Oh good grief

The Guardian's Saturday travel supplement offers this nugget of brain-deadness:

The trend for weekend pampering is not a new one. Back in 1132, Yorkshire's Rievaulx Abbey was described as a "marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world". Almost nine centuries later, English Heritage is encouraging us to find inner serenity on a series of "Pampering Saturdays" within the walls of the ruined abbey, including t'ai chi demonstrations and classes and foot massages in the herb garden.

I really don't think that the monks were finding freedom through pampering. Rievaulx was one of the first Cistercian abbeys in England, and Cistercians were an order renowned for their austerity: the Trappists are Cistercians. It may even be that if you're looking for a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world, you're not going to find it in a foot rub.

I'm more and more convinced by the idea that almost all of the modern media is a sophisticated form of trolling. Trolling on a web message board is where you post something deliberately provocative and enjoy the ensuing attention -- for example, dodgy claims about the World Trade Center attacks, and suchlike.

Community

I've been thinking a bit about community, recently. A criticism often levelled against the church from within is that the people of the church have lost an understanding of how to be part of a group. We've all got too used to being individuals, and the understanding of the self gained from this has been at a cost which prevents communal action. This is a large part of an argument which otherwise seems incomprehensible to non-Christians, I think; the suggestion from people who don't think that homosexuality is wrong that we should nonetheless not allow blessings of gay marriage. (St Paul told the Corinthians that they could eat meat sacrificed to idols, but that they should refrain from doing so if their example was causing anyone difficulties with their faith. I suppose that at that time finding meat in Corinth which had definitely never been sacrificed to an idol might have involved you in more effort and more cost, but it doesn't seem to me so very equivalent to giving up permanently an entire area of your life, one which the preachers are constantly telling us is a beautiful gift from God, in order not to upset people who are often finding it upsetting for entirely discreditable reasons. But then I was raised a protestant, and the church has little authority for me.)

Anyhoo, the idea that by being individuals we have lost the ability to work as a group interests me. Two things have brought it to mind in recent days. First, there has been a cigarette ban. About the only people I know who still smoke are fellows at the college where I work; colleges are, by their nature, appropriately some decades behind the times. There has been an unwillingness to accept that, passive smoking or no passive smoking, many people are negatively affected by smoke, especially now that asthma is on the rise. Secondly, we have been taking votes in groups. It's interesting to think about how we move on from divisive votes. A decision is taken which is binding on a group of which you are part, but it is not the decision you would have taken. I suppose you have to see it as a communal act, and support it. I don't know that this is very natural to people any more. Colleges are run in a medieval fashion which predates the rise of the individual (depending on how you date that -- it's usually seen as a late-/post-medieval thing). The closest modern analogy would be communities of nuns and monks, who also live according to pre-modern rules. The monks at St Bene't's were removed to other tasks; some of them really did not want to go, and would not have made the same decision if it were up to them, but they had vowed obedience so that it was never a question of whether or not they would do it, even the man in his eighties who had spent decades here, had to give up a job he loved, and feared very much a move to inner city London. There's a hugely impressive discipline in that.

Pirates

I've had a very draining day, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Rather than dwelling on this, and in the hope that it might be cheerful for other people as well as me, I have decided to put up something strangely comforting: a pirate's speech from the early eighteenth century, sounding just like pirates ought to. Captain Bellamy, the pirate, has captured a sloop, and would like to give it back to Captain Beer, its commander, but his pirate crew won't have it.

'Damn my beard', says he, 'I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do anyone a mischief, when it is not for my advantage; damn the sloop we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though, damn ye, you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich men have made for their own security, for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery. But damn ye altogether. Damn them for a pack of crazy rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make one of us, than sneak after the arses of those villains for Employment?'
Capt. Beer told him that his conscience would not allow him to break through the Laws of God and man.
'You are a devilish conscientious rascal, damn ye,' replied Bellamy. 'I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field, and this my conscience tells me. But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure and pin their faith upon a pimp of a parson, a squab, who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.'

It's from one of John Julius Norwich's Christmas Cracker anthologies. Equally good, and a great deal less verbose, is Sir Thomas Beecham's comment after conducting the Dance of the Cygnets from Swan Lake for the ballet of the Camargo Society at about twice the normal speed:

That made the buggers hop.

There's no i in teemocil, at least not where you'd think

My brother gave me the DVD of the first season of Arrested Development for my birthday, and it's making me cackle out loud.

The proper study of mankind

or, My amazing journey of self-discovery continues...

So I did a quick M-B test online and came out as INFJ -- very I, quite N, and hardly at all FJ (1% J apparently). I would have thought I was more sensing than intuitive, because in my academic subject I am very wary of people who do the whole big picture thing, rather than making a big picture from all the little pictures put together. Apparently I share this profile with Nathan, the prophet of Israel, which is nice. (Also Jimmy Carter, which is a bit hmmm.)

I'm not so sure about the other three, but the introvert thing is still making me happy. Because it makes sense of the fact that I actually like people and human interaction, if the problem is just that it's bad for me. It's like sunbathing; I enjoy going out in the sun, but if I indulge in it without care it makes me irritable, de-hydrated, and pink. So this makes my unsociable nature not my fault, and everyone knows that's the best kind of fault. Yay!

Introspective

I've always thought of myself as an introvert, and I've always felt bad about this. Yesterday in the Guardian Magazine "This Column Will Change Your Life", which I read because it's often interesting in an annoying sort of way, was about introverts. What was particularly interesting about this is that it defined introvert in a way which is a) not what I thought it was b) precisely like me and c) not something I need to feel particularly guilty about. I'd always thought that introversion was about being essentially self-centered, uninterested in other people, at heart selfish. Apparently it's really about energy; introverts feel drained by social interaction and recharged by being alone, while extroverts are the opposite, and it's even possible that introverts are that way not because they are uncaring but because they can't help empathising in an excessively-sensitive way which makes time spent with other people terribly exhausting. Which is exactly how I feel. I am certainly selfish, and pretty self-obsessed, and these are not good things, but it's very helpful to separate these bad qualities from something as intrinsic to me as being an introvert; it makes it easier to see how I can try to be better without attempting not to be who I essentially am.

A lot of life's worries seem to come down to working out which things are intrinsic and which things are not. Go Reinhold Niebuhr!

Also, I wonder if many introverted people keep pets? One of the best things about pets is their non-human quality -- it annoys me when people suggest that they're some sort of human substitute (enough people have suggested that I have rats instead of a boyfriend, or occasionally, children...). They're so straight-forward in comparison to people that they make good restful company. They completely lack the tiring quality of people because their wants are so simple in comparison -- in my experience, a rat who can't be cheered up with a yogurt drop will have died within about thirty-six hours. (Thankfully my two are currently bouncy and eating their antibiotics with every sign of pleasure. At the moment they are curled up in their hammock, and too lazy to open more than one eye to look at me as I go past.)

Professors on the loose

I worked on the tills at M&S to earn some money when I finished my PhD. It's a sort of matriarchy there, probably loosely based on the WI. It was great because if, for example, an old lady came by who had a lot of shopping and was struggling, you could call up a young man from the loading bay to help her carry things to the car park, thus gratifying two powerful human impulses: the desire to help people, and the desire to order people around. And on the whole the customers there are quite polite. We got a lot of elderly people in and the queue behind would wait patiently while they hunted through their change or wrote out cheques in tortuous longhand. I was putting one old lady's shopping through one time when she suddenly remembered that she had got the wrong sort of milk, because the grandchildren were coming to stay, and they liked full-fat not skimmed. So I called up a young man to sort out the milk situation, thinking she was rather an old dear, and then she handed me her credit card and the name on it was U. Dronke. Suddenly I realised that I had met her before: she was Professor Ursula Dronke, an extremely sharp scholar. I had recently heard her give a very good joint lecture with her husband, Professor Peter Dronke; they're one of those old-fashioned scholarly couples where both are very good but the wife is the scarier of the two, with a mind like the jaws of a bulldog.

