Some things I like about Bologna

1. people greet each other with "salve". Francesca says it's just a way to avoid doing an instant evaluation of one's relationship with someone so as to decide between the informal "ciao" or the formal "buongiorno", but it sounds wonderfully Latinate to me. Also it reminds me of starting Latin when I was about 12 at school; when the teacher came into the room she said "salvete puellae" and we all said "salve Mrs Washington".

2. there's this slight air of the 1950s. Everyone smokes, and women have little feet and wear fur. On the buses there are tiny elderly ladies swathed in glossy furs, and I have to resist a terrible, patronising impulse to stroke them. There are two fur shops on the street where I live. One is large and pretty posh. It has things in the window which look rare, leopard-like, but surely they can't be? They cost several thousand euros each. Most disconcerting are the ones made of lots of loose furry bits, looking like a legion of hamsters is clinging to the coat, perhaps as part of some hamster-smuggling wheeze. The other shop is tiny and last time I went past there were two big (alive) Alsatians squeezed in among the clothes.

3. people bring their dogs into shops. I like this, personally. Not sure the dogs are enjoying it much.

4. it's a beautiful city without being at all pretty. Almost everything is built in local red brick, often very roughly finished, and the buildings harmonise because of this, and also because the architecture is quite straightforward. (The picture above is one of the nicest bits of my walk to work.) The city is mostly flat but there are hills all around it, which mean there are lots of beautiful views. Also there are towers. At some point in the late middle ages local merchant families took up competitive tower building. Only a few are left but apparently once there were about 180, all with their only entrances about six metres up, and galleries around them; it must have been like something out of sci-fi. And a lack of anything hugely startling means Bologna isn't really on the tourist trail, not compared to Florence and Venice, so it's rather more like a real city.

5. the people are mostly very friendly. Sometimes an attempt to speak Italian gets a really positive reponse.

6. my flatmates are great. Giorgia speaks some English but is out quite a lot. She looks like Alexa off of Popworld. Federica speaks almost no English but is really friendly. She says my Italian has noticeably improved over the last few days, and yesterday we had a conversation about what I do and I explained what palaeography is, which gave me a sense of achievement. Also we have just had a long talk about Pete Doherty (consensus: over-rated). She has exams coming up, because she is doing some sort of postgraduate degree in economics, but after that she says she is going to cook proper lasagne for me and Giorgia. Figaro the cat is also good; his role in the house is suddenly to do something charming but very inconvenient, so that one of us goes "Oh, Figaro!" like in the Felix adverts.

Bologna continua

Well I have now moved into my new room, and at last have unpacked all my things. I can walk into the palaeography department in about ten or fifteen minutes, almost all under portici so I don't need an umbrella, and most of the way along the ancient Roman Via Emilia. After some very foggy days it's suddenly really sunny and beautiful, and I think I shall spend the afternoon exploring. Apparently I need to buy a journal called "Bologna spettacolo!". They have a free newspaper here like the ones in London, but today's headline seems to say that the salads of the lazy are making prices soar, which is either about how people buy prepackaged salad these days or it's something I'm really not getting in Italian. I've had three lessons now, two and a half hours each, and it's beginning to seem like hard work, but I can only imagine how gruelling it is for the teacher, who does five hours a day of complete beginners.

The two girls I live with are very nice and helpful. Figaro the cat has developed a game where he pushes my door open, leaps onto my desk, pats the pens until one falls on the floor, and then chases it round and round until it disappears under the sofa. Then he lies there going "miao" in a small sad voice. He's not a terribly vocal cat, which is probably good, because it makes him easy to ignore when I feel like it. It's nice to have a pet again though, even if only at second hand and temporarily.

They have very formal book launches here. I went to one yesterday for the new volume of the department's library catalogue (specifically of the older books) and the Professor, who is very nice, introduced to me to lots of important people, at whom I smiled inanely and said "piacere". Then we all sat down and lots of men gave speeches. (Our professor was the only woman on the stage, and reference was made at least once to her charmingness in a rather depressing, but very familiar, way.) By the time Francesca and I gave up and sneaked out the seventh such speech was going on, we'd been there for an hour and forty minutes, and there were still people up there waiting to talk. I couldn't follow it much, partly because the microphones distorted the sounds a bit, but someone said there were too many libraries and someone else said there weren't. But the room we were in is amazing; a huge hall with a raised dais at one end, with high vaulted ceilings decorated with beautiful and quite simple floral designs. Behind the speakers was the most immense fresco of some subject I couldn't identify, perhaps the court of King Herod, I'd guess seventeenth century but possibly later. The palazzo which houses all the historical subjects used to be the nunnery of San Giovanni in monte -- the monte is a Cambridge-style hill, i.e. a slight slope, but it's just up from the Gerusalemme church and to pilgrims represented the Mount of Olives, apparently. Then until the 1980s the building served as a jail, possibly the poshest jail in the world.

I probably ought to start doing some of the work I'm here to do... I originally allowed myself a week to settle in but then I decided to extend it because of the hassle of having to find my own place. Maybe on Friday...?

