This new, gigantic, and terrible mouse

I've been complaining too much about charters. I do love them really. The problem is that they've been on my head like a very heavy hat for some years now, more than I want to sit down and count, and when I first got these six months in Bologna I was dazzled by the idea of finishing it off in that time and then recommencing my life as a Free Person. It's become increasingly clear that that's not going to happen, and that my evenings and weekends probably forever are going to involve revising and rerevising this immensely technical stuff, which started as something I had to work on for a job I have now finished. I suppose given that people do smaller archives than mine as a whole PhD, thinking I could polish it off in six months was a bit ambitious, maybe even unpleasantly arrogant in retrospect. They're good material, I just have to accept I'm going to be working on them for longer than I thought. I am going to have to learn all about open-field agriculture, and this is after all interesting. I have borrowed O. Rackham's History of the Countryside from the Bologna Palaeography department's library, and I will read it carefully. I've got it at home but in the illustrated version. Sometimes I feel very much the urge to become an outdoors person but I don't much like dirt and can't stand slugs so it probably wouldn't work.

I finished Prince William's uncle's account of Prince Rupert. It did annoy me in places but I decided to put this down to the class difference and therefore find it of anthropological interest. Now I am reading Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. I forget who, but some Corpus person, told me to read All the Pretty Horses some time ago and they were right, it's brilliant.

On the subject of princes there's something about Prince Charles having alpacas to keep off foxes (which they are very good at by the way) in this week's popbitch, but I'm going to have to trim it down quite heavily before I can forward it to my mother. In fact I'm not that happy about her knowing I subscribe to an e-mail called popbitch; she will think less of me for it, probably rightly.

Favourite bit of History of the Countryside so far, on when rats first reached England: There is an apocryphal story that rats were brought by Crusaders from the Holy Land. But if their coming was as late as the Crusades, why did no chronicler notice what must have been an impressive and fearsome event? Why did no moralist denounce this new, gigantic, and terrible mouse as a divine judgement on a sinful nation, as on the Philistines in the days of Samuel?