Today I went into Pret to get lunch. There were quite a few late middle-aged couples in their anoraks there who had gone in to get a cup of tea out of the rain. Squeezing past to nab a Classic Tuna sandwich I suddenly realised that one of the men there was one of the most eminent Professors I know. For a moment I wondered if it was my conscience paying tricks on me, because he ought really to be in Chicago or New York, and I owe him a major piece of work, deadline end of June, which I need to polish off this afternoon and e-mail off. He was there with his equally eminent Professor spouse, who is very nice but rather frightening -- she used to be a nun. Really these people shouldn't be allowed to wander the streets startling us at the weekends. (And I ought to stop displacement-activitying and get on with the work I owe him.)

Ponders

It's a shame I couldn't go to Bec. If I were there I would have sung compline by now. It closes with Salve Regina, to an old plainsong melody, and asperging. Otherwise it's all in French, including the Psalms; it's a very good language to chant quietly, with its growly 'r's and soft 'j's:

Sur le fauve et la vipère tu marcheras . tu fouleras le lionceau et le dragon
Puisqu'il s'attache à moi, je l'affranchis . je l'exalte puisqu'il connaît mon nom.

It's very peaceful there. I wish I could have gone.

Nonetheless, I'm also glad that I stayed to look after my rats. They are being very friendly at the moment; I think the antibiotics are making them feel a bit more themselves. Muesli is beginning to put some weight on again, and for the first time in quite a while she climbed up onto my shoulder, leant on my chin, and started making the teeth-chattery noise which is the rat equivalent of purring. It seems like there's not really much meaning to caring about things if you don't give things up for them.

Television

Even if we've lost Scrubs, TV is still great. My Name is Earl is excellent happy television. I have also been catching up with Rome, which I missed yesterday because of graduation dinner. It has HBO swearing, full frontal nudity, exotically-coloured poisons, and gratuitous references to baboon training. Yay!

That shark

The pre-credits teaser of the new season of Scrubs has only just finished and I'm already worried that it has jumped the proverbial.

Abjuro te!

I abjured the Church Times some while ago, but in a moment of weakness after lunch today I picked it up again. I had only got to page 5 before it annoyed me very much and I have now reabjured it. There was a story of how young mothers are less likely than older mothers to want their children to grow up with religious values. Apparently we should be upset about this. But who on earth wants their children to grow up with "religious values"? I'm not even sure what religious values are -- a proper respect for the household gods, maybe. Tony Blair has religious values. If I had children I would want them to have Christian faith, and I would want them to question things. I'd rather they were atheists than that they attended church through faithless piety.

I texted my mother this Christmas from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was distressing me, and she texted back "Avoid religion where possible; it's the relationship that matters". This is because my mother is quite wise.

Anyway, I think I might have to give up on the idea of posting happy things, and reserve this blog as the place where I rant about things that annoy me. The web-related concept of trolling is a good one, I think, for describing the media as a whole, and there's sadly no reason why the Church Times wouldn't join in.

I heart my rats

One of the endearing things about rats is that sometimes, when you're offering them a treat, they stretch out to take it, and with their mouth open, just millimetres from the yogurt drop or whatever, they pause and look at you sideways, as if to say, What's in this for you? Cats tend to be all Of course you adore me, while dogs are more Of course I adore you, but rats sometimes stop and wonder what's really going on. You can't say that's not very lovable.

Plea for help

If by some chance you have read James Wilson's The Woman in the Picture and understand whether or not her mother killed herself and if so why and if not what happened then could you let me know? I was enjoying it til it suddenly ended without telling me; it made me feel all stupid, and that's really not the point of reading Borders 3-for-2 novels.

In other entertainment news, the first half of the Rihanna album is the better. Some of the songs are a bit Nelly Furtado and some a bit Kanye West; I'm betting Timbaland was involved and whoever produced Kanye West too (maybe Mr West himself, I don't know). "Don't Stop the Music" is absolutely brilliant -- it has this excellent beat like the sound of loud music on the other side of a door. It has gone to the top of my itunes favourites playlist, together with the Freemasons remix of Beyonce and Shakira's "Beautiful Liar". (Don't listen to any version which wasn't mixed by the Freemasons.) Between them they're helping me not to lose the will to live as I tackle the Old English boundary clauses of the charters of Wilton Abbey, one of those unpleasant tasks in which you know you're bound to make a total fool of yourself. It's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of knowledgeable help before I can even get them into a state in which they can bearably be sent to some experts to have the errors pointed out. This is because there are people out there who really care about boundary clauses. They are not necessarily the same people as the ones who really care about Tolkien, but they share some attributes.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Now I have to go and find out my students' results. I've been looking after about a fifth of my department this year, and vicariously caring about their results has given me nasty flashbacks to my own results experiences. First year wasn't fun because my boyfriend got a 2.i not a first, which made him grumpy. I bought him a nice runny camembert, but somehow this failed to make it all OK. My whole second year was unpleasant, and I just stayed in bed until someone phoned me to tell me the results at about half past two, and then I went back to bed again. This worked well: I would recommend it as a strategy. But in my third year I went down to the boards alone, feeling as pressured as I ever have in my life, because unless I got a first I was not ever going to get funding to do an MPhil. I had to recite poetry in my mind to stop it exploding -- as I recall it was Strange Meeting by Wilfrid Owen as I was walking past WHSmith's. If my mind had exploded I don't know what I would have done -- run about the streets waving my arms shouting The horror! The horror! perhaps -- I'm amazed one doesn't see more students doing that at this time of year. Anyway I got the first, so it was OK, but the sheer terror of the whole thing is still vivid in my memory ten years later.

It would have made a big difference to my life. Most likely I would then have become an actuary. Although they like you to have a scientific degree I had looked into it and some firms would be happy with my predominantly-science A-levels. It's about seven years' training, so I don't feel it's really an option at my age, but by now I would have been qualified, established, earning pretty large amounts of money... I'm sure I would have regretted not knowing more about medieval manuscripts, but I'm also sure I would have been quite fine. I would probably have eventually done some evening classes, like the ones run by the wonderful Michelle Brown in London, and by now I might have been looking into a career-break self-funded masters. Or maybe I would have gone another direction -- hieroglyphs or cuneiform, perhaps.

I know with complete certainty that I would have been alright -- maybe even better because of not being exposed to the particular unhealthy neuroses of academia. That's a good thing to bear in mind when I check my students' results, I think. It makes me sad to think of all the stress we put the students through here, to drive them on to achieve things which are good but not of overriding importance.

Another picture

Clearing up the next day

A picture

This is a grab from the Corpus webcam, showing the May Ball.

Now that's a fridge

So it doesn't have a temperature indicator on it, but the shelves feel cold and the milk is no longer chewy. Yay!

In other news I am enjoying the Rihanna album. I feel like I shouldn't somehow, but then life's a bit short to feel guilty about things that aren't actually morally wrong. Wikipedia has a picture of her with an umberella.

Also good was the first episode of the second season of Rome, the TV series. A list of historical errors is available on wikipedia, including things like "it is historically unlikely that these two ladies talked to each other at this point", for fact-spotters.