Woolf had a point

A room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year were what Virginia Woolf said people need in order to write. I was pretty dismayed on getting to Bologna to discover that the free accomodation ("shared apartment") that comes with what they call a "fellowship" is a shared bedsit! The woman I'm supposed to share with seems very nice, but is even older than me and also doesn't want to share a bedroom and a single desk for six months. I can't believe the Institute of Advanced Studies really thought that would be OK. It's more common in Italy than in England for students to share a room, but even so, my student days are a long long time behind me. Anyway the amazing thing about not being a teenager any more is you don't have to put up with this sort of thing, so after a short stay in a hotel I have found myself a room in town to move into on Tuesday. It's a large nice room, in a flat shared with two other women, one of whom speaks English, but anyway it will be good for me to try to speak Italian as much as possible. And wonderfully, there is also a cat! The cat is a fluffy grey cat called Figaro, who likes to pounce on imaginary mice. I am very hopeful that this will all work out OK. It's simply not possible for me to sleep in the same room as a complete stranger for months on end; after about a week they would find me shrivelled up in my bed like a dried up monkey, aged by millennia through the constant company.

The problem is that now it is a case of a room of one's own versus the five hundred pounds a year, i.e. financial independence, because the rent will reduce my stipend to the level of a nice gesture. Still it's only for six months so hopefully I won't run up vast debts.

Bologna is otherwise very excellent. There are posters with little tear-off phone number slips on the lamp-posts advertising tuition in Latin and Greek. The department where I will be working is very friendly and surprisingly organised, and it's in a huge sixteenth-century palazzo. Next week I start an intensive "Italiano per stranieri" course. To enrol they made us all introduce ourselves in turn in Italian and when I said was studying palaeography they gave me respect: this has never happened before. So I think I will like it very much here once I've settled in to my new room and unpacked my things.

Obviously I was worried I would have withdrawal symptoms from British TV so I downloaded some 4OD stuff before I left. I have watched the first 3 episodes of Shameless now, and I think it's back to its best. "Well, form is temporary but class is permanent" as Frank Gallagher says. I also watched the first episode of City of Vice, which I quite liked, though there was something rather naive about it somehow. I have read A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo, which is very good, as is Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey, and I am partway through Julian Rathbone's The Mutiny, which is good but odd because I think of him as a very cheeky writer, and this isn't cheeky at all.

Parcelforce says...

...that my copy of Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon is currently in a depot somewhere unspecified in Germany. This gives me anxiety.

More random stuff

1. I finished Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. It was funny in places, which was good, but otherwise it did read a bit like a parody. All that spit and semen! Also menstrual blood, disgusting viruses, the action of chemicals in the body described at pretty much molecular level, and self-mutilation. The sort of stuff he does is good for the first few of his books you come across, but I wish he'd broaden it out a bit, maybe write something people could read without mild nausea.

2. We had a works outing today to Westminster Abbey archives and Lambeth Palace conservation centre. The latter was interesting but the former was amazing, because there is a whole balcony overlooking the abbey from above, with a huge twelfth-century oak chest and an even bigger thirteenth-century one, which must have been winched in when the abbey was still being built. Also, lots of thirteenth-century tiles and a huge wall-painting of Richard II's badge, and other great stuff. I particularly liked a fourteenth-century big illuminated Missal in which the opening prayer asking for God's blessing had been altered to invoke King "H" and Queen "N" -- presumably meaning that it was altered from praying for the pope to praying for King Henry and some queen whose name was not specified, perhaps a sensible cautionary measure given Henry VIII's character.

3. The Soulwax album arrived and it's great.

4. This book exists:I will read it sometime. Though that word "beautiful" in the title worries me.

Random Stuff

1. I think this is fantastic. There was a link to it off of the Guardian's music pages the other day. Good things happen about three and a half minutes in, and the last minute is great. I love 2 Many DJs but I tried some Soulwax once and thought it was a bit too rocky, so I've bought the remix album this track comes from off of ebay in the hopes it will be good, and will arrive in time to form the soundtrack of my move to Italy.


2. Every year at the time of my summer exams I used to get this terrible need to write a novel, and this is called a displacement activity. Maybe my life would be different if one time I had just gone with the flow and not struggled through finals etc. Recently I have been getting very appropriate displacement activity urges: when I was meant to be painting I felt the need to crochet an ipod sock; and when I was supposed to be packing and getting rid of books I felt an overpowering urge to start collecting Everyman Classics.
There is a reason for the latter, a good reason. Hardbacks are rubbish. They cost lots; they are difficult to read because unwieldy; they are large making them a hassle to carry or store; they are printed on bad paper with big fonts and lots of space on the page to stretch the text out to a larger book; and they have dustjackets, which are a nuisance to keep on while reading, but even worse if you take them off because then you have to put them somewhere safe and find them again later. Except for academic reference books, hardbacks are not good. The message conveyed by a book in hardback is "Look at me! I am a... (pause for effect) hardback!". You pay extra for that self-importance. But, in the words of Shania Twain, that don't impress me much. I am lucky enough to work with some of the most beautiful books in the world, the more beautiful for being meaningful in many different ways, and they mostly look like nothing special with their covers closed.
There is one exception to the wrongness of hardbacks, which is the old style Everyman Classics -- not the current series, which is even worse than most hardbacks because it tries too hard by having cream covers. The original Everyman hardbacks are the size of a small paperback (thriller/detective novel size rather than literary novel size), and therefore easy to carry. They wear their sturdy format lightly. They may have had dustjackets at one point, but many have now lost them. They also have lovely endpapers and title pages (see below). So I am thinking of starting a collection of battered valueless Everymans. The more stained and imperfect the covers the better, as long as the books can be read without discomfort, and have the insides all intact. Hopefully at some point I will be able to get some more rats to help the shabbiness along; rats are good at customising books to make them less physically pretentious.



