Qualifier

Though there is a slightly unholy collaboration with Starbucks here.

Yum

New ipods.

Sensible rats

One of the pleasures of having pets, friends, and presumably children, is giving them things you know they will like and watching their enjoyment. Spotting the first cobnuts on sale at the market or ordering rat treats at the excellent ratwarehouse.co.uk gives me a thrill. But if I give my rats the wrong thing they know how to tell me; the offered item is neatly dropped and they give me a piercing stare. Come on, they seem to say, you can do better than that. Usually what they want is a yogurt drop or one of these 'treat-ums' (aka rat crack):
But they also seem to know what's good for them. When they were on antibiotics about two months ago they were initially unenthused, until after one or two days they seemed to have realised that the medicine was doing them good, and they would eagerly wait by the bars every evening for their dose. On Monday evening they were a bit out of sorts and wouldn't take any treats at all; they kept staring at me intensely, and I couldn't get rid of the feeling that they wanted medicine. Yesterday they were worse, and today they look quite bad. I got a repeat prescription, and although they didn't want any treats at all, they flung themselves at the medicine with glee. People might think that I'm anthropomorphising here but I really think they were asking for the medicine because they felt ill. If they hadn't asked I wouldn't have phoned to arrange the repeat prescription, and by the time I had thought of it for myself today it would have meant one more day they had to wait for it. They are amazing animals for training me; all the rats I've kept have been able to convey what they want to me and I'm never quite sure how the first link came in my brain. One of those now long dead used to sit on my hand and lean according to which way she wanted to be carried. If I took her to the right place she would hop off, and if I didn't she'd just keep leaning and gesturing where she wanted to go. In the previous cage I had they used to ask to come out by sitting by a cage door which was almost never used; the door I always opened to get them out was by their favourite relaxing post. So although the logical thing would have been for them to sit by the door through which I let them out, they seemed to realise that this might have confused me because I could have thought they were just relaxing there. Instead they would go to the door which was out of the way, where the message was unambiguous.

Nekhlyudov considers matrimony

In favour of marrying Missy in particular ... was, to begin with, that she came of good family ... and secondly, there was the fact that she thought more highly of him than of any other man she knew, which, as he saw things, meant that she understood him. And this understanding of him, that is, her recognition of his superior worth, was proof to Nekhlyudov of her good sense and sound judgement.

Tolstoy, Resurrection, chapter 4

Why can't we all just get along?

I read an interesting book about the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and the first fifty years of New England. We don't get the mythology over here to the same extent, but it's still rather surprising to discover that the picture-book version of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims and the 'Indians' sharing a meal together and being generally thankful for it, is actually quite accurate. The event does seem worth celebrating, in its own way -- the Pilgrims were occasionally a bit rubbish, but on the whole both groups of people at this date acted in ways that seem to suggest that it might be possible for people all just to get along. Alas within fifty years it had completely broken down, there was a terrible war with mass killings and horrendous atrocities on both sides, and the English in particular became very racially motivated, incapable of seeing differences between different tribes, and generally fulfilling all the vague impressions I had in my mind of the appalling behaviour of the early American colonists to the native people. It's interesting that this book tries, like so many, to throw a 'lessons-from-history' spin on it at the end and make it all relevant to the war on terror etc, with limited success. I suppose that people reading a hundred years from now will notice this in many books from our time, and find it poignant, though they of course will know how it ends.

I also read Resurrection by Tolstoy. It's about a young nobleman who is called to serve jury duty. In the defendant, a prostitute accused of murdering and robbing a client, he recognises the girl he seduced and abandoned ten years before. The book is bitterly satirical in places; it's very good, but I can't help but feel I should have read it when I was eighteen and ardent. It's interesting seeing the contrast with Dostoyevsky's portrayal of prison life in The House of the Dead; it seems to me like Tolstoy is always more concerned with theory, and Dostoyevsky with people. Obviously that's a very broad generalisation, but I think that's why I usually prefer Dostoyevsky.

Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Fraser is quite good, and interesting because the stories are interesting. It does read as if it has been a little clumsily edited down from a much longer work, though . It doesn't give much credence to the accusations of black masses and poisoning against Madame de Montespan, and doesn't give that sense of the sheer mass hysteria of Louis XIV's court which you get from other accounts. Probably she's right. I didn't know that Athenaîs continued to have the status of maîtresse en titre long after she and the King were no longer having any sort of physical relationship; and even after Madame de Maintenon had started sleeping with him on the grounds that if she didn't then he'd just get it somewhere else, and that that would interfere with her project to reform him.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke is an excellent collection of short stories, some relating to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I love the one with Anthony a Wood in it, and also the excellent Bess of Hardwick, who always seemed a bit uncanny in her housewifely social advancement. Corpus Christi features in one of them; a greedy and conceited fellow gets in trouble in a remote parish.

And for some light relief I read the third Temeraire book, Black Powder War. I enjoyed it as much as the previous ones. It's like baby Patrick O'Brian; it's what the midshipmen would be reading. I should think even Maturin wouldn't spurn it in lighter moments -- perhaps while recovering from a broken leg, or if deprived of his supply of coca leaves.

Bored genie

When I was a kid, because it's dull if the genie offers you three wishes and you ask for
1) world peace
2) cures for all diseases
3) another three wishes
the rule was that you only got your wish if you wished for something no one else had ever wished for. At the moment what I want is a spare brain in a hat. It would be a top hat, one of those strokable black ones where the fur on the top looks like grass after an animal has made a bed there. It would not be collapsible. I expect that the new brain would connect to my old brain via a tube in one ear. Then, in order not to be exposed, I would pretend to the strong principles of the early Quakers and never doff my hat for anyone. People would say "Look, there goes that strange woman who always wears a top hat", but I wouldn't care because I would have a spare brain. I would use it for organising and keeping track of things, and not for thinking, because I'm not greedy and my current brain will do for that.

Book resolutions

Sticking to my new-found seriousness in book choice, I read The Sea of Faith by Stephen O'Shea. It's about the first thousand years of Muslim--Christian interaction in the Mediterranean. It's interesting because of its broad view, but on the other hand quite a few of the episodes, e.g. the fall of Constantinople, are already pretty familiar. I was interested to learn about Muslim Spain, and also it had never struck me before quite how meteoric the spread of Islamic power was -- only about a hundred years after Muslim armies first emerged as a threat to Byzantine power in the east, they were fighting Charles Martel at Poitiers. The author occasionally says stupid things, but mostly he writes well. I also read Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead, which is just utterly remarkable. He was an incredible author, not just because of how he wrote, but what he wrote about.