Smug

I've just bought a little icon off ebay described as "three wise men with animals", which is a nice description of the Holy Trinity with the signs of the evangelists.

Also on ebay, I really wanted this handmade congratulation from Miranda July, but it's gone out of my price range.

Pleasure

There's an excellent series of murder mysteries which have this particular episode where two attractive young lawyers, Selina and Julia, go to a louche party as part of their investigations of the death of an heiress's cousin. On arriving they almost immediately regret it -- the music is loud, the lighting low, people in various states of undress are indulging in wild behaviour, and alcohol and even stronger intoxicants are pressed upon them. They partake, perhaps unwisely, of what our Welsh cousins call "y mwg drwg". Julia tells the story later; at this point, she says, Selina shocked her greatly by throwing off all social constraint, and giving herself over entirely to pleasure. She took from her handbag a small hardback copy of Pride and Prejudice, and sat on a sofa reading it, ignoring all conversational attempts.

I'm being a bit like this at the moment, ruthlessly not doing social things I don't want to do.

The books are by Sarah Caudwell, and are great, though you might not like them if you dislike things which are arch, like Stephen Fry's The Liar, or Kyril Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai books. Her detective, Hilary Tamar, solves crimes using the principles of textual criticism, which is quite cool if you've studied textual criticism, though I do realise that's a pretty niche market.

Happy birthday to me

Today is St Eadburh's day. She was a saint of Winchester, daughter of King Edward the Elder, who at the age of three was given the choice between a nun's habit and a princess's robe, and chose the habit. Her life went on from there in similar vein. The same tale is told of St Edith, who made the choice at age two, and I'm afraid Eadburh has always seemed to me like one of those saints about whom not much was known, and who therefore attracted pale copies of other people's stories. (I edited the life of another one, St Cuthburh, an echo of St Æthelthryth, for my M.Phil.) Not that there's anything wrong with shared stories. In the anonymous Life of Gregory the Great written at Whitby, probably by a nun, there's an excellent bit where the author says that if she has attributed anything to Gregory which was actually done by another saint it doesn't matter because we are all members together of the body of Christ.

It's also St Vitus's day, he of the spasmodic dance of death.

I've got the portiforium of St Wulfstan out, one of my favourite books of all time. According to a fourteenth-century inscription it was the portiforium of St Oswald, but it was obviously written after Oswald's death, besides containing hymns to St Oswald, which would be unholily arrogant of him to have carried around with him... The fact that it is now associated with the more plausible St Wulfstan instead says a lot about the human tendency to anchor objects to well-known figures, and see the past in terms of people. (I don't think there's so very much wrong with that either.) St Wulfstan is another lovable saint. He was bishop of Worcester and by far the longest-lasting Anglo-Saxon bishop after the Conquest -- famous to palaeographers is the 1080-something Canterbury profession where all the bishops write their names in small crabbed Norman hands except for Wulfstan with his beautiful round Anglo-Caroline minuscule. He was also a bit of a loony. Fond as he was of King Harold II, he saw the Norman Conquest as a judgement on the English nobility for wearing their hair too long. He used to carry a small pair of scissors around with him and cut the hair of young men who he felt needed it. (He'd cut off one lock, confident that they would then get the rest trimmed to match.) The Normans with their pudding-basin haircuts obviously deserved to inherit the land. (This is disturbingly like Rimmer's theory on warfare in Red Dwarf.) But he took his pastoral roles very seriously, and rode around the countryside preaching to ordinary people, baptising, and doing other stuff than sitting about eating in his palace. When they built the great Norman cathedral at Worcester, Wulfstan is said to have cried -- he said, we are tearing down the house of saints to replace it with our own works.

His portiforium is great, whether or not it's really his. The calendar contains his obit, added on the 20th January; Obitus pie memorie domni Wlstani episcopi. The script is wonderful late static Anglo-Caroline, and the ruling is a complete mess. Whoever went through removing the word "pope" as required by the Reformation-era Act for the Suppression of Superstitious Books and Monuments, did so rather carelessly. All in all my favourite sort of book.

Separated at birth?

Mr Kidd just sent me this:

Great apes

A while back I read lots of stuff on animal intelligence, and the idea of animal culture, including an interesting book called The Ape and the Sushi Master. The reference in the title is to the way that a trainee sushi chef spends years watching the master at work before even trying to make sushi, and is apparently then pretty good at it from the off.

The thing that surprised me in the book was the author's definition of culture as something which was of material benefit to the animals involved. He was looking at different groups of apes with different ways of obtaining the same foods with basic tools like a stripped twig. But I think that culture among humans could almost be defined as not having a material benefit. What have I gained from reading War and Peace? I've gained a lot in some indefinable way, but it hasn't increased the protein in my diet. Examinations of grooming habits seemed much more like culture to me -- there was some fascinating stuff about a group of zoo apes who held hands while grooming each other and then developed a very distinctive habit of clasping their hands together above their heads while grooming, and the way that this habit was taken up by new apes joining the group, and sometimes spread by apes who went to other zoos.

Anyhoo, the point is that the idea of learning by looking was making me happy this morning, as I was checking out a manuscript for damage. Usually I'm such a responsible manuscript reader that I wouldn't order one up without a sound reason for needing to see it, and I would have digested the basic bibliography on the stuff and know all about it, etc. Checking things out for damage means I have only a very basic sense of what they are beforehand. Today I had something which I think is Luxeuil minuscule, definitely Merovingian. It's distressing how challenging it is just to read that sort of stuff, let alone decide anything else about it. I think it's from the eighth century, and it might be from Corbie. The g is definitely where Caroline got its g from. I wonder whether the initials, with their cheerful large-eyed birds, had any influence on Type-II initials from England? It's quite Insular, this stuff, that is it has the sorts of features which might more popularly be called 'Celtic', with interlace, strange animals, and red dotting around initials. It's quite Insular in its extravagance, too, a sort of sense of letters doing more than just conveying words.

Happy thoughts

I'm afraid this blog has become very bad-tempered. I haven't even got any good reason for it as I have tons less marking than most people and much less than last year. Maybe it's my forthcoming 31st birthday. My mother, who usually asks me what I want for a present, is insisting that this year she is going to buy me some sensible shoes, and has sent me a sensible shoe catalogue so I can make my choice. I had to negotiate hard to prevent her stipulating that they had to be sensible sandals... But usually I find this sort of thing funny, so I don't know why I'm being all irritable about it. Mothers are allowed to worry about their children in strange and creative ways.

And I should say, I'm not against marriage as such -- it's not something I'd put on my list of where I see myself in ten years' time, but then, as Michael Ball put it, Love Changes Everything -- who knows what the future will bring, &c. I just get bad-tempered when people act as though the subtitle to my life is "Rebecca's search for a man" rather than "Rebecca's attempts to live honestly while exercising her brain in some way".

So to make up for bad-temperedness I am putting below a nice picture of some flowers. This is Rosa cymosa var. Rebecca Rushforth, flowering outside my parents' house. It has pretty vicious thorns. My Dad named the variety after me quite a long time ago. I think he found it in Bhutan. It amuses him greatly to refer to the plant as me, and say things like "You're looking a bit straggly this year".

Impertinence makes me angry

At my brother's wedding three people asked me when I was going to get married, and at one level I felt rather good about this as it was precisely the number I had predicted when chatting to my brother beforehand. Of course on another level it annoyed me immensely -- not least because one of those times I was with my cousin Jo, who unlike me is rather keen on the whole getting married and sprogging up thing, and who is sensitive about her singleness.