3. I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted. I'm no distance in and already I've read something so gross I'm going to have to work really hard to forget it, almost in the My Idea of Fun league. It's going to have to be good to make it worthwhile.

Some miscellaneous good stuff

1. I read Lisa Jardine's Ingenious Pursuits, which is quite readable, though it was partly for some work I'm doing not just pleasure. Her Latin is imperfect and she's not always accurate, though. My favourite details are a) that the Royal Society printed far too many copies of a heavily engraved book on fish. Not only did that jeopardise the publication of Newton's Principia, but they had to pay Hooke for his work as the Society's demonstrator in copies of Willoughby's History of Fishes at the nominal value of one pound each. I bet they're worth a bomb now. I think fish are very beautiful, myself. And b) Hans Sloane, introducer of chocolate to England and sort-of founder of the British Museum and British Library, describing some of his natural-history collecting activities in Jamaica:
Though I foresaw the difficulties, yet I had an Intention to try to bring with me from Jamaica some uncommon Creatures alive, such as a large yellow Snake, seven Foot long. I had the Snake tam'd by an Indian, whom it would follow as a Dog would his Master, and after it was deliver'd to me, I kept it in a large earthen Jarr, such as are for keeping the best Water for the Commanders of Ships, during their Voyages, covering its Mouth with two Boards, and laying Weights upon them. I had it fed every Day by the Guts and Garbage of Fowl &c. put into the Jarr from the Kitchen. Thus it liv'd for some time, when being weary of its Confinement, it shov'd asunder the two Boards on the Mouth of the Jarr, and got up to the Top of a large House, wherein lay Footmen and other Domesticks of her Grace the Dutchess of Albemarle, who being afraid to lie down in such Company, shot my Snake dead.

2. I found the notes I took on some lectures which Rowan Williams gave about art a couple of years ago. They were very difficult. I have a bad tendency, when presented with sustained language and concepts which I don't understand, to wonder whether this is being done on purpose by someone who would rather appear clever than be comprehensible; but in the case of Dr Williams I cannot hope that that is the case. He is simply very very intelligent. My notes are consequently a bit hazy. Apparently "Prudence is the ethical reasoning-out of good". Art is when "things are more than they are, and give more than they have". David Jones, loads of whose stuff is in Kettle's Yard, consequently drew an analogy with transubstantiation. And it's OK not to like Eric Gill's work because it is not "wounded by the infinite". (I've usually not liked it because of the child abuse, but I don't think it's really OK not to like art because of the artist's life.) Part of the way through I appear to have given up and just written out some of the lyrics to the Pet Shop Boys' Domino Dancing -- presumably there was some connection in my mind at the time, or maybe it had just given under the strain. Not in these notes, though, is an interesting definition of porn which I remember him giving, which included the late Caravaggio, and also fitted with the way people call the start of Country Life property porn, etc. If I had read more of Williams' stuff I would be a better person; if I had understood more of it I would probably be quite wise. He is the only clergyman who should ever be allowed to talk about sex, for example.

3. I have made a playlist of the campest songs on my ipod to help me pack, and though I says it as oughtn't it is geen-yus. T.A.T.U.'s version of How Soon Is Now?, Dusty Springfield singing I'd Rather Leave While I'm In Love, Tarkan's proper version of Simarik (which Holly whatnot murdered as that Kiss Kiss song), and Girls Aloud's No Good Advice are current favourites.

A small step

Modern life is full of complex challenges, most of which I significantly fail to meet, like filing my utility bills in labelled folders, or remembering the names of the people who live on the same stairs as me. But I have just successfully crocheted my own ipod sock! It's the third attempt, and it's pretty ragged, but I think it's important to rejoice in these small triumphs. Hurray! Below is a picture: on the left, ipod; on the right, sock. I chose an attractive mottled green-brown wool, which didn't photograph that well in artificial light. And hopefully it won't give me static shocks like the polyester case I am currently using. Seriously, this is the first thing I've actually achieved in yonks.

Some notes on stuff

1. I object profoundly to the Kleenex advert where a man takes a sofa out on to the streets and gets people to sit down and have a bit of a cry, with feel good emotional music in the background. Nobody needs that.

2. Amazon.co.uk has just told me that after looking at Ruskin's Stones of Venice 80% of customers buy it, but 6% choose Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instead.

3. Jill Paton Walsh's Imogen Quy detective books are quite good.

4. An intelligent friend of mine pointed out that the demon-man hybrid aspect of the plot of Beowulf the recent film is entirely present in the original poem, when the Grendel-kin are associated with the Nephilim, the children of fallen angels and human women who provoked the flood. Hurray!

5. Borders has sent me an e-mail to offer 50% off "The Handbook for Exceptional People" by Jez Cartwright, assuring me that it is written in an "easy-to-read fashion" with use of pictures and analogies.

Extract from poem on Day of Judgement

Nis nan witnesse also muchel se monnes a3en horte.
Wa se seið þet he bo hal . him solf wat best his smirte

Morris 1868, p. 163

The import is that our own hearts will condemn us as to the law at the day of judgement. It's a slightly frightening piece, like so much Middle English religious poetry -- very Romans 7, rather than Romans 8.