But one evening, when there was nothing on television and I didn't feel like working, I decided to relax by reading more low-brow books, and got through the first two volumes of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. (This is why I have no savings.) These books are actually very good. A bit like Suzanne Clarke in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Novik places a characteristic of fantasy, in this case dragons rather than magic, into real Napoleonic-era history. It works well, and at the end of the second book appears to be going off somewhere thought-provoking. The third is out in paperback soon so I'll get it then. All the writing at the moment which is really interesting is Sci-Fi or Fantasy-type stuff. That old genre, Secrets of the Past are Revealed, just doesn't cut it for me like it used to. What really happened at The House at Riverton (by Kate Morton)? What is the meaning of The Savage Garden (by Mark Mills)? What was The Thirteenth Tale (by Diane Setterfield)? I've lost the ability to care. From now it's Dostoyevsky or sci-fi for me, I think.

Some more reading

I've just finished The Islamist by Ed Husain, which is very interesting. I wasn't expecting to find it moving but I did. I've thought about it and I think it's moving because 1) it's a nice change to read something which doesn't treat faith as intrinsically stupid, but takes a more subtle approach by looking at different manifestations of faith and 2) his anger at the way that Muslims are manipulated by people who want to turn their faith into a political thing reminds me of how angry it makes me when I feel that certain types of Christians are taking advantage of Christians like my parents.

A bit of a grumble

After wowing South America with my pasta-related repartee on Radio Columbia (live from Bogotà) in 2003, I have at last been picked up by the British media, and made my UK radio debut this morning. A nice lady phoned me up on Friday to check the blurb, and I pointed out a few minor errors, but the original version has gone up on the website anyhow. It's probably not her fault. I listened to myself for a little bit; I'm surprised I sound like that.

My main grumble is that today I got a letter informing me that for my examining this summer I am to be paid £55 before tax. Now, £55 (minus tax) is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick; I can't dispute that. But what I did for those fifty-five Great British Pounds was: set by myself an entire final-year exam paper, with twelve essay questions and a complex gobbet question with images and texts in Latin and Old English with translations; turn up in my gown to start the exam and stay within contact during it (I started another one too but that was as a favour to a friend); mark ten exam scripts of the same paper, with all the attendant agonising over half-marks; mark five third-year undergraduate dissertations on various subjects at the outer limits of my knowledge; reconcile marks with second markers. (I ducked out of the examiners' meetings since my attendance wasn't mandatory.) This series of tasks (not at all part of either of my jobs) took a lot of time; drew very heavily on my knowledge of various highly-specialised subjects; and involved also a big emotional effort -- these were young people's finals marks, after all. I used to earn the same amount of money in a Sunday afternoon on the tills at Marks and Spencer's.

Philip Pullman

Now I've actually read the Literary Review's interview with Philip Pullman which I mentioned before I find that he is writing a sequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy which will apparently "answer some of the huge theological questions thrown up by his reworking of the Fall". (It will be called "The Book of Dust" and be about Lyra.) So I think I shall wait 'til that's out in paperback before rereading the Trilogy.

In the interview he quotes that annoying saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. This has always irritated me, because it seems to imply that belief is something clutched at in panic and therefore either real and honest or quite the opposite. It would be truer to say that atheists and believers are both less sure of themselves in foxholes. Although the spider-pig is excellent, my favourite bit of the Simpsons film is when the people of Springfield come out into the street to see their doom approaching. All the worshippers run out of the church, and the drinkers out of Moe's Tavern, see the disaster in the sky, and then all the people from the church rush into the tavern and all the people from the tavern rush into the church. It's good to be shaken up and made less certain about things. I could be seduced by the argument that we spend most of our lives sleep-walking anyway. The first time I went to stay at the nunnery at West Malling I found it hard to confront their regime -- every few hours they stop to praise God, because God is to be praised, and there are none of the endless daily chores to hide behind, you have to meet very large things face on. After a few days, though I still found it a hard discipline, I had got very acclimatised. The morning that I left I sat on the platform at West Malling station and felt swamped by what seemed like a heap of utter trivia -- what time would the train get me to London, when would I get home, what laundry needed doing, what did I have in the fridge, whom should I phone -- when a very talkative friend of mine phoned my mobile and I could hardly put sentences together to answer her. It felt like normal life was the most absurd lunacy. To the abbot of Worth, the monastery of the eponymous BBC series, it is clear that much of our busy-ness is stuff we have made up to distract our minds. I could be persuaded of this.

The odd thing is that Philip Pullman seems to be saying that God might exist for some people who need him -- he implies, people with difficult lives. (It sounds like one should call no man an atheist until he is dead, which is as annoying as the foxhole thing I'd have thought.) I await with a mixture of apprehension and interest his resolution of "huge theological questions". Something I will miss about being a fellow is access to people with genuine theological knowledge. In particular, the college chaplain, though I frequently disagreed with his views, has a very large body of theology at his fingertips, not only from the great patristic era, but from the twentieth century and the present. I would be very tempted to do a theology degree if I had the money -- only, it would be too embarrassing if I didn't get a first, and the stress was bad enough last time. So, my good intentions are defeated by worldliness. Ho hum.

Better reading

I decided that I needed to lay off the 3-for-2 (or £3.73 from Tesco) novels for a while, and read some chewier books which occupy one for more than two or three hours' total. I have so far read two books under this new regime, both of which are very good. A recent biography of Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howells has made me feel all inactive and silly -- she really was an amazing woman. I wish I could have met her. I wish I could learn fluent Arabic, don a jellibah, and ride into the sunset on a silken-flanked racing camel. I read a review of this book, though, which says that the author's estimate of the state in which Iraq was left after Bell's death is optimistic, and I'd like to have a better understanding of this.

Then I read a truly unusual novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki. This is a big shaggy dog story full of stories within stories like the Arabian Nights, or to a lesser extent the Decameron, but in spirit quite like Tristram Shandy. It's also a bit like The Master and Margarita in being a classic which ought to be as famous as Moby Dick, for similar reasons. It was written in the late eighteenth century by a mad highly-educated Polish count, who later blew his brains out with a silver bullet which he had first had blessed by his chaplain. The textual tradition, likewise, makes one wonder if the whole thing wasn't invented by Borges...

Country life

Things are a little sad chez Rushforth right now, as Georgie the baby alpaca had to be put to sleep earlier today. My mum and I took her to the vet yesterday, and today she was worse, so a nice man in a waxed jacket came out and administered the coup de grace. They say that if you've got livestock, you've got deadstock. My mother is much better at this sort of thing than my dad, who gets very melancholy about it. Me, I'm sad about Georgie, but I hadn't been feeding her regularly like my parents had, and I do think she was too miserable to be kept going any longer.

Also, this morning I woke up to find a small mobile installed above my bed, two large moths dangling from strands of spider web. This evening I evicted a large gangly-legged spider, and thought I'd got the culprit. But just now a huge black spider-beast with hairy legs, huge mandibles, and a body the size of a large wasp, scurried down my wall and behind some books I need to pack. I am sure that in the night I will squash it and wake up with squashed spider on my face. In short, I am ready to return to civilisation.

