company and library access, and nothing else, and I miss them in a sensible sort of way. But all this poring over maps of the Wiltshire Downs is making me yearn for the South West and the English countryside. I can't wait to go back at Easter and tramp around the fields with my parents, watering alpacas. (Many years ago my parents named me after Rebecca in the Bible specifically because she was nice to camelids.)
What cheered me up:
I had a reply from the Queen of Charters, who is editor of seven of the thirteen volumes which have come out so far in the series for which I am writing my charters book. She says my boundary clause work is good! Or at least, that it can go off for linguistic comment without much work. This is the most tremendous relief because I have been feeling it's absolutely on the border line of what's possible for me. Luckily it seems that I have got onto the right side of that line. I have been worrying about it so much that on reading the message I picked up Figaro and did a little jig. He was unimpressed, though he can never help but purr when cuddled. Here is a picture of him in full teddy-bear mode as a sort of blog-based apology. (Apoblogy?)
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