As a rule, his mornings were filled with bouts of energetic roaring

My only really long-term subscriptions are to the Literary Review, which I first started as an undergraduate, and to the Early English Text Society, which oddly enough I joined as a sixth-former. Otherwise I tend to try a subscription but not renew. Still, every now and then The Believer comes up with something like this, about the man after whom the venerable Warburg Institute is named: Ghost stories for the very adult, by Leland de la Durantaye: so maybe I'll stick with it.

Half submerged in water in order to reduce the stress caused by its vast size

Thank-you Fiona for telling me about this rat the size of a hippo. I could have been its pet human!

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought

I was flicking through the channels yesterday when ITV3, which seems to be dedicated entirely to repeats of old adaptations of golden age murder mysteries, produced an episode of the late 80s version of Dorothy L. Sayers' Have His Carcase. This was a big nostalgia thing for me because I watched them with my parents the first time round, when I was 10, and consequently read the books. Sayers first invented Wimsey as a frivolous character, who acts foppishly to hide his debilitating shell shock, particularly in Murder Must Advertise, where he spends much of the time dressed as a harlequin. But once the Harriet Vane books start he's much more serious. In the last Harriet is investigating some nasty poison pen letters and vandalism at a women's college in Oxford, and fears to discover that the chaste spinster life will have turned some of the fellows loony; only to find out that the perpetrator is a "normal" woman with children. She marries Wimsey anyway. I fell head over heels in love with Peter Wimsey; I did realise even at the time that it was a bit naff he was a lord, but I couldn't resist his intelligence and his patience with Harriet Vane. I used to follow up the quotations at the start of each chapter, and also the quotations made by Harriet and Peter if I could tell where they came from. This was a harder thing to do before the internet made it easy to find obscure books, and when I had very little money to spend, but I put a list of items on the wall by my bed and tracked them down over a long period, and in that way discovered some really excellent books. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici; the poetry of Donne and Herbert; Tristram Shandy; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; Ernest Bramah's The Wallet of Kai Lung; Boccaccio's Decameron; and probably others I can't think of right now. And coincidentally this morning my post included another of them, a copy of Thomas Lovell Beddoes' Death's Jest Book, which I only recently managed to track down in an affordable paperback edition. It's a mad nineteenth-century blank verse attempt at a Jacobean Revenge tragedy by one of those romantics who took it all rather hard and eventually killed themselves. The list of characters ends with "Homunculus Mandrake, zany to a mountebank", and it all looks rather hard work, but I'm in just the mood for that given that most modern fiction is rubbish.

Hurray for Dorothy L. Sayers! She was an interesting individual too. She fell head over heels in love with someone who was not really a very good idea. He asked her to go and live with him; for religious reasons she said No sex outside marriage; he replied that marriage was a bourgeois institution to which he objected on multitudinous very high-minded grounds. This stalemate continued for a while; then he suddenly married someone else. She felt like an utter fool to have taken his objections seriously rather than personally, and naturally went out and slept with the first man she met -- a lodger in the same house as her, who worked on motorcycles. She got pregnant from this. She managed to conceal it from everyone, and for the last couple of months went away to stay with a cousin of hers who took in foster children, but she arranged for her mail and phone calls to be relayed to her so efficiently that no one even knew she had left London. She left the baby with her cousin and supported him from afar. Whatever psychological damage she may have done to this poor kid who didn't even know that this frequent visitor was his mother until he was 10 or so, I can't help admiring someone so human but also so efficient at coping with a difficult and at the time very scandalous circumstance. She continued to support herself through her writing, and eventually married someone terribly shell-shocked; they "adopted" her son. She was renowned for striding around Oxford in strange clothes humming Bach loudly to herself.

Good work Sweden!

Also I do like the idea that there is a Swedish girl pop duo called West End Girls who exist purely to cover Pet Shop Boys singles. One of them even does a Chris Lowe and just stands around looking sulky.





I phoned Ikea the other day in a foul mood because they had delivered the wrong stuff to me, and they put me on hold with Abba singing Lay All Your Love On Me, and it just didn't seem worth staying angry. There has never been a better accent for pop. (Except possibly Baccara, who have never sounded that Spanish to me.) Also Neil Hannon wrote a good song about Sweden. It's here on YouTube, but with a poor video some filmschool student made.

Notes on disappointing books

I am reading A. M. Homes' This Book Will Change Your Life and it's boring me. I don't like to be snobby but I think maybe I should stop reading Richard and Judy choices. I recently finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and that wasn't so great either. It was readable enough I suppose, but had a terribly schlocky death scene at the end. Apples by Richard Milward was also disappointing after the rave Guardian reviews. Probably it would have had more impact if I were likely to be shocked by the idea of teenagers having lots of grubby sex; I suppose it's just another way in which the Guardian is about 20/30 years out of date. I don't know why I read The Self-Preservation Society by Kate Harrison; it's really the sort of thing one should only read while recovering from a great emotional trauma, in the same way that in the aftermath of a nasty breakup a friend of mine found she couldn't bear to watch anything on TV except for Will and Grace.

Actually good is Mary Wortley Montagu's Life on the Golden Horn, one of those small Penguin paperbacks, an interesting but brief selection of letters she wrote from a diplomatic expedition to Istanbul in the early eighteenth century. I think I will read a longer compilation of her stuff some time. Maybe I should switch to biography and history for a bit. I need some good books! Some proper literature. Something substantial but not too indigestible. Something reliable by someone who can write.

Mooses are good at least:
http://moosefarm.newmail.ru/mfe01.htm
Kiss a lovely moose today! Also this bloke's illustrations are gently cheering. I like his portable halo here. Also the undercover pig, although I fear for said pig's future.