It's amazing how often people will ask you these things. I brought my ex-boyfriend in to the first feast I ever went to in college, and a few weeks later at dinner one of the other fellows asked me why I hadn't married him. Which is some chutzpah if you ask me. I dislike it most when it happens in a religious context. I was about the only teenage girl I knew who didn't assume she was going to get married and make a home, and I expressed this opinion in my church youth group when I was about fifteen. The curate who led it thought me very strange but as a favour found for me a book he thought I'd like. It had a byline about "the increasing numbers of Christian women who through no fault of their own are finding themselves single". I smiled sweetly and said Thankyou. And I went on a retreat early this year where we all had to go up one by one to be prayed for, and when I went up the leader prayed for me "to love again". This was someone I had met two days before and hardly talked to since. He knew nothing about me (at least if he did he didn't get it from me). Unfortunately it was right at the end of the retreat so I couldn't work up the courage to ask him about it, and it made me boilingly furious for a couple of weeks. (This is the problem with the church: it's so often two steps forward, one and a half steps back.)

I'm thinking I ought to get proactive about it -- I need a good story in reserve, because hardly anyone who asks that sort of thing deserves a proper answer. Something like, I have vowed not to marry until the return of the true Stuart kings to the throne of England; or I can only marry the man who can solve this riddle: [need good riddle here, which is a bit of a drawback].

Some good things

1. Sophie Ellis Bextor's new album, Trip the Light Fantastic, is very listenable. I used to hate her but I have reluctantly accepted that her pop is quite disco. Oddly the album doesn't include the excellent Dear Jimmy off of the popjustice compilation CD.

2. The internet! It means I can pretend to be a knowledgeable geek instead of the loser geek I am, because of all the nice people out there sharing their knowledge. I have set up a .bat file so that my USB pen automatically backs itself up when I plug it into my computer. It sounds all intelligent of me but I got it from this website. I added a "/D" after the xcopy command on the recommendation of one of the commenters, which means that it only alters things which have been changed since I last plugged it in. This is good because I have about 7Gb of data on it. So much more satisfying than the backup programs I have on my computer, which won't deal with removable drives, even though these must be pretty widely used right now. Bad Norton!

3. The Temple Gallery, which sells icons, sends me its catalogues for free even though I haven't ever bought an icon from them, and am unlikely to be able to afford one for many years if ever. Also, it's possible to visit the gallery and I'm going to do that next weekend, to see their current exhibition. If I could afford to I would buy an icon like this one of John the Theologian in silence, or this one of him dictating to his disciple Prochorus.

Ceci n'est pas un fridge

And yet there are four pints of milk in it.

Academia again

Cambridge University Press has brought out in paperback two excellent books from its Studies in Palaeography and Codicology series. Bischoff's very important Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, helpfully translated by the excellent Michael Gorman, and with added Bischoffness put in by the man himself, is just £14.99; while the useful and heavily-illustrated The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books by Albert Derolez is a very reasonable £19.99. If you're a member of the university you get a 20% discount and if, like me, you are a C.U.P. author, it's even more. Go C.U.P.!

(OK, so I'm just the author of a chapter in a C.U.P. book which has been forthcoming for a long long time (actually since I was in primary school, though I was not at that stage a contributor) but it all seems to count for the shop staff. Go C.U.P. shop staff!)

My review of Derolez is online here: I met him many years ago when he gave the Sandars lectures in Cambridge, on the topic which eventually became this book. I was a second-year undergraduate, and our palaeography teacher, later my PhD supervisor, invited him to dinner at Girton, together with twelve of us students. (I did wonder about that number even then.) After the starter, our host cleared his throat, and said, "Professor Derolez, what my students are wondering is why you are so dismissive of Lieftinck's system when they have experience of its excellent results for Insular script?" The poor man then had to sing for his supper, and I'm really pretty sure none of us were wondering that. Either our teacher had misunderstood him or he then changed his mind on Lieftinck's system, as the book is very pro it.

(I ended my review by urging C.U.P. to bring it out in paperback. But to be honest I had heard already that paperbacks in this series were a possibility, so I can't claim clairvoyance, or any sort of influence on their publishing decisions.)

Smart clothes: fight the power!

I'm not naturally a sociable person, or much of a one for joining in, but when I started my fellowship I decided to throw myself into the spirit of the thing heartily, and I have since found myself, with a varying sense of unreality, entertaining visiting bishops; giving my official opinion on pelmets; or dressed up in full academicals, my square doffed, presenting my fingers to be clutched by graduands whom I am recommending to the vice-chancellor in flowery Latin. And why not?

But recently I had this interesting idea to spend more time doing the sort of stuff I like, stuff that is, if you will, a bit more me. Tonight I am not attending the Name Day Feast. I have just received an invitation to a "black tie/white tie" dinner in May Week, but after that I am aiming not to go to any more black tie events for the rest of the decade, and no white tie ones until I am at least fifty. Hurray! People say that dressing up is fun, but they are lying, it is not fun, it is a big hassle, and the requirement to wear smart shoes is costing me significant sums in Scholl Blister plasters. Women often claim that men look better in black tie, but this is another error. All men look like prats in black tie, except for the very thin vacuous ones who look like Bertie Wooster. White tie makes men look like they have disproportionately squat legs, and at this level even women usually don't look good, as they tend to overdo the shiny fabrics. I also very much resent the idea that May Balls, for example, are an intrinsic part of the Cambridge experience. I have never been to one and I've been here for thirteen years. (Although my objections to them are no longer so much political -- oh those posh girls who would leave Student Poverty marches early to go hat shopping! -- as aesthetic.)

To be honest I have long since reinterpreted black tie to mean "no jeans, nice earrings" anyway, and that dinner in May Week will not be getting anything more. And for my birthday next week I am going to have a curry with a friend and watch some DVDs. (I want to find out who Vaughn really is.) Yay!

Questions

Are google ever going to bother taking anything out of beta again? I suppose on the grounds that it's free it's a sort of "don't blame us" strategy. Google gears is just what I need, if it works.

And, what has happened to Matthew Collings? He isn't on TV any more telling me about culture with his gentle intonation. Why is that? Nobody knows.

Some books

I've read some books recently. Hurray! Most of them were good and some were very good. I have decided to pay tribute to these in this very public forum.

1. Christopher Brookmyre writes interesting and well-crafted thrillers which are quite funny. I will take one next time I go on an aeroplane or a long train journey. He is a not very subtle fan of Robertson Davies, who wrote The Cornish Trilogy, which I think is the best book of the twentieth century.

2. Michael Chabon can really write. He's such a good writer it's annoying of him. I read Wonder Boys, which is even better than the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Clever Michael Chabon! -- as Matthew Collings would say.

3. I also read The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, which my inner teen/pre-teen enjoyed. I wouldn't have bought it if I'd realised it was quite so Fantasy, but it's very readable. Probably good for a kid who was moving on from Harry Potter. I'll read the sequels when they're out, and when I'm feeling the need to veg.

4. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders is brief and quite frightening. Could be more engaging.

5. The Famous Writers' School by Steven Carter is very good while in progress but the ending was a bit meh.

6. Z. Z. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is definitely worth reading and very gripping, but my enjoyment was slightly spoilt by the worry that since she's American I should have been thinking of her as zeezee rather than zedzed.

The twelfth century, or, where it all went wrong

Today I get to look at the Red Book of Darley, one of my favourites ever. There's a nice early modern annotation at the back:
This booke was sumtime had in such reverence in darbieshire that it was comonlie beleved that whosoeuer should sweare untruelie uppon this booke should run madd.