Avignon art

There have been good popes and bad popes, and the fact that there have been rather more of the latter is probably the fault of the Donation of Constantine. This document purported to be a grant of the Western Empire by the eponymous emperor to the bishops of Rome; it was forged in the second half of the eighth century, probably, and taken seriously until the mid-fifteenth. It made the popes into temporal princes, with territories to defend, alliances and treaties to make, and conversely secular enemies. It was this sort of political manouevring that forced the popes to leave Rome in the fourteenth century, and take up refuge in Avignon, in the pocket of the French kings, where they found ways to console themselves for their losses. Most of the Avignon popes lived sybaritic lives, holding the sort of banquets that sound like hard work even to attend, let alone for the servants -- records survive listing for one feast figures like 10 471 hens, 1023 sheep, 46 856 cheeses, etc. The one or two popes who did show some devotion to the church did so by throwing their energies into the ruthless detection and burning of heretics. This makes them unsympathetic, frankly. Cheerful gluttony looks less likeable when you consider what a huge pyramid of people's frank and anxious devotions supported the expenditure.

The local heresy, which still lingered in the mountains, was a kind of Manichaeism, pitting a good god of things spiritual against a bad god of the flesh. A few men, the parfaits, were supported by the people and undertook to abstain from meat (though not fish) and sex, but the majority did just what they felt like, on the grounds that sex with a prostitute or mistress was no more sinful than sex with a wife, etc, and trusting that they could be redeemed by a parfait on their deathbed. (After that last-minute purification they were not allowed to eat or drink again and had to starve to death, so they had to hope their relatives had correctly assessed their condition.) It doesn't seem so far removed from the attitude of the popes and cardinals, who must surely have assumed that their lives in the fleshpots could be attoned for in the eyes of God by alms-giving and death-bed confession. The attraction of Catharism seems at least partly to have been hatred of the heavy church taxes which paid for the church's lifestyle. This was the period when it was condemned as a heresy to say that Christ lived without possessions, because it might set a dangerous example.

It must be knowing this that gives an odd quality to the surviving papal art in the Petit Palais. It looks almost blatantly secular, without even a mask of piety. Even the carved angels have a distinctly worldly air, while the prophets and apostles look utterly weary, and Christ's gestures seem more rude than benedictional. There are surviving frescos there from a cardinal's house; they show scenes of hunting, dancing, and stolen kisses in beautiful gardens.

The rest of the Petit Palais has a collection of largely Italian art up til about 1550, which feels like a return to seriousness. There are some truly beautiful early icon-style works, and lots of beautifully executed madonnas in rich brocades -- the Pre-Raphaelites would have loved it. It's one of the best art museums I've been to in ages, and surprisingly uncrowded. It's all kept in a huge decorated stone building with stunning views over the Pont St-Bénézet (of the dance) and the Rhône. It was the original papal palace, but was soon found inadequate to their needs, so they built the Palais des Papes.

Holiday reading

To take my mind off a seriously disgusting encounter this afternoon with the less attractive side of baby alpacas, I have written some reviews of the books I've been reading on my holiday.

Mother Leakey and the Bishop, by Peter Marshall
This is an excellent little history book of the sort I would like to write myself. It's about the ghost of Mother Leakey who appeared to some people in Minehead in the 1630s, and how this relates to the story of a Bishop hanged in Ireland in 1640 for "unspeakable crimes". Very readable and quite fun.

Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann
George the shepherd is found dead by his flock of sheep, who decide that they will investigate his murder. Unusual and funny, with a convincing sheeps'-eye view of human behaviour. Also a little poignant.

Pelagia and the White Bulldog, by Boris Akunin
I didn't enjoy the first Erast Fandorin mystery as much as the reviewers, so I had sort of given up on Boris Akunin. But this book is very good, and somehow satisfyingly Russian. Maybe I will have another look at the Fandorin books.

The School for Scumbags, by Danny King
Readable enough. Not much in the way of surprises but the criminal schemes of the schoolboys are sometimes amusing.

Montaillou, by Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie
This is an interesting social history book, looking at the depositions made by a village full of heretics to an inquisitor in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The problem is that the stories are brought out to illustrate social points, like how co-godparents related to each other, and many of the quotations sound like the start of interesting tales which one would like to read in full. Although the author is interested in conditions and mores in a mountain village, the personalities of the people involved are what makes it a really compelling book.

Avignon of the Popes, by Edwin Mullins
Quite well-written, straight-forward account of the sojourn of the popes at Avignon. Seven popes lived there and two anti-popes. Telling the difference between a pope and an anti-pope is best left to the experts.

The Discreet Interventions of Verdon James, by Julian Roach
The puff on the front mentions Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, so I was expecting something rather light-hearted and rompish, but it pleasantly surprised me by being better than that, and distinctly more substantial. It makes one think, presumably deliberately, of the links between the rise of fascism in the 1930s and the fatuous material of the Da Vinci code, which is an interesting point. Includes a novel way of avoiding death duties and of dealing with a blackmailer.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon
This first novel by a talented writer is a precise demonstration of why no one under the age of at least 30 should be allowed to write a novel -- or maybe simply no one over the age of 30 should read works so produced.

Donne: the Reformed Soul, by John Stubbs
Prone to occasional oddities or flourishes of phrase or reference, which is forgiveable in someone who has spent so much time with such an allusive author, and on occasion they come off quite well. Readable because Donne is so readable, and so lasting. I used to enjoy, and still do, his love poems, but then the sacred sonnets and latterly the meditations and sermons have grown on me as some of the greatest writing ever, which is interesting because of course that's the progression Donne made when he wrote them. I should imagine many other people feel like this too but maybe it helps to be a Christian.

Nobody Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July
Disappointing. Not as good as the website. Some good stories, but mostly a bit too much on the borderline whimsical/fatuous. Very like her film "Me, You, and Everyone We Know", if you've seen that, though maybe I expect more from fiction than films because I didn't find that quite so annoying. I had read all sorts of good reviews about this book, but I get the feeling she's one of the Dave Eggers/McSweeney's group and that's why Dave Eggers and other McSweeney's people like her so very much.

One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson
Very good, intelligent and satisfying. I like Kate Atkinson, and I like the hero of her last two books, Jackson, with his terrible compulsion to protect people.

The Tenderness of Wolves, by Stef Penney
Quite good. Readable, not very surprising. There are a lot of books like this about at the moment -- workmanlike fiction, satisfying but forgettable.

Seven Tales of Sex and Death, by Patricia Duncker
Duncker, on the other hand, is an original. Some of these are very good, some are pretty shocking. I like Zeus as a stalker.

Hav, by Jan Morris
Jan Morris is also unique. I like this very much, but I think I might understand it better if I had read more travel writing. It seems like there's a riddle there that I'm not quite getting. Hav is memorable, and the Myrmidons unpleasantly banal, and Cathars, which is appropriate to my holiday destination.

The Savage Garden, by Mark Mills
Yet more readable, forgettable fiction, though with a reasonably pleasing historical mystery aspect to it. It's my own fault I keep encountering this undemanding stuff -- I think I need to read something tougher next.