Kostantiniyye part 3

I was going to blog some more about İstanbul but I've been too busy doing other stuff. I definitely intend to go back, and I will stay longer and see more mosaics. The Istanbul Archaeological Museum is great, with the Alexander sarcophagus which Fiona said rendered Michelangelo unnecessary, and statuary displayed very well with huge pictures on the walls of details which I might otherwise have missed, but I didn't manage the first and second floors, with their stuff from Troy; plus I never made it over to the Asian side of the city. Here is a fishing boat near Eminönü, looking over the Golden Horn towards where the Genovan colony used to be.


PS Eminönü is fun to say.

More about Fraser

Typically sensible stuff about George McDonald Fraser from Neil Gaiman (in the middle of a long post). I'd noticed that the obituaries have been surprisingly pro-Flash, and it's true that the books are much better when he's being a cast-iron scoundrel. Newspapers aren't very capable of subtlety, are they?

So, farewell then General Flashman

George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, has died. Now we will never have the full details of the briefly-alluded to sordid episode in the Parker Library.

John Sutherland has written in the Guardian about how Americans never got Flash, and how this just goes to show how British he is. He is a genuinely revolting anti-hero for much of the time, and the amount of vileness people will put up with in a hero varies hugely. Nick Hornby can't stand the Charlie Mortdecai books, for example. But I liked Flash: he drank Tokay; he seduced women; he rode fast horses; he cheated at cricket; if pursued through the Russian snow by knout-wielding cossacks he would happily push his sleeping lover off the back of the sleigh to increase speed; he felt no qualms about living off the earnings of infatuated hookers; and I learnt a huge amount about the military cock-ups of the nineteenth century by reading the copious endnotes provided by his editor. He wasn't just pretending to be nasty, he was the real thing, and a wonderful antidote to Tom Brown's Schooldays, if you have had the misfortune to read it.

Kostantiniyye part 2

6. I loved Agia Sophia -- for a start, isn't it cool to have a church dedicated to Holy Wisdom? The bit about Wisdom calling in the market-place is the main place in the Bible where God is referred to as female; I remember my uncle Paul, who is a URC minister, telling me that when I was quite small, because he comes from the civilised non-sexist side of my family. The Orthodox church interprets her as Christ before he was incarnated and they have a good icon, where Wisdom has a bright red face for reasons I forget.
Unhappily, I could tell that Fiona was distinctly unimpressed by Agia Sophia. It's true it's not in the greatest shape. The dome is huge, and a good section is filled with a construction of iron scaffolding so immense as to be impressive in its own right. (Apparently this is for surveying purposes, and they will move it every ten years until they have looked at the whole building, and then they can decide what to do about its terrible structural deformations.) The massive calligraphic roundels, put up in the nineteenth century, disappointingly turn out just to say the names of Allah, Muhammed, the caliphs, and the prophet's grandsons, rather than anything profound about God. The building was converted from the head church of Orthodoxy to a great mosque within three days of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and only a few mosaics survive. One is the Virgin and Child; apparently a similar image was the only one not destroyed by Muhammed when he cleansed the Kaaba at Mecca, which I completely don't understand. There's also a very fine fourteenth-century deisis, and various emperors and empresses giving things to Christ. I liked the one of that termagent Zoe and her husband -- whose name and face had been changed at least once according to political circumstances. But it seemed sad that the whole place is no longer used for anything sacred. Ataturk turned it into a museum in the 1920s, and it has a very secular busy air, no one keeping their voices down. I'm biased, and would have liked it to have been a church, but at least if it were a mosque there would seem some point to its not being a church any more. When the army of Mehmet the conqueror breached the defences of Constantinople the orthodox priests who were celebrating the liturgy in Agia Sophia are said to have gathered up the sacred vessels and disappeared into the walls behind the altar, where they await the return of orthodoxy to the empire.

Joy!

I just got to the bit about the weevils!

A short note about books

I am in Devon for Christmas and have read my Christmas books from my mother (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, which was good but disappointing given the recent hype about her, like a duller E. F. Benson; and An Infinity of Little Hours, by Nancy Klein Maguire, which was very interesting but curiously conveyed nothing of the character of monasticism as I have encountered it, touching very little on God). On holiday I finished The Syme Papers by Benjamin Markovits, which I eventually started to enjoy (though I noted the page when I got into it and it was p. 217); The Legacy of Reginald Perrin, by David Nobbs, reliably amusing though perhaps only for people who already know the characters; Salamander by Thomas Wharton, which rather overdid the Jeanette Winterson-style magic realism; and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I enjoyed, though I did feel that most of the middle was basically a self-indulgent nostalgia trip for Umberto Eco. So I went into the library -- my parents built this house from scratch, and designed it themselves, and my one contribution was that I insisted we had to have a library, so we do, with high bookshelves all the way round made in pine by a local carpenter, and a chair that folds out into steps for getting at the top shelves -- and went to where I left all my Aubrey and Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian when I lent them to my father. There are more than 20, I think, and I just picked one at random from the middle (The Fortune of War, as it happens), and have been enjoying it immensely. They are wonderfully well written, and very funny in a human sort of way -- I can't remember who said that they were what Jane Austen's sea-faring brothers would have written, but that seems exactly right to me. If you haven't read them already I envy you for the chance to discover them, though there are a substantial number and they may take you some time to get through.