Its first text is an almost unique English poetic dialogue between Solomon and Saturn: it's a sort of riddle contest in the Scandinavian tradition (as carried forwards by Bilbo and Gollum). The "O"s in Solomon were often written like fat hollow crosses. Then there's an excellent missal, with masses against idle desires, and for brotherly love, etc. It's surprising how many of the Anglo-Saxon liturgical books I look at have excommunications copied later into blank spaces; this one has a twelfth-century version, very long. The language is fiery enough to be slightly comic, as in Stedman's The Jackdaw of Rheims:

The Cardinal rose with a dignified look,
He call’d for his candle, his bell, and his book:
In holy anger, and pious grief,
He solemnly curs’d that rascally thief!
He curs’d him at board, he curs’d him in bed,
From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head!
He curs’d him in sleeping, that every night
He should dream of the devil, and wake in a fright;
He curs’d him in eating, he curs’d him in drinking,
He curs’d him in coughing, in sneezing, in winking;
He curs’d him in sitting, in standing, in lying;
He curs’d him in walking, in riding, in flying;
He curs’d him in living, he curs’d him in dying!
Never was heard such a terrible curse!
But what gave rise
To no little surprise,
Nobody seem’d one penny the worse.

But above it an early modern hand, perhaps associated with Parker, has written "detestanda execratio", detestable execration, which is a sympathetic statement, at least to my mind. (Assuming it's a judgement not a description...)

Grumble grumble

The newest version of Firefox has changed how you close tabs, which is annoying because it slows me down, and also it has a sort of sideways scrolling thing if you've got loads of tabs open, which is also very irritating.

But most seriously of all it now suggests search terms from other people's searches when you start typing in the google search box at the top right of the screen. I wanted to find a quick detail about Britney's "comeback" to send to a friend, so I typed in Britney, and then Firefox helpfully suggested all the words which other people had put in after the name Britney, many of which were unedifying in the extreme. Eventually I found the option to turn suggested searches off, which has desmutted my computer satisfactorily. But really, who ever thought drawing on other people's internet searches would be a good idea?

Just to resmut my computer a tiny bit I am putting in a picture of the Firefox kitteh:

Wedding: some thoughts

I love my brother to bits. He's a complete sweetheart and always has been. (I still feel some guilt for being pretty mean to him when we were kids.) His wedding yesterday was genuinely moving. I'm not very good at weddings -- they always make me feel like I missed some sort of handout or pamphlet which everyone else read years ago. Other people were crying away, though, and even I got a lump in my throat during my brother's after dinner speech, when he said glad he was to be spending the rest of his life with Charlie. They're a lovely couple, and I'm very glad to have her as a sister-in-law.

Well, I'm proud of him. I think he has the quality I've long admired in my parents -- a sort of innocence which is not ignorance, knowing about the world and living in it with an air of being untouched by it. I don't know how they do it; I always feel thoroughly traduced by the world I live in.

Ashill, the day before my brother's wedding

It's pretty much impossible not to be yourself around your family, even if you're not sure you're really the same person they got used to all that time ago. I'm not thinking of my parents but my aunts and uncles &c, and although they're not here yet there's already a sense of them hanging in the air. (Maybe because they're presumably mostly within a smallish distance from here by now, and they're a pretty pungent bunch of personalities.) My brother asked me to be an understudy for the readings tomorrow, but with a diffident air because one is a poem about marriage, and the other is that man's man, St Paul, on husbands and wives. He specifically alluded to the fact that everyone knows I'm violently against marriage, that notorious instrument of patriarchal oppression, as he apologised for asking. I'd be very sad if I thought he didn't know I'm very pleased for him; I think it's just that in this setting he still sees me as some sort of average of my 7- to 15-year-old selves. They'll all be amazed to see me eating vegetables.

On the plus side it does take some pressure off. No one will expect me to be very sociable tomorrow, or any practical use whatever. If I do succeed in doing something helpful, like maybe boiling a kettle, I will get disproportionate applause. No one would bat an eyelid if I ran crying to my bedroom after my uncle Graham made some sexist remark, and I think I'm pretty unlikely to do that these days, so I've got a lot of leeway to play with.

Ambitions

About eight or nine years ago I formulated my two ambitions: to work three days a week, and have a dog. To these I am now adding a third: to spend substantially less of my time listening to middle-aged men talking crap.

This post is in extreme danger of being taken down shortly when I think better of it...

He bullied Albertine

I'm reading a book in which a character says about Proust:
I think he would've been a better writer if every day for about a month someone had walked into his room, stood smiling over his bed for a minute, and then punched him in the stomach.

Miranda July

This is the best book promotion site so far:
http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/

Oak apple day

Also I forgot, it's oak apple day. I know that in Devon, therefore, my father will be wearing a small branch of oak on his jacket all day. It's not that he has any particular loyalty to the Stuarts -- he's not a Tory in that sense -- but he just seizes any chance to be close to trees. (And if he can embarrass my mother at the same time that's a small bonus.)

Pwned!

I hate very much going to the dentist. It's not the threat of pain, it's the moral issue -- the guilt that I may have squandered the teeth I was given -- so I find check-ups much more frightening than if I actually have to go back for any work.

However my check-up this morning went well and I am happy. My dentist does this thing where she repeatedly jabs my gums with a sharp instrument to see if she can get them to bleed, and if she can't she gives me grudging respect. I won again today -- an auspicious start to the week!

Mad dogs

I've always liked William Dalrymple's writing, especially From the Holy Mountain, but his latest book, The Last Mughal, is really unusually good. I bet bits of it are making their way into John Julius Norwich's commonplace books; nobody did eccentric like nineteenth-century colonial governor and army types. (The Flashman papers are great at bringing this out, by the way.) For example, John Nicholson, who hated all Indians and Afghanistanis, and had little if any sense of judicial procedure. According to Dalrymple, one note he wrote to the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab simply reads:
Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I have just shot a man who came to kill me. Your Obedient Servant, John Nicholson.
Somehow he inspired an Indian religious sect called the "Nikal Seyn", which apparently means "let the army come out" in Urdu. They saw him as an incarnation of Vishnu, and he had them flogged if they chanted in his presence. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 allowed him to give full rein to his grim impulses, entering a mess tent in Jalandhar where his fellow officers were awaiting their overdue meal with the words "I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks".

The Mughal court was similarly interesting -- exotic (at least to me), rather than eccentric. The early signs of the disintegration of Hindu–Muslim relations are sad. How much influence has eighteenth-century Medina had on the modern world? I don't know anything about it, but I'm guessing it's a lot.

Kittehs!

Bertrand Russell said that he had never been so unhappy that he would not have been cheered in an appreciable measure by the sudden offer of a chocolate cream. If you don't mind being thought of as eccentric (frankly, for many of us Cambridge types it's too late to worry about that) then try suddenly giving chocolate creams to people and you'll find that he is not alone in this. But the low calorie, web-based version is cuteoverload.com, which I can never look at without feeling better. (Thanks Sarah for telling me about it some months ago!) Also good are the LOLcats at http://icanhascheezburger.com/. I love LOLcat pidgin.

Of course Bertrand Russell was a grade-A loony most of whose children and grandchildren went mad or killed themselves. So not all good.

PS Q: are swearing children funny?