Popes' houses

I learnt something about papal architecture by stumbling across the palais des papes on my first night in Avignon, trying to find my hotel in the high-sided medieval streets. It startled me in exactly the same way as the first time I went to read in the Vatican; it gives the impression that you've just been dropped into a place where everyone is two or three times as tall as you. Windows are very high, and the gap between stories huge, but it's all done to scale as if it were just natural. You imagine walking in and having to clamber up the stairs like a toddler. I assume the effect is entirely intentional. I wonder if it's because in Italy and France they had Roman remains about to give them ideas. When the Anglo-Saxons came across Roman ruins they famously called them enta geweorc, the works of giants, even though they knew their history perfectly well. In Arles, which I went to for a day, they have a huge amphitheatre, apparently one of the best preserved surviving. Roman Arles also had a large theatre, and a circus for chariot racing; but in the middle ages a substantial proportion of the dwindled population moved into the amphitheatre and used it as a fortress, dismantling the top storey and building watchtowers with it. There were over 200 houses, three streets, and two chapels inside the arena when it was cleared in the nineteenth century. It's a complete shift in scale from the Roman period.

Here is a picture of one of the watchtowers built in the middle ages to defend the amphitheatre-fortress. (Now it's used for the sort of bull-fighting where they don't kill, but just annoy the bull.)

Avignon and Arles

Here are my notes on things I did in Avignon and Arles, from my Moleskine (in case they're any use for Perry):

Avignon
1. The Popes' Palace
Rather more impressive outside than in. Little decoration remains, but two chapels and the pope's bedroom and study still have frescoes. Somewhat less than comfortable when I was there because of all the bored children running about not looking where they're going. You can't blame the children -- there must be few who enjoy large empty stone buildings -- and you can't really blame the parents because the children need to learn the world's not arranged for their amusement.

2. The Pont St-Bénézet
This bridge once went all the way across the Rhône to Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, passing over the Ile-Barthelasset, but now only 4 of 22 piles remain, with two little chapels on top of the other. A nice walk. Again, too many children looking like they're about to run off the edge into the depths of Rhône.

3. The Petit Palais
Excellent, my favourite. Nice and empty when I was there. Its collections have two main themes: Avignon in the middle ages, and early art. It has excellent collections in both. There is lots of good stuff here, not going any later than 1550 or so, which suits me very well. Also there are fantastic views from the top floor.

4. The Petit Train
Quite good. A bit silly, I suppose, but interesting enough. Does a circuit of the town with commentary in French, English, and Spanish.

5. Boat cruise
The beginning is the best bit, with fantastic views of the popes' palace and the bridge. Flags a bit in the middle, when the commentary gives way to 1990s pop.

6. Musée Angladon
Satisfyingly small, and personal because it constitutes the house of two great collectors, themselves artists, who inherited from an even greater collector who had known all the impressionists. Nice stuff. Includes the only Van Gogh of Provence still in Provence.

7. Musée Lapidaire
A large disused church filled with stones of many kinds. Nice to wander round. There are Roman carvings and inscriptions, many local, as well as Greek and Egyptian ones, and some medieval monuments.

8. Musée Calvet
Has one of those fantastic huge Brueghels of a village where about 100 things are going on at once -- a procession, a small play, drunken dancing, livestock, a man pissing against a tree, etc etc. Otherwise a nice collection of art and sculpture -- not too large.

Villeneuve-lez-Avignon
1. Musée Pierre de Luxembourg
A museum containing very little, but with two very nice things (which I was told to go and see by Nigel). A carved Virgin and Child, fourteenth-century. It leans back slightly -- they say because it was carved from one tusk of ivory, but one also sees this leaning back on the hips as one of the features of art at the time. Also, the crowning of the Virgin by Enguerrand Quarton. This is nicely displayed in a whole room to itself, with a bank of seats at a good viewing distance, and cases with the relevant documents. A detailed contract exists, imposing the composition. However there are a few differences, e.g. in the lack of the Hospitality of Abraham. Otherwise the museum mostly contains wet-eyed products of the Counter-Reformation.

2. Collegial Notre-Dame et Cloitre
A large church with a calm and open cloister. Peaceful but not remarkable.

3. Chartreuse Val de Bénédiction
A labyrinthine collection of remains of the charterhouse here, the largest in France. Lots of cloisters; lots of empty rooms with notices explaining their previous use. With lots of other people there, uninspiring; viewed alone it is probably quite different.

I ran out of oomph to visit the Tour Philippe-le-Bel and the Fort-St-Andre. I had see them both from the river. The main square of Villeneuve is a nice place to sit with a coffee.

Arles
Arles is about 20 minutes by train from Avignon.

1. Les Arènes
A huge Roman amphitheatre, probably of the first century A.D., remarkably well preserved. It was used as a fortress in the Middle Ages, when large parts of what remained of the city moved into it, like a raincoat folding into its own pocket. There were more than 200 houses and two chapels in it, with three streets. They took down the third tier at this time, and used the stone to build four watch-towers, and on other town projects. They cleared it in the nineteenth century, and now it is used for bullfights. It makes for a strange building -- part ancient building, part current stadium, with extra seats on scaffolding and stencilled numbers for ticket-allocations.

2. The Theatre
There was a large Roman theatre there, too. I walked past but did not go in.

3. St-Trophime
A fantastic frontal, not very large, but very detailed, with about 60 scenes. Lots of them contain lions -- Samson and David are both there, and there are also deorative lions. It's possible a lion was the symbol of Arles. Very beautiful. Inside, the church is very dark, presumably to protect the Aubusson tapestries of the Life of the Virgin. One of these partially covers a large eleventh- or twelfth-century inscription about St Trophimus. There is a fourth-century Christian funerary monument with carving, and some interesting paintings.

4. The Cloister of St-Trophime
Very beautiful. Probably peaceful when fewer people are there. The ranges are all beautifully carved, though it was hard to see because some were dotted about with conservation tape when I was there. A lovely place. It disappointed me that it was hard to buy pictures of the carvings both of the cloisters and the frontal.

5. The Market and the Van Gogh Place
The market was intense and confusing, and sold things in too large quantities to be much use to me -- or provencal fabrics which I didn't want. I had lunch at the mental hospital where Van Gogh stayed for a while. It has been repainted in the lurid colours of his painting -- an odd thing to do.

6. Musée de l'Arles and la Provence antique
An absolutely baking walk to get there. The museum has some excellent objects, carved heads (one very handsome) and other relicts of the Roman government of the Province. Of particular interest to me were the funerary monuments, which go from pagan to Christian, and start to portray Christian scenes in the same style -- lots of small figures densely packed together. Interesting. The nice ladies at the desk directed me to where I could get a bus back into town.

There are also the Thermes of Constantine, but I have a long-standing dislike of hypocausts so I didn't go.