Kostantiniyye part I

Yesterday evening I got back from visiting İstanbul with my friend Fiona who lives in Rome. Here are some thoughts about it.
1. İstanbul has had an excessive number of names: Byzantium, Constantinople, Kostantiniyye, and finally İstanbul, not to mention variants on those. The Vikings referred it as Miklagarðr (which simply means the Big City), and it's still called that in Iceland. It is 125 km in length from the westernmost part in Europe to the easternmost part in Asia. It claims to have been built on seven hills.

2. We decided to try lots of local things. The first one was sahlep, a hot drink made from orchid root and cinnamon, and this turned out to be utterly delicious. You can buy a steaming polystyrene-cup-full of it from street vendors for one lira (45p). Pleased with this success we had different flavours of toffee wound onto a stick; ayran (delicious yogurt drink); sherbert (far too sweet); strange meatballs; and we asked a rabbit to tell our fortune. The rabbit did this by being told our names and then nosing out from a tray a little slip of paper for each of us. Mine said "O! Owner of fortune: You're in straits nowdays but don't worry you will sort out everything and feel happy. It is seen generosity by someone." I feel quite good about that, especially the initial invocation and the final cryptic phrase. We also ordered odd things on menus to see what they were: I had a meal called "Christians of Istanbul", which turned out to be lamb and dried plums baked in pastry. It was very good, and terribly Byzantine, the sort of thing the Palaeologi probably ate before going off to slay some Bulgars. Fiona even went so far as to go to a hamam, though I discovered myself to be just too damn British and went to a bookshop instead. Alas: our new-experience lucky streak came to an end with the ill-advised order of some turnip juice. It was really remarkably foul, and I found it upsetting just to have it on the table while I ate my pide. So we lost heart and never tried the milk pudding flavoured with slightly burnt chicken breast, or boza, a hot alcoholic drink made from chickpeas.

3. Fiona pointed out to me the lack of women in their twenties and thirties; and in the old city people on the streets were mostly men, and it seemed that the only other women about were with their husbands. Of course that's a pretty typical evening at high table; still it was a bit disconcerting.

4. We went down into the massive basilica cistern, which was completely lost until a sixteenth-century French archaeologist noticed that some people in the old city were catching fish through holes in their floors. It has huge arches and lots of reused masonry, including some big gorgon heads on their sides holding up pillars. The water isn't deep but is full of ancient carp. Fiona said that it would be the ideal place for a first date, because there's a cafe there lit by candles; I offer that in case anyone is looking for a first date location in Istanbul.

Happy Christmas!

Hurray, I do like Christmas when it finally happens, after all that tedious long run-up. (Even though I just checked my e-mail and it's all about pills and sales except for a long list of things to do which my boss sent me a couple of hours ago.) Once you get down to midnight mass and the Christmas morning service it's all great. Church at Easter is the best because it celebrates victory over death; Christmas always feels a tad more mixed to me, because you know that the baby will grow up to face terrible things. But it's still a celebration of a strange undeserved gift.

Interviews, some thoughts on them

When interviewing undergraduates it's largely about giving them lots of opportunities, within the relatively short time at one's disposal, to show you their intelligence etc. I've been thinking about job interviews recently, especially since an ex-DoSee told me what a shock she'd found it when doing the milkround to move to a totally different sort of interview, in which they were not interested in you as a person and did not feel any particular need to make you comfortable.

1. Do not lie in interviews. This is partly a moral thing because one shouldn't lie, but really I'm saying it because if you are feeling any need to lie it may indicate that you do not actually want the job; something is making you feel that it is a fake and wrong situation. I have only once lied in an interview. It was when I was an undergraduate and needed a summer job in Cambridge while I worked on my Part II dissertation on a manuscript in Trinity Library. I had an interview at the new Seattle Coffee Company cafe in the Waterstone's book shop (now Cult Clothing). This was at a time when cafes in bookshops were new to Cambridge, and slightly out there; plus it was years before Starbucks came to England, and we were all used to ordering a coffee like this: a large white coffee please, no sugar. Plus I didn't drink coffee at the time. During my interview they gave me a grande iced raspberry mochachino with whipped cream and asked me what I thought. Delicious, I lied. They gave me the job and sent me for training in London where exuberant Americans made us all wear plastic animal noses all day and told us we should always treat every customer as if they were wearing an animal nose. They seemed to think this was shorthand for "as if they were an exciting individual who's fun to be with", whereas really one would react with concerned pity, or perhaps icy courtesy if they looked like a public schoolboy. There was no harm done because it was only a summer job, and I met some interesting people there, and had a very mild flirtation with being cool.
The only other time I was not so much tempted to lie as presented with the opportunity to do so was at an interview for a job at a certain auction house. It was just three days after I had submitted my PhD and I was exhausted; I didn't want the job but an academic I hugely respect as a person had presented me with the advert with such kindly pleasure that I felt I must be wrong about it. As well as the interview we were each one by one set a Latin test, with a pretty nasty bit of St Augustine getting confused about what he is and how he can know what he is, and an original Elizabethan deed which I would guess I aced. Then we had to save our work on the computer provided in a particular folder. Where of course one found in serried ranks the answers of all the people who had already done the test. I did not open any of them, but the whole process filled me with a mild disgust. I'm very sorry for anyone who cheated off my answer on the Augustine, which I said was Anselm. It was not the happiest era of that auction house's life; and if someone were to tell me that candidates who did use other people's work were by no means frowned upon I could probably contain my amazement. They told me I was too academic, which was a polite way of expressing ...something, and then wouldn't pay my travel expenses, which was a bit rubbish of them.