Sermon and analysis

The Boutwood sermon on Sunday was preached by the Reverend Mother Angela Tilby, who has recently become the vicar of St Benet's, the church next door. I've never heard her on Thought for the Day, because I don't listen to that, but I quickly got the point that she is an excellent thing. I loved her story of swearing at motorists while overcome by road rage, for example.

Once she'd got the usual comments on romantic love over -- why do all high-church preachers have to talk about romantic love all the time? -- she said interesting stuff about psycho-analysis. In Lawrence Durrell's Avignon Quintet, which I prefer to the better-known Alexandria Quartet because it's less stuffy, there's an immensely appealing description of analysis from the early days of its development -- it makes me want to go and find an intelligent analyst and plunge into years of intensive work. It sounds like a spiritual experience, which was Angela Tilby's point, but it also seems like the one-sidedness of it would make it a problematic metaphor in this context. And of course most of us, definitely including me, could bear to think less about ourselves not more. I would have liked to have asked her, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her afterwards.

Durrell is good at making dodgy things sound more than attractive, almost essentially right and necessary. His descriptions of gnostic death cults in the Avignon Quintet are very appealing.

But on a lighter note, slightly, here is the Pet Shop Boys' song about the Blair/Bush relationship, "I'm with Stupid", with a video by David Walliams and Matt Lucas. I like this song.

The horror!

So if you didn't believe me about Kalamazoo you can read about it for yourself here. The medium reinforces the message on this one... I left before the medievalists' disco, myself, I'm not stupid.

Human behaviour

I mustn't be ruled by my increasing mustographeaphobia, because I actually had a nice realisation this afternoon. It was about someone of whom I have been thoroughly scared in my whole time in this particular institution. Other people also have been very daunted by her and felt her to be unfriendly. Today I became convinced that, however things may have progressed over time, she started out as intimidated by it all. She made a passing reference this afternoon to interview candidates as scary people, when most people would put the fear gradient the other way round. I think perhaps she just has not realised that she has been here long enough now to count as part of the establishment -- when she first got here just being female would have been a pretty ground-breaking activity on her part. Her prickliness must at least have started out as a reserved manner combined with an unwillingness to lay herself open to attack. And that is very very understandable to anyone who goes to the sort of meetings we have here.

I'm not saying that understanding this makes it suddenly OK. If someone's unfriendly, they're unfriendly whatever the reason, and we all have a tiring duty to be alert for other people's vulnerabilities and to avoid upsetting them. I suppose the reason it cheered me up so much is that it's better to think of someone as reacting through excessive dauntedness than through ill-will. But also I think it struck me so strongly because it's something I really have trouble with too. I realised in my third-year seminars that sometimes it is selfish to be scared of people, but that realisation didn't make me any better at not being scared. Then in my first PhD year a new American post-grad whom I hardly knew from Adam sat down opposite me in the pub and demanded to know if I had a problem with her. I had come across as unfriendly to the point of deliberate rudeness entirely unwittingly, and I would guess that that has happened on other occasions to people less willing to be confrontational in pubs. (It was one of the most mortifying experiences of my life. And she seemed to think that after we had got it all out in the open we could be friends, whereas of course that was absolutely impossible for me.) We mostly see ourselves as the oppressors, not the oppressed, and think we are acting on the defensive not the offensive. (Which maybe leads me back to my mustographeaphobia... but if I start trying to make too many allowances my head hurts.)

Appeal for help

I don't really know any Greek, beyond the first few words of St John's Gospel. Can anyone help me with a proper clinical label for the problem blighting my recent trips to the porters' lodge, viz a crippling fear of envelopes marked Confidential? A bash at the online Liddell and Scott makes me want to say mustographeaphobia, I guess spelt μυστογραφεαφοβια. Which is probably about as accurate as most of these terms...

Cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels

Hurray for Home Economists.

I want icecream

http://cdbaby.com/cd/michaelhearst

What is not sustainable 1.1

I have been back since this afternoon and already I'm firefighting. It's nearly eleven and I haven't had time to start any of the things I really needed to get done this evening. I wonder if leaving this city is the only solution.

Pointless displacement activity post about M&S

Well I'm back in Cambridge, and dealing with the crushing panic arising from all the things which need doing RIGHT NOW by blogging instead. I don't have anything much to say, alas. I shall just offer this thought:
Why oh why oh why does Marks and Spencer, every time I find something there I really like, immediately discontinue it? This has happened with
1. very flat chocolate-chip muffins (like muffin tops à la Seinfeld) which were designed to fit in a toaster so you could get that just-out-of-the-oven, melted-chocolate-chips experience. They were great!
2. individual low-fat trifles made of layers of chocolate mousse and chocolate custard, with a jaffa cake inbetween them which had gone all soggy. These were absolute genius. I did wonder if they were removed because they didn't have as little fat in as they claimed...
3. smoked-haddock fish cakes. They had gruyere sauce in them which went all oozy. The salmon ones aren't as good.
And countless other items which I have now forgotten. Get it together, M&S! I know it's not just me who had this experience, because when I used to work there it made the customers angry.
Disgruntled,
Tunbridge Wells

PS that place-name reminds me of another recent annoying experience; I was reading about an irreplaceable historical manuscript which was ruined by the BL, and a certain Adrian Gilbert of Tonbridge posted a comment wondering if the Christian manuscripts of the BL are safe now that so many veiled women work there. Obviously this is the comment of an a-grade a-hole, but further to that the ruined manuscript was the 300-year old diary of a Jacobite. Who would deliberately sabotage that? A disgruntled Whig? Get it together, Adrian Gilbert of Tonbridge! Do you even live in a world where every person is a complex and unpredicatable individual?

Scandi-pop

I missed Eurovision -- I suppose that while it was happening I was travelling across Lake Michigan. I had an instant message while I was killing time at O'Hare from a friend saying it had been great. He wouldn't tell me who had won, though. (Maybe he'd forgotten -- he sounded like he'd had a good evening.) But he said that the UK did very badly. I like it when the UK does badly at Eurovision. This is how it should be. Here is some proper Scandinavian pop:

Stranded in Michigan with 3200 medievalists!!1!

Well, I put up a post about Kalamazoo and then took it down again because of (rare for me) qualms that if you don't have anything nice to say you shouldn't say anything at all. The town itself is not so very bad, but I'm not fond of conferences, and this is really the über-conference. Hopefully I can get away with not going again ever.

One disturbing thing was meeting a professor who has been working on the same project as me for a while, the project that misguidedly paid for me to go to "the 'Zoo". Apart from e-mails we were both cc'ed in on, the first communication I had from him was to tell me that he'd had a dream about me. Ah, I thought, reaching for my I-Spy Spotters' Guide to Academics, an Elderly Amiable Lunatic. (You don't get many points for those.) But when I met him he turned out to be relatively young and good-looking -- he really must be at least in his late forties, but he looks younger. Which made me rethink the whole thing and find it rather creepy. I don't know if it's OK to be prejudiced against the attractive? A troubling moral question there. My personal feeling is that they get away with things so much that it's actually an act of cosmic justice to give them a hard time.

Anyhoo I'm back at Chicago O'Hare airport waiting for my flight to London, so it's all nearly safely over. The rats are in Devon, amusing themselves in various ways -- Muesli managed to convince my poor mother that she was at death's door, but then was fine the next day. I've got nearly three hours to kill. 4oD doesn't work overseas (booooo...) but luckily I have discovered a rich vein of Peter Cook on YouTube. Back in 1990 he did a series of twelve short Christmas things as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (of teaching ravens to fly underwater fame). It's called A Life in Pieces, and here is episode one.

No, after you...