Yes, this is mid Devon

My father is on the front page of today's Culm Valley Gazette (website: www.thisismiddevon.co.uk); next to a picture it says "Keith's encounter with a giant rhubarb; see page 29". On turning to page 29 I found out that he has a full-page profile in "Village People" -- a series about "the colourful characters who live in our rural communities". Which is nice.

Livestock

Yesterday we let some alpacas out of one field into the next field along, which I understand is OK because they are essentially both the same field, we just put a gate in a while back to control the grazing more. The alpacas were keen to get to the new grass, but there's a tiny stream in the way which they felt the need to leap extravagantly. Here is a picture my dad took of a leaping alpaca:

She has her front feet nicely together, like a showjumper. Four of the babies decided that this wasn't what they wanted at all and while the rest of the herd disappeared up onto the hill my parents and I chased them round and round trying to get them across the stream. They looked to be having quite a lot of fun, until eventually one of the mothers trotted back and bad-temperedly herded her cria across.

Apparently this little gang is well-known for being trouble. I'll try to record the sound of them going meep at some point and put it up. They do the most brilliant shrieking yodel when distressed -- it would make a great ringtone -- but it seems mean to distress them just in order to annoy people on trains.

The provinces

People in London may call Cambridge the provinces, but it's hard to beat Devon for a bit of "blimey, do people still say/do that sort of thing?". This morning at church an amiable old man preached against evolution -- not in a ranty sort of way, just urging us to respect the bible's date of 6000ish years. He seemed a sweet chap so afterwards I thanked him for his sermon (which also included some good stuff on faith) and said that, as it happened, myself I'd never seen a problem with the difference in the bible's dates and the scientists' dates, because of the bit in Psalms (quoted in the New Testament by Peter) about a thousand ages in God's sight being like a day, suggesting that time in the bible isn't always about counting the movements of the earth relative to the sun. But then I felt guilty because I had opened up the topic for my dad, who is less tactful than me, to have an argument with the poor man in the manner of an enthusiastic dog bouncing a small reserved boy.

This sort of thing, it's odd and sad to relate, seems to be a product of the enlightenment, and the bible literalists and the evangelical scientists are very closely related. It was a great thing when people got down to applying logic and observation to their understanding of the world, and we learn things in one lesson of school science now which were someone's life work. But maybe that has made us over-confident about how easy everything is going to be to understand. Want to know more about how God made the earth? Why not add up all the numbers involved to make a total! Then also everything has to be true or false, 1 or 0, and if the bible says a day it means 24 hours and if you say otherwise you're calling God a LIAR. In the middle ages we would have known, if we were educated, that there were four ways to understand anything, especially scripture. The literal was the first, then there were the three spiritual ways, which I think were moral, allegorical, and anagogical. I can never do the anagogical, which I suppose means that I am a bit ignorant in medieval terms, in the same way that we would tut tut about adults who didn't know about the circulation of blood taking oxygen to the body, or some such. I think it's brilliant to know, for example, how a tree works, but it's a shame we couldn't have hung on to some of the good things about the old style of knowledge when we got the new stuff.

I count myself immensely lucky to have been brought up by my parents both as a Christian and to challenge things I am told. Actually we can be very pub-bore-ish when we get started -- we spent the whole of the Christmas day before last trying to estimate how likely it is that if 13 people sit down to dinner one will be dead within a year, and my mother has done small surveys on the number of times that alpacas chew the cud. But they have never objected to, but rather welcomed, challenges to anything they think they is true -- this goes as much for scientific beliefs as for Christian ones, and I suppose therefore I shouldn't feel too guilty for letting my dad loose on the preacher, because my dad at least will have found their discussion invigorating.

Vacances

I never used to get holidays, which is why I'm not very well-travelled. My mother has never liked them. When I was young we used to go to Cornwall on a day-long car trip or, after we had moved near Portsmouth, to France on the overnight ferry. The one attempt that my brother, mother and I made to organise something a little more exotic, a trip to Pompeii, was vetoed by my dad on the grounds that the place is very hot and full of flies. Meanwhile, my dad got to disappear most autumns to obscure parts of middle Asia on plant-hunting expeditions, often in Bhutan. My mother got very bad-tempered while he was gone and I would get upset because I couldn't quite remember what he looked like. Postcards he sent immediately on his arrival in Thimpu wouldn't get to us until months later, and this was before the days of satellite phones, so we didn't hear from him at all while he was gone, and turning up at the airport to collect him on the appointed day was an act of faith. He returned with a weather-beaten tan, immensely smelly laundry, a new species of rhododendron or camelia or such, and the occasional obscure intestinal parasite which meant the whole family had to be dose with remarkably foul-tasting worm powders. He would cheerfully tell us stories of being airlifted from mountain passes by the Indian Army, or thrown into prison by corrupt Nepali policeman, which always sounded to me not just scary but rather hard work. So I never got the idea of travelling for pleasure -- even those straight-forward ferry trips to France started badly as we put Peggy the dog in kennels. She'd had a bad experience with a sexually-voracious labrador and hated to be left. When we returned to collect her my mother would make us sit wait in the car in case she'd died while we were gone, and I knew that was why she did it too, which made those car waits pretty dire. And as an adult organising trips for myself seemed too much like a high-pressure chore; and also to raise the disturbing question, why am I expecting to enjoy a place just because it's a long way away? What precisely am I running away from?

But in the last couple of years I've just begun to understand. I think it's because now I'm older and I know exactly what I'm running away from (the shock is it turned out not to be myself). Today I took a long train journey down to my parents' in Devon to drop off my rats for ratsitting while I'm gone. My father checked and although they are rodents their tame status means it's not illegal for me to transport Yaffle and Muesli onto agricultural premises. (Though my parents currently can't move any of their alpacas under the regulations of the immediate response to the new foot and mouth outbreak, which is tricky when they're running out of grazing.) The journey down here can be very beautiful when it's not too crowded. There's this one spot just by Westbury where there's a big wrinkly hill with a chalk horse cut into the side. People wearing parachutes jump off and catch the thermals rising from the steep side of the hill, circling round and upwards like the buzzards you see everywhere in the West Country now. In continuation the train theme, on Wednesday I will catch a Eurostar down to the south of France. Remembering that at school we spent a good proportion of our French lessons plaguing poor mairies for tourist information on their towns, I requested information from the Avignon tourist board (that being my destination) and now I have tons of leaflets on jazz festivals and whatnot with which to plan my stay. I have fifteen books in my suitcase, plus a small sketchbook, and I think I am all set for a civilised time.

Cria creche

My parents have more baby alpacas than they know what to do with. I think the current total is 10, with another 3 to come before the end of the summer. One of them has to have eye-drops, and another is being bottle-fed, which adds to the time they take. When you bottle-feed an alpaca you have to be careful not to fuss it at all, or make it too tame, or it will develop personality problems when it is older. You have to wander up to it with a bottle of warm milk as if by accident, and poke it in the direction of the mouth in a diffident, offhand manner, while taking care not to make eye contact. This is very hard to do because they are absolutely adorable, with their thick immensely soft curly coats and huge black eyelashes.

