Stuff I have done

I have been doing various things, for example: putting all my stuff into boxes in a van which my dad crashed (very minorly) and had to abandon for a night at the bottom of an icy hill in the back lanes of Devon; trying to find a copy of the Guardian in the countryside, which is truly Telegraph-land; and looking into tax regulations, which is taking a while because I keep getting distracted by coming across things like the rules for declaring income derived from a gravel pit, which send me off into complicated daydreams about how I might acquire and use a gravel pit. Presumably one would need some sort of gravel washing device.

Also I've been playing with small nephew. Small nephew is very excellent indeed. He's just over a year old now, and very cheerful. He loves light switches, turning the pages of books, and crawling out of the living room, into the hall, into the kitchen, and then back into the living room by a different door -- he thinks that's very funny. He likes pretending that a TV remote is a telephone, and the other day he managed to embark on a long-distance phone call to his other grandparents in Germany -- he used the Last Number Redial button and then gurgled at them down the phone for some time before his mother noticed. On the down side I have now got my first small-child-spread cold. He gets quite a few colds because of going to nursery, but he has such a good time there that his mother, who agonised about sending him at first, now feels guilty that she only sends him three days a week. They have a special baby area where they do things like putting them all in swim nappies and then letting them do whole body painting, and he made his parents a Christmas card and a 2010 calendar -- his parents kept finding glitter between his toes at bathtime.

I also got my favourite ever spam message, from someone who wants my details so that he can give me a discount on puppies.

In sorting through some old papers I found this excellent old handout from one of Simon Keynes's Anglo-Saxon History lectures. It's an extract from the index entry for E. A. Freeman from a book by (I'm pretty certain) J. H. Round. Click on it to get it full-size, because it's worth a look.