Actually I'm quite pleased to be leaving Chicago as the courtesy is beginning to take it out of me. I've had to ratchet my politeness level up from Big City through Cambridge Supermarket and Faculty Building right up to At Church in Devon with my Mum. This involves not going within about fifteen inches of anyone without apologising, even on the subway, even if it involves having to find a new route to get somewhere, and it also requires saying hello and, later, goodbye to people in elevators. I just bought a banana after airport security; the lady at the till saw I was struggling with lots of stuff and carefully packed my bagel and my water and various bits and pieces into a neat package with handles and extra napkins, and handed it to me with glee. Now I'm sat at the gate listening to some flight attendants swapping stories about passengers who were particularly charming or nice to them. Next time in the U.S. I'm going to New York.

Land of the free

So here I am back in the US of, renewing my acquaintance with non-dairy creamer. Apart from the non-dairy creamer I've been surprised by how easy America is to like. It's only my second visit. Last summer I went to San Francisco and Los Angeles, but this time I'm in the Mid-West, specifically Chicago and then Kalamazoo. In California I was struck by how hotel staff and waiters seemed to find it a really interesting challenge to help people, in the same way that if a reader asks me about an Anglo-Saxon manuscript in the Parker I enjoy answering their questions as best I can, or setting them on the right track. In San Francisco I asked for advice about shops that opened early so I could get breakfast and some lunch to take on a full-day whale-watching trip, and without even asking the hotel owner arranged for me to have a wake-up call, early breakfast and packed lunch, for no extra charge.

I've only been in the Mid-West for a short time but the service seems a bit less exuberant here, though there's still an urge to please which leads to some odd exchanges. I got the passcode for the wifi service over the phone, and when I'd written it all down I asked the man if any of the letters should be capitals, and he said I could capitalise them all if I wanted. Which is liberty for you, I suppose -- too many choices.

Also I like the way that here in Chicago people seem to have a sense of personal space at least equal to mine, and politeness about door opening and passing in narrow spaces at a full cripplingly-English level. When I speak they react to my accent with a mixture of affection and pity, which I love, because in my day-to-day interactions a mixture of affection and pity is exactly what I'm aiming for. Hurray for Chicago! If only it weren't so humid...

Cheap thrills

But I've cheered myself up by buying Tone-Loc songs on iTunes for a total of £1.58. It's great living in the future.

What is wrong with this place 1.1

What's wrong with Cambridge is that it offers you so very many opportunities to feel fundamentally unsuited for the things you are doing. I've just been shortlisting for a job in which several of the things I found attractive about candidates were the things which automatically ruled them out in the minds of people who know much more about it than me. That's frequently my experience when interviewing prospective undergraduates as well.

I was even completely out of my depth on the Soft Furnishings Committee. Reread that sentence: soft furnishings; out of my depth.

Also did you know that the United Reformed Church is not in communion with the Church of England? Half my family is URC and half CofE, and I worship in both churches interchangeably -- how on earth did I not know that? And for what possible reason could they not be in communion? The world is bizarre. Not the least bizarre part of it; Cambridge.

Life

Little Lilian died in the night. I'm feeling a bit bad because I was quite relieved to find her dead this morning -- I think I would have had to have taken her to the vet to be put to sleep this evening or tomorrow morning. She's been on her way out all week, and last night she refused a delicious treat, although she still made happy noises when I tickled her behind the ears, bless her. It's been very odd watching her be so frail because for most of her life she was all lithe and agile, one of my handsomest rats, very strong and bouncy. And extremely cheeky -- she would eat treats quickly and then rejoin the back of the queue, and she was also very quick to nibble the things I had thought it would be safe to put down just for ten seconds.

Reckless piety

Roy Hattersley on John Wesley and women:
Charismatic preachers have always attracted admirers. Not all of them have either enjoyed or encouraged infatuation with Wesley's reckless piety. He remained, into old age, dangerously susceptible to every woman who seemed to admire him. His misfortune was that he felt only able to express his emotions in the form of uplifting moral advice.

"His misfortune" -- I would have said, his luck.

More likely, not luck but self-control. Hurray for not having to read about Wesley behaving badly with women! I think Hattersley is a little harsh on him -- there's really no reason why it was discreditable of Wesley to write to young women with uplifting moral advice.

Today's notes

Today it's Archbishop Wulfstan's Handbook (190). I note that next to the section de fornicatione clericorum et sanctimonalium, on the fornication of clerks and nuns, a medieval hand has written Sancta Maria ora pro nobis -- which is quite sad, I think.


Archbishop Parker has joyfully underlined the bit in Ælfric's letter about teaching people the gospel propria lingua, in their own language, but he won't have enjoyed so much the parts about how priests should not get married.

In a contemporary hand, e.g. very soon after the Norman Conquest, a scribe has copied the penitential decrees concerning those who fought at the Battle of Hastings. No matter which side you were on you did one year's penance for everyone you killed in battle, and forty days for everyone you wounded. If you were a priest or a monk you might be given extra penance by your bishop or abbot. Archers, who didn't know how many people they might have killed or wounded, had to do three periods of forty days' penance. The tariff went up if you did any of these things after the consecration of William the Conqueror, rather than in battle. It's an interesting attitude to war, that everyone who killed or wounded had to cleanse themselves afterwards, no matter whether they fought on the winning side -- very different from our modern way of dealing with it, which is victory parades on one side, war-crimes tribunals on the other.

Strangely warmed

I've been reading a biography of John Wesley. I've always been fond of the Methodists, so I thought I should find out more about how it all started. Recently there's been a lot of talk of the Methodists coming back into the Church of England -- the two denominations signed a covenant in 2003. I've often heard it talked of gloomily, but actually everyone knows how much John Wesley, and even more so his brother Charles, would have been pleased by this idea.

What's surprising me in reading this biography is what the exact things were which caused the separation in the first place. These seem to be that the Methodists wanted a) lay preachers b) regular communion c) extempore prayers. At the time the Church of England was still very much a respectable profession, rather than a calling, and it was rather de trop to have any strong feelings about God. (These days it's a rather unrespectable calling, which frankly I rejoice at.) Today lay preachers are very frequently found -- anyone might be preaching at my parents' church, and even I have been asked to preach in chapel here, though I declined on the grounds that I didn't have anything to say. In terms of regular communion the Church of England has rather overtaken the Protestant churches -- weekly communion is the norm, and our chapel provides daily communion during term-time. And if you tried to suggest to the Church of England that they should only use prayers which were read aloud exactly from a printed book I doubt you'd get very far.

So it's rather pleasant than otherwise to think of the Methodists becoming part of the Church of England again. They've always been a sensible and hearty bunch.

Hippety-hoppety

There's no need for that

Apparently Popworld has been cancelled!

This is as good a place as any to store this

The Lord's Prayer in Old English (162 pp. 17-18)
Ðu ure fæder
þu ðe eart on heofonum
sy þin nama gehalgod
cume þin rice
si þin willa
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum
syle us todæg urne dæghwamlice hlaf
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað þam ðe wið us agyltað
and ne gelæ[d] þu na us on costnunge
ac alys us fram yfele
sy hit swa.

Beware beware her flashing eyes her floating hair!

I have a touch of Stendhal syndrome this morning.