Here are some crias having fun:

Notes

1. I should also add to my list of living authors whose work I would always read:
Mavis Cheek: though she's got a tad serious. Janice Gentle Gets Sexy is a great funny book.
Jane Stevenson: London Bridges is a great Hurray for London! novel, and everything she has ever written is very good in an intelligent way.

2. I want itunes to have a bookmark feature. If I'm listening to an audio book (at the moment I'm reviving my near-defunct French) I want to be able to come back to the same place while perhaps listening to something else in between. I want to be able to bookmark where I am and then choose from a list of bookmarked spots which one is the right one to go back to.

The literary insomniac

The best way to get reading suggestions is still either personal recommendations from people whose taste you know, or from reviews. I read the Guardian's Saturday book reviews, but they're not always completely reliable. I can't be doing with the Times Literary Supplement or the London Review of Books -- they're both full of articles about how some minor mid-twentieth-century sculptor or poet I've never heard of is in need of a reappraisal, which is too much like hard work when I've never originally appraised them. The best place for proper reviews which introduce you to the book and give you a sense of whether you want to read it is the Literary Review, which treats intelligent reading like it should still be a pleasure. I stayed subscribed to this even during my postgraduate poverty years. The new issue arrived today and has an interview with Philip Pullman.

I'm wondering if I should reread Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. As I remember it the first one is brilliant; the second is quite good; and the third one loses it, both in narrative (it gets all bogged down in strange dust and animals with wheels) and in the point it's trying to make. I'm not against things that argue against Christianity -- much of the time they seem to me to make interesting sense -- but this one was confused and odd. I'm probably missing something because a lot of people have been very impressed by it. It seems to be saying that organised religion is bad, but it still keeps the concept of sin -- it just suggests that because organised religion is bad, sin must be good. One of the characters is a new Eve, and it's vital that she "falls", which she does by engaging in some vaguely-described sexual behaviour with another slightly older kid. Of course it's possible that the book is trying to do something more interesting than I understood, because whether or not you think there's such a thing as sin, most people would see pubescent/pre-pubescent children having sex as a bad thing. It mostly just annoyed me, though.

I've just finished The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. It's quite good if you're looking for something reasonably non-draining in a fantasy sort of way but not too full of dragons. It's about someone who helps patrol the streets of Moscow keeping the balance between good and evil. He works for the good, but the organisation is a bit compromised, and in some ways more frightening than evil. I'll probably read the others, perhaps on holiday.

I'm here to kill your monstah

http://www.beowulfmovie.com/

Oh that brings back happy memories of Andy Orchard saying "let's do some original research!" in supervisions, and typing lofgeorn, eager for praise, into the Toronto Dictionary of Old English database, and pointing out that it's almost always used in a prose, negative context, therefore maybe implying criticism of Beowulf. That was a good teacher! He deprived the town-dwellers of their ale-benches, etc. Later he wrote a book called Pride and Prodigies which is an excellent title. This is most of what I can remember from my Part II Beowulf course: it's about pride, the monstrous, and Christians dealing with the pagan past. It looks like this might even be a reasonably good film.

Rights of the reader

I should also add Daniel Pennac to my list of living authors whose work I would always read, only I need someone to translate for me first. His scapegoat books are great. I like his rights of the reader, and now Quentin Blake has illustrated them. (I tried to make the image below a link, but it hasn't worked: here is where the poster comes from.)

Not the final routine

This is pretty cool.

But am I the only person who was reminded of the Day Today Elvicutions and such-like? I know that's pretty sick of me...

Simpsonize me

This is what I would look like as a Simpsons character, apparently. I think I have a rounder face. Anyhoo, here it is.

I am not ashamed

I've been reading Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree. It's a collection of his columns from The Believer, a magazine from the people who do McSweeney's. (I bought an issue when I was in America this spring, and it was good, though they seem somewhat over-impressed by post-modernism.) He wrote for them monthly about what he was reading. The Believer has a strict policy of no negative reviews, so if he didn't like a book he had to anonymize it when he talked about it, so "Contemporary Literary Novel by Anonymous" appears quite often in the list. (The only one I could identify is a Bonfiglioli mystery, which he really hated. Don't read them unless you truly don't mind a repulsively amoral narrator.)

I like Nick Hornby. A Long Way Down is funny in such a grim way it's quite painful, and How To Be Good is one of the few recent novels my mother has read. (She thought it would be interesting to know what people understand being good to mean.) But I picked The Polysyllabic Spree up several times in shops before actually buying it, because it is obvious even at a glance that Nick Hornby is a very different sort of reader from me. He likes books about sport, and aggressive thrillers. He read Jonathon Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson although he hasn't read any B.S. Johnson, while I need to like an author a lot before I can muster interest for a biography. (Though a biography written by Jonathan Coe might be the exception given that he's one of my favourite authors.) Nonetheless, his writing about the books he has read and the books he has given up on in each month is very readable, and I've found a few things he mentions which I might now check out. Also it makes me think that I should write more on this blog about what I read.

Today I read the new Harry Potter book. I had to queue for two hours in the middle of the night to get it -- if I'd known it was going to be that long I wouldn't have done it, I expect, but once I'd queued for 45 minutes it seemed like a waste to give up. I texted someone at 1 am to say I was still there (and still on the first floor) and he replied that it was ridiculous given that the book was not by Pynchon. (I might have queued at midnight for a book by Pynchon -- certainly the fancy dress would have been more interesting. I could have gone as Fairing, who preached to the rats of New York. (Can I just point out I didn't go in fancy dress to the Potter thing?)) The problem is that the huge hype has polarized opinion about Potter. I find them very readable, and I doubt there'll be another two-hour long queue for a book in my lifetime -- it's like the people waiting at the docks in New York for the next installment of Little Dorrit. I first heard about them when there were only two out. My cousin was a primary school teacher, and I asked her if she was discovering good new children's books or if they still all read the old favourites, and she said that her class of nine-year-olds had all told her to read the Harry Potter books. I don't think it was til the third came out that it was widely noticed as a phenomenon, so I was lucky to be able to read them unclouded by hype. Nick Hornby writes very strongly in his introduction to the Polysyllabic Spree that he thinks people shouldn't be ashamed to read for pleasure, though I suspect he's not a Potter fan; some people express the opinion that adults shouldn't read children's books but I occasionally watch Big Brother and if I'm not ashamed of that I'm hardly going to be ashamed of anything I actually read.

Here are a few names I forgot for my list of the authors whose new work I would definitely read:
Chuck Palahniuk: though they are mostly foul, especially the latest one with all its rabies
Orhan Pamuk: some of them are really hard work, but My Name is Red is great, and it has a talking dog in it (sort of)
J.K. Rowling: see above

A point of information

I have just finished the last Harry Potter book, and I am emotionally drained.