2. Self-confident ebullience is a completely different thing from lying. My interview technique is to imagine myself only better, and then pretend to be that person. It works quite well when I pull it off, which isn't every time.

3. If you're being rude in an interview, again you probably don't really want the job. In one interview I ended up not only doing the set test but writing a long critique of it in the remaining available time, and later in the personal interview I put it to the interviewers that they didn't really know what they wanted. They didn't reply very convincingly, and they didn't give me the job. By that time I had come up with 5 reasons why I was allowed to turn it down if I was offered it. I was right about it, the whole project has been very bad for the blood pressure of everyone involved, and the person who did get the job had a miserable time and got out quickly. It's a shame because it was promising on paper.

4. When on the other side of the fence, i.e. interviewing not being interviewed, the thing that annoys me most is when fellow interviewers start talking without asking questions. I've been at plenty of interviews where the candidate can hardly get a word in edgeways.

5. Back to being interviewed: competencies-based interviewing, where every candidate is asked exactly the same questions and given a numerical mark on each answer which will later be tallied to give a total candidate score, with no opportunity for the interviewer to follow something up or ask about anything specific on the papers, is a dehumanising and unpleasant experience. I'm guessing it must be harder for the interviewer like that too -- can you imagine interviewing sixth-formers that way? It's only happened to me once, for a government employer, but it was wierd, especially since two of the three interviewers were people I count as personal friends. I didn't get the job, which was for the best in all practical ways, though I would have liked to have worked there.

6. The Church of England has this attitude to its clergy; they trust that for every vicar X there is a right job, and for every job Y there is a right vicar. Then in the interview they seek to discern whether vicar X and job Y are the two that fit together. Although it can't be quite like that in the non-vicar world it's still a good attitude to take into a job interview.

Short versus long fiction

I've been trying to read Benjamin Markovits's The Syme Papers, because I loved his Either Side of Winter, and thought Imposture was good too. It's a big book about a modern scholar trying to make his reputation by rescuing that of a nineteenth-century amateur geologist who might have come up with some important ideas before they became mainstream. I'm finding it rather heavy going, even though most of it is set in the British Library's newspaper library at Colindale, which is endearing. (It's an excellent building, full of old art deco style reading lamps and fittings, not through any conscious decision but simply because there has never been the money to replace them.)

In contrast I am also reading Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines, which are very short factual pieces he wrote for the news-in-brief column of a French newspaper in 1906. They give a gloomy picture of early twentieth-century France, full of strikes, suicides, violence, and random death. For example:

In Le Havre, a sailor, Scouarnec, threw himself under a locomotive. His intestines were gathered up in a cloth.

or

A madman from the Arab village of Beni-Ramasses has deserted his family, albeit belatedly since he was tormenting them. He is being sought.

or

Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook "Forgive me Dad. I like you."

or

The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Ménard, snail collector.

Self-knowledge through tidying

If while tidying you come across a big heap of essays, poems, and fiction written when you were a teenager, my advice is to think twice about actually reading them, especially the poems or any blank-verse drama written under the influence of Christopher Fry. (Pause to go "!!!!") It's wierd to be taken back to a time when I felt so very strongly about things; I'm afraid I'm a bit laodicean these days.

The heap includes the A-level English coursework I submitted, consisting of one long essay and two short ones. They were all titles I made up myself. The long essay is on characters from Marlowe; I was mildly obsessed with him as a sixth-former, which reminds me of Wendy Cope's poem about having a crush on A. E. Housman. The two short ones are both creative writing, because I read the A-level regulations, and discovered that they couldn't stop me from doing this. So in one I rewrote the end of Jane Eyre; I clearly remember being in a bad mood that weekend so I made it that Jane got there just in time to see Mr Rochester die cursing her name and then she married StJohn and went to India to work herself to death. In the other I wrote a speech of Satan from Paradise Lost to his followers, reporting his trip to the gates of hell. It was rather fun to do because I inverted sentence structures and put in tons of sustained classical allusions, etc etc. Then I just wrote an essay showing what I had been trying to do with examples from real Milton, explained that I hadn't managed because I was only me and Milton was a genius, and watched the marks roll in!

Anyway, having read a lot of sixth-form essays for interviews recently it's interesting to look at this stuff in that light. (The Marlowe one is the one I sent in for my Cambridge interview, but I rather doubt anyone read it, things being different back then.) I assess my seventeen-year-old self as interesting, probably intelligent, but very annoying, and quite possibly lacking in intellectual stamina. This actually makes me feel quite good about myself, because I have overcome some of my natural flaws -- I have stuck with ASNC for thirteen years even though I am prone to short-lived enthusiasms, and I like to think I've reined in the annoying a bit too. Hurray! Now if my ex-wisdom tooth would just stop hurting...

Related TV idea

I am a wisdom tooth down. I wouldn't recommend it as a way to pass time. The actual extraction wasn't painful, though the creaking and cracking noises and the smell of blood were pretty disgusting, but now it's very achey.

I do miss having rats, because something about the way they have things of their own to get on with is quite consoling when I'm in a bad mood. (Though of course I do have rat tooth envy -- theirs grow back!) In this vein I have come up with a TV idea. It's called "Help me [not Anthea], I'm not infested!" Someone who is the opposite of Anthea Turner -- I'm thinking off the top of my head Sandi Toksvig -- helps people who live in clean unfriendly houses to pick out a pet and the appropriate equipment. The resulting shed hair and scattered squeaky toys on the floor are contrasted with the joy of animal company.