Happy things about the Old English gospels

1. The Old English for disciple is "leorning cnihtas", literally "learning boys". (Cniht became elevated in meaning over the years, until it became the modern word knight, which is why we spell it like that, how we used to pronounce it.)
2. Beautiful script. Well done, AElfric and your friends at Bath!
3. There are odd hooks on some ascenders. Yay!
4. It has manumissions in it.
5. It made Parker happy. Poor old Parker didn't have a lot of things to make him happy once Elizabeth made him archbishop.
6. The script of John is quite rectangular. I collect quite rectangular script. (Quite rectangular is a technical term we palaeographers use -- it's a very complex discipline, no really it is.)
7. In Old English you don't ask, you ax. Just like in Futurama!
8. Jesus says his kingdom is not of Middle Earth. (Though that's Tolkien's fault for nicking Old English terminology -- it just means "this world".)

I approve of this

It could almost be Belgian.

Learning

As part of one of my jobs I get to edit some Anglo-Saxon charters, specifically the archive of Wilton Abbey. The problem is that there have always been easily enough other things going on to fill up my half-time work on that project; but this week I decided just to ignore them all and get on with the editing. It's making me happy. It's not a surprise to me that I'm enjoying the writing, but it's been so long since I did the thing where you write something and send it off and it comes back covered in scribbled corrections and suggestions. Editing Latin isn't too much of a problem -- I find that if I sit down and translate it very carefully that helps to catch any errors I or the scribe have made. But editing Old English boundary clauses is a new thing for me. It involves making annotated translations, so that this:
Ærest on roddan pol nioþeƿeardne
becomes:
First to the lower-part of ? Rodda’s pool (? gen. pers. n. Rodda or river-name cf. R. Rodden, Salop, or *rodde, ‘club, pole’; + pol, ‘pool in a river’).
Then ideally I work out where Rodda's pool is, and the next step in the bounds (langan hlinc, the long bank) and so on until I've oulined the whole Anglo-Saxon estate -- probably it coincides with the parish boundaries. Luckily Susan Kelly, queen of charters, is helping me.

Learning stuff is fun. Yay!

If you live near Didlington or Chalbury in Dorset help would be appreciated. Plus once I've done this one there's another 33 to go.

Thinking

I have a horrible suspicion I'm coming down with another flu/cold; my head is bunged up and I feel awful for no reason.

If you were going to make an intelligence test, a basic portmanteau one, then you might get people doing puzzles under timed conditions. That's essentially what an intelligence test is, though perhaps with a careful variety of puzzles. But when I'm ill I can power through Sudoku and Kakuro and the other puzzles I have lying around, I just sort of hoover them up. Last time I had flu it didn't even feel like thinking -- I just knew where the numbers went, and it was almost mystical. This morning I have done several 5-star Killer Sudokus in quick time, while usually I have to abandon about half of them because I'm stuck. But my brain is clearly not functioning 100%. It feels like it's stuffed with cotton wool. The bugs seem to have impaired some part of it which usually prevents my thinking in that pure mathematical way.

Possibly it's related to this phenomenon, where sleep-deprived people made quick moral decisions based on numerical factors. In the meantime I've had enough of Sudoku and I'm going back to bed.

Genre fiction

So, a novel about fighting cannibals in a post-apocalyptic wasteland wins the Pullitzer, and is therefore serious fiction, and a novel about Isaac Newton and the Glorious Revolution wins the Prometheus award, which makes it science fiction and for geeks. This is very annoying: I assume it's because Cormac McCarthy has always been writing the great American novel while Neal Stephenson started in "postcyberpunk", apparently. This is all just pointless categorisation. Borges gets credited as the real thing, but closest to him in spirit writing at the moment are people like Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, who count as genre. It's not just science fiction and fantasy, there's chick-lit, romance, and detective fiction too; there's some serious writing tucked away in those sections of the book shops, and some poor rubbish on the main shelves. And it's not like it's not genre to have to read another blooming novel about people living in London having disfunctional love lifes and hating their jobs. Enough already! Especially if they're losing their minds in some way, or are being brutalised by cubicle life.

Names

George Foreman's has called all five of his sons George Edward Foreman after himself. Two of his five daughters also have George-related names.

Aren't scientists wierd 1.1

Here are some scientists tickling rats under laboratory conditions:




Apparently rats like to play...

Deux pressions, s'il-vous plaît

I have just got back from Paris, where I went to see an exhibition and some Parisian friends. I had a very nice time -- I'm always surprised how much I like Paris. The romanticisation is a lot of baloney, but it's actually a lovely city. I went with a friend who has the excellent quality of a similar attention span to me, and this makes me free to say that all the art is beginning to bore me and I could do with a beer. Yay! Not to mention how effortlessly they seem to make good food there.

The exhibition was wonderful, but also frustrating in that I want to see script, and of course the parts of the books which are open are the shiny bits. These may or may not have some minuscule script on them, but the higher grade the book the more likely it is to have whole openings of gold and majuscules, so the sort of script I particularly want to find out about for a project of my own, the Caroline minuscule of high-grade liturgical manuscripts, remains annoying invisible a few pages further into the book. I can forgive the general public for this, easily, because there's no reason why my preoccupations should be imposed on the world at large, and in general decorated pictures are beautiful and appealing -- though I do think that most people appreciate a good page of script if shown it -- maybe just a few pages at a time though, not a whole roomful. But it annoys me that curators take this point of view too -- that the tip of the book-iceberg, the pretty stuff, is the only bit that counts. It's because they tend to be art-historians, not historians. The catalogue could easily have included more pictures of the script of the manuscripts.

That aside, it was an excellent trip. I put a very edited group of photos up here, many of them taken from the Seine on a boat trip, using my little camera phone.

Devon, I'm in Devon

A pair of buzzards live in one of our oak trees, and as I type this I'm watching them through my bedroom window, rising on the thermals. They spiral round and round to get to a good height for hunting. It reminds me of the Fatboy Slim track, Bird of Prey, though the video for that has a different sort of bird of prey.

In the paddock a week-old baby alpaca is trying to get some starlings to play with her while her mother grazes. She should have some better playmates within a few days because the other two alpacas in the field are both heavily pregnant. I saw one being born once. It was bizarre; it just sort of slid out in a long thin sausage shape, mostly made of legs. After a moment's rest it unfolded, and in less than an hour she was on her feet and exploring with the whole herd following behind her. The mother didn't seem particularly bothered by the experience, and continued to graze for most of it. A couple of hours later she produced a bulging purple afterbirth which, contrary to EU regulations, my parents buried.

Young parents

My mother recently told me that her wedding day was the worst day of her life. She's not keen on being the centre of everyone's attention, and at only 21 I suppose she was young enough to take all the kerfuffle very seriously. This picture shows her and my dad at 18 and 19, when they'd already been engaged for a year. Aren't they adorable? They're younger than many of my students. It's like they're from a different planet from me.

It was taken by a photographer who was roaming the streets of Aberdeen looking for pictures of city life. I suppose they represented the students and youth and all that. My dad has a beard and a bald patch now, and my mum's hair has been white-grey for as long as I can remember. Other than that they haven't actually changed much.

(It's their 35th wedding anniversary soon, so she's allowed to say that about her wedding day.)

Things that are quite good

1. Blackbirds doing that thing where they run past you with their heads down, to draw you away from the nest, in case you're feeling malevolent. I'm not malevolent to blackbirds but I do think it's a nice gesture. I hope the fact that I never follow them isn't putting them off; I saw one of them looking at me puzzledly today as I walked away.
2. This website for an exhibition on Carolingian manuscripts in Paris, and the fact that I'm going to out to see it the week after next. The website's quite good, you can play with it to get nice images, and some of them are script which is good.
3. Avril Lavigne completely not getting it in the latest Popworld: free from 4OD.
4. Kittehs.