Ritual

I want to put it on record that I think Neville Longbottom will turn out to be the real hero of the Harry Potter books. But I probably won't get much time to read the last one tomorrow, because I might have to go and do some Latinate magic of my own. A certain fellow is stuck in Crete, and needs someone to stand in for him and say
Dignissima domina, domina procancellaria, et tota academia, presento vobis.... &c &c.
Gestures of doffing, finger-clutching, and hand-clasping, together with flamboyant yet shabby robes, complete the thing; I will not, however, have a wand. I dislike rituals intensely.

This is why, O Cambridge dweller, you should always have things definitely planned, preferably taking place far away, for every weekend; if you don't fill up your own time someone else will find something for you to do. Next Saturday I had made plans, and it's only because of that that I got out of giving a paper about something completely random at ten days' notice. This weekend I was not so wise.

Short lives

The Guardian did a thing not long ago where they got people to write short stories in six words, because apparently Hemingway once wrote a six-word short story which he said was his best ever. It went "For sale: baby shoes, never worn". The Guardian's ones show that it's not easy. I like DBC Pierre's:
Evil isn't necessarily unkind. Gran next.
Will Self is wonderfully typical with:
Pain, unutterable pain, stertorous exhalation. Death.
In the best tradition of mainstream journalism, the Guardian ripped off the idea from a lower-circulation magazine, in this case Wired, which has slightly better ones, maybe because of the sort of authors they chose -- idea-mongers, mostly. (In the best tradition of blogs, I got this information not from my own head but from a better blog.) I like Orson Scott Card's:
I saw, darling, but do lie.
Paul di Filippo's:
Husband, transgenic mistress; wife: “You cow!”
Margaret Atwood's
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
and Alan Moore's
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time

In a related enterprise I am collecting those sentences you sometimes come across, especially in book reviews, which seem to sum up a whole life and the milieu in which it was lived. The problem is that I keep writing them down in different places and then losing them. The ones I can find to hand are Anna Kavan:
They lived unhappily for a while in Burma, and produced a son who was killed in World War II.
and Sir Harry Oakes:
He befriended the Windsors and drew them into some questionable business ventures before being murdered in 1943.
Less typical, but quite evocative, is this description of Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe:
a notably fastidious man, with feelings so refined that he could not bear to see women eat cheese.
And back to exiled British royalty, here is Andy Warhol's manager Fred Hughes:
He was obsessed by the Duke of Windsor, but bore more than a passing resemblance to the Duchess.

(From BookForum, Rupert Everett's memoirs, Dalrymple's Last Mughal, and Everett again.)

Some more bad things

1. I suppose that both politically and as a human it would not be a good idea to start using this blog to chronicle the crimes against me of eminent professors. Still, grrrr! Maybe I could just designate them anonymously with asterisks, like the tender moments in old-fashioned novels, only instead of *** it would need to be something more like *!#!!*@!*
2. Language students in town trying to buy alcohol.
3. But mostly it's the professors.

Bad things

1. The "Lucifer Box" books by Mark Gatiss. I read the first one and thought it was rubbish, and then the second one got tons of good reviews and was half price in Borders, so I read that one too. It is also rubbish. Making a character camp and prone to seducing young men is no substitute for giving him an actual personality. They're just a cut-price rip-off of the Kyril Bonfiglioli "Charlie Mortdecai" books. I can't imagine why so many people claim to have enjoyed them so much. It's another example of the many ways in which Stephen Fry has lost it since he became happy. It's nice for him, but the rest of us have to pay the cost.
2. Facebook. It brings out the naff in anyone who uses it; there is nothing genuinely funny on it, and vast amounts of weak humour. Enough now! This is a modern complex world; it is quite appropriate to have different faces you show to different people, however much that concept gets booed down on Big Brother as hypocrisy. I behave differently to my friends, my colleagues, and my students, and that's called being a proper adult. Facebook should go back to being just undergraduates and the tutors who are keeping an eye on them.
3. How we behave towards people being rather complex. When I was about sixteen I had my hair cut from longish to a sort of Hugh Grant look, which being skinny in those days I could get away with. This had a strange impact on my behaviour; I used to go to school by train, which meant a lot of waiting around for trains that didn't turn up, and I suddenly found that I was asking guards when the train was due in a straight-forward business-like way, instead of a curly-haired, helpless, poor-little-me sort of way which I hadn't even noticed I was doing before. Today I am annoyed with myself for having in the past been similarly pointlessly conciliatory to my vet, who has given me the wrong medicine for my rats. They are sitting about looking miserable because he diluted it without telling me, and actually directed me to continue with the same dosage. I am feeling immensely patronised by this, and very guilty because I haven't cared for my rats properly. The thing is that he's patronised me before, but I just took it because I assumed I had accidentally been annoying, and I assumed my rats would get the best care if I wasn't annoying.

Some things which are good and one slightly disturbing thing

1. Calvin Harris's album I Created Disco. It's a bit like Jarvis Cocker crossed with the Human League. The Girls, Acceptable in the 80s and Merrymaking at My Place are the singles, and all good, and I currently love Disco Heat, which has great instrumental bits, expressing heartbreak in the brilliant way that only electronic pop can. I do hope he's not going to drug himself to death though -- he looks a bit out of it here, in a proto-Doherty sort of way, and all the songs seem to be about taking drugs with girls, without any of that "Just say no!" stuff for the kids.
2. Whistling Allegri's Miserere in an echoey place made of stone; to be specific, L staircase.
3. The tea place called Ti is actually quite good, and strangely soothing, even though I don't like tea. I hope they keep it going OK, because everyone wants to sit down and drink tea slowly, rather than sipping it as they wander about town like coffee, leading to a lower turnover.
4. It's Cambridge open studios this month.
5. The Sacred exhibition at the British Library. I promised someone I'd say what I thought about this, but I only had half an hour there which wasn't long enough. Still it seems like putting Jewish, Christian, and Muslim books side by side is genuinely interesting and not just the Blairite gimmick it at first appears.
6. Washing your hands in milk -- surprisingly luxurious.
7. Peter Callesen makes sculptures out of bits cut from a sheet of paper. About halfway down this page is a closet with lots of monsters in.
8. This video of a wishbone pulling the mechanical device which makes it walk is oddly disturbing.

Beware the eminent

Two major responsibilities which I have really enjoyed are pretty much ended now, and for a few months past I had been feeling sad about this, until a couple of weeks ago I realised how much more pleasant my life will be without them. Both are responsibilities without much power, and that's very frustrating. I've always been one of the least of the many on the college governing body; and in some way directing the studies of students is even worse because while it is much more interesting and of more immediate practical value, it's also one of those things where the possibility of messing up is huge, and the capacity for doing well is very small. The students run their own lives, and while you can advise them, remind them, or tell them off when necessary (which is rarely), in the end you can only trust that they will be able to deal with things themselves. Also, it's difficult for me not to worry about the students -- we do ask tough things of them -- and then I end up feeling like a complete mug for making my job harder than it needs to be. Anyway, both these things officially come to an end in September, but the Cambridge long vacation means that they are essentially over now.

So for the first time in at least two years, maybe longer (I forget), I am facing the prospect of only working full-time. (I've mostly given up teaching for rather sad reasons to do with the demise of palaeography, which I won't go into here.) I have two half-time jobs, which involves quite a bit of juggling between them, and switching from one to another involves more mental effort that I at first allowed for, but still, it seems almost incredible that that's all I have to do now. I can actually reopen the files on my computer of nearly-finished articles and notes on ideas for future work. It feels like a wierd treat -- like when I was working at M&S and if Igot a whole day together for my own work the UL felt like the Earthly Paradise.

There is one small problem in all this, which is that an eminent Professor has promised a learned society that I will be producing a book for them by September. I last talked to him in February, when we agreed to have a coffee to discuss the possibility of my producing a book for them at some point, but he never replied to my e-mails trying to arrange said coffee, and it's only because I work with another eminent Professor who was at the society's AGM that I know that September was mentioned as a deadline. I need to e-mail him about it but hermes is down. It's not impossible that I could do it by September, because it's really just a revised version of a book I have already published in a department series in a very humble form which involves my folding all the foldouts myself (consequently I have a bad callous on my right index-finger and I can't make more than two or three at the same time without my RSI flaring up). It's sold about 200 copies so far, and I'm ready to retire it from that series and get it into production in some way which does not cause me physical pain. I wrote it while I was doing my PhD; I don't know whether it would be good advice to a post-graduate to have another related but separate project on the go while doing their PhD, but it worked very well for me.

Probably the first eminent Professor didn't really mean for the deadline to be taken seriously, because he's a bit like that. When I was applying for my PhD and unsure whether to be a palaeographer or a hagiographer he told me just to make up a topic, apply, and then decide what I actually wanted to do once I had secured funding. Unfortunately the eminent Professor who was my PhD supervisor (this is yet another eminent Professor, different also from that e. P. who got me to publish my little book in the department series; Cambridge is stuffed to the gills with them) took my initial proposal very seriously and was very averse to my changing. I wanted to move from a topic where all the manuscripts were in Germany to one where the manuscripts were mostly in Cambridge, London, and Oxford, but for some months he resisted fiercely, the mainstay of his plan being to find me a German boyfriend so that I would want to visit Germany frequently. This involved a few embarrassing occasions on which he would introduce me to some suitable post-grad he had found with helpful ice breakers like "You're about the same height, aren't you?". It was a shame because I remember one in particular was doing what sounded like very interesting work but obviously I could never get in touch with him to talk about it and if I had seen him in the street I would have had to have run away. My supervisor is quite a sentimental man, happily married to a short series of otherwise intelligent women, and I really think he thought he was doing me a favour. Eventually I forced him to let me work on another topic, though that one only stuck for about eight months because we couldn't stop arguing about Eadwig Basan. So I ended up well over a year into my PhD without a topic, which is why I had to write my PhD on something I still find somehow mildly revolting.

Anyway, theoretically I could challenge eminent Professor 1 about the September deadline, but the problem is that he really is eminent Professor 1; as undergraduates we all called him "The Prof", and I still have a good deal of residual respect and fear for him, engendered by Latin classes where he let our year off doing Frithegod of Canterbury because he said we weren't bright enough, and Old English classes where he would suddenly randomly pick on someone and demand to be told what class a verb was. (The secret to this was to pick a number from 1 to 7; you had a 6 in 7 chance of getting it wrong, but if you got it right he would give you respect for ages, so it was worth the odds.) Also it would do me good to get the work finished, and it would be extremely cool to have a black-spined gold-lettered book in a series started by people like Bishop, Gasquet, Deslisle, Wickham Legg, and all those mad old liturgists. Also it will have to be an outsize volume in an otherwise mostly uniform series, and even though I am very fond of Gill and several other librarians, many of whom are excellent people and deal with academics in a patient way worthy of a medal, it somehow gives me a perverse little thrill to think of people trying to work out to how shelve it. I'm not sure this post really has a point, beyond the obvious one of displacement activity, but I suppose the moral is: beware of eminent Professors.

Best desk in the world ever

It's a bit cramped sometimes, but I want to acknowledge that there is not a better desk to be had.

I would read anything this author wrote

Thomas Pynchon: though he reminds me a bit of my PhD supervisor, in that sometimes the parts are greater than the whole
Barbara Trapido: though Frankie and Stankie was a bit disappointing
Barbara Kingsolver: Prodigal Summer is great, and so is her early stuff. (I discovered these two Barbaras at a time a few years back when I got so annoyed with the male voice in writing that I decided I had better not read anything written by men for a while, for fear that I might otherwise develop an unshakable and unjustifed intolerance. I'm pleased to report that this worked but I still wouldn't read anything by Martin Amis in case it triggered a relapse.)
Tibor Fischer: though his early stuff was better
Jonathon Coe: though he will never top What A Carve Up
John Irving: though Until I Find You was definitely not his best
Kate Atkinson: she can really write
Michael Chabon: ditto
Alexei Sayle: though I prefer his short stories
Allan Massie: am loving his fake twelfth-century narratives of the Matter of Britain
Pat Barker: obviously
Rose Tremain: natch
Iain Banks: as opposed to Iain M. Banks, though I do mean to try those one day
Barbara Vine: as opposed to Ruth Rendell, though I've never thought any of those were a waste of time either
P. D. James: though I wish she'd give the Book-of-Common-Prayer echoes a rest
Jilly Cooper: there's no point in being ashamed of this -- it's trashy reading but satisfying, like a twix
Iain Pears: the art-history mysteries are very good indeed, and The Dream of Scipio is the most moving book ever written about textual criticism
Arturo Perez-Reverte: buckles have never been swashed more intelligently
John Julius Norwich: though The Middle Sea is not as good as the Byzantium books
George MacDonald Fraser: we're officially owed one where Flashman makes sweet love in the Parker library -- Ray Page has the correspondence to prove it -- the main obstacle is presumably the dual improbability of anyone's getting into the Parker Library in the nineteenth century, and that person's being a woman -- it's going to tax his plotting skills
Salman Rushdie: the first time I read the Satanic Verses was to see what the controversy was about; the subsequent three or four times have been because it is a seriously good book; but he's definitely fallen off in recent years
Will Self: he is utterly original -- e.g. Great Apes, How the Dead Live, The Book of Dave, &c -- but do not, I repeat, do not read My Idea of Fun if you haven't already -- it's fouler than American Psycho
Julian Rathbone: he's annoying in many ways but gets away with it by being so good
Diana Athill: now she's stopped trying to write novels
Patrick McGrath: master of Gothic madness
Thomas McGuane: good on horses
Neil Gaiman: especially now he's grown up a bit
Liz Jensen: they've all been good in a lunatic sort of way

This is really quite a cheerful list -- these authors are all still alive so if they were each to produce a book every two years then I would have at least one appealing thing to read every month.

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.)