Anyway hooray for cuteoverload, with its rats and cats, and puppies:

Things I found while tidying part IIa

A handwritten note on a printed correspondence card sent to me in my first year by the man who eventually supervised my PhD. I had failed to go to a 9 o'clock lecture. It says "Your absence this morning was noted!"

Reading books

I finished the Amalgamation Polka. It was good, and I do like that Pynchon style, but it left me strangely unmoved in the long run. I imagine I'll read his next book, though.

Currently I am reading the rather more memorable 'Ulrich Haarbürste's novel of Roy Orbison in clingfilm'. This is the gently charming tale of Ulrich Haarbürste who lives in Düsseldorf with his terrapin Jetta, and who likes very much to wrap Roy Orbison (preferably fully clothed) in clingfilm. I saw it mentioned on the Guardian books page and ordered it with some trepidation, because once from the same source I ordered what sounded like an interesting thriller which just happened to have a lesbian heroine, and when it arrived it turned out to be a "thriller" of another kind in a series devoted to lesbian porn. (It was objectionable on two grounds 1) it was grossly anatomical in places and 2) lesbian porn ought to have few or no men in it and this had loads, but I had stupidly written my name at once in all the books in that amazon parcel so I couldn't really give it to Oxfam because if I did one of my students was pretty much bound to buy it.) I warmly recommend Ulrich Haarbürste's rather touching story, as he finds himself with ever more complex yet convincing reasons why Roy Orbison needs to be wrapped in clingfilm, and only avoids the terrible fate of wrapping Jim Morrison in clingfilm through the kindly interventions of Yul Brynner. By page 47 I stopped counting how many times Roy Orbison had been completely wrapped in clingfilm -- it was 14 that far. Saddest are the times when Roy Orbison needs only partially wrapping in clingfilm, which leaves our hero anxious and ill at ease.

Of course now I've written this the second half of the book will be disgustingly perverted...

Life is complex

The fragment I saw on Sunday was sold on Tuesday for approaching three hundred thousand pounds to someone who, I'm guessing, already owns a house. I'm glad I got the chance to see it.

Currently upsetting me is the fact that I seem to be agreeing with the American Christian Right in that I don't like Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I console myself with the thought that my objections are on a much more intellectual level than theirs. Luther said "Sin boldly" and I'm more of a fan of intelligent atheism than of that sort of piety which sends people to church every week because it's the done thing. But now it seems like you can get atheistic piety too, which leads to people in the Guardian feting the idea of the Pullman trilogy as an anti-Christian children's book without looking in to what sort of ideas it's really espousing. I don't have any more right to speak for atheists than atheists have for Christians (and I suppose actually I don't have any right to speak for Christians either) but wouldn't atheism ideally not base itself entirely on Christianity, just with all the goods and bads reversed? Pullman's ideas seem like one of the those early gnostic sects where all forbidden things were really mandatory; like the children who have been told never to put beans in their ears, and who then put beans in their ears. At least the Harry Potter books have a morality which doesn't involve God. But I may just be missing the point about the Pullman ones, I suppose. And the American Religious Right's attitude makes me wonder if I should give the books another chance. Oh American Religious Right, will you please shut up! You make us all look like loonies.

Things I have found while tidying part II

1. Loads of old tape cassettes: e.g the Scorpions album Strange World which includes To Be With You In Heaven and Winds of Change, copied for me by the brother of the bloke I had a crush on when I was 14; other tapes I have kept solely because of who made them for me; all going in the bin now, I'm afraid.

2. The filigree hat pin which my Granny gave me so that I could defend myself if necessary on the Tube. I kept it pinned down my coat lapel for a while but got increasingly concerned that I was more likely accidentally to stab myself than any would-be attacker. It was a very Granny thing.

3. My Part I Latin folder with heavily annotated texts in it. I always meant to drop Latin, but somehow I'm still doing it.

4. A typewritten letter from a Dr A. D. B. Poole inviting me to an interview for "Anglo-Saxon" at 15.00 on 7 December 1993 in G3 Great Court, Trinity College. My boss managed to get the itinerary with the 1 dropped off the front of the times so he was expecting everyone two hours later; with hilarious results!

5. A picture of my school form in the first year of secondary school; I look remarkably like Neil from the Young Ones.

A sense of accomplishment

The silver lining to the dark thunderhead that is having too much to do is that, when you do get a moment, it helps you to seize that moment fluently, and dispatch something which could have taken ages under normal conditions. I wrote the bulk of my book on St Margeret's Gospels longhand either at St Mary's Abbey Malling (where it was a displacement activity for praying and Thinking Hard about Things) or in the pews of the medieval church of Edington, where the services are so popular during the Festival of Music in the Liturgy that you have to turn up about ninety minutes early if you want somewhere to sit. This dead time seemed like such a gift that it became strangely easy to write. Today has been my first day of my own work in ages because of flat-clearing panic, and I managed to go down to London and spend an hour transcribing an important fragment as well as finishing off my book on calendars. Hurray! No doubt there are still some things wrong with it, but the editor has shown no desire to read it, so at least he won't be demanding tedious revisions. It should be out in the spring, apparently, though I'm not quite sure I actually believe that.

(By the way, I should really point out that when I say I have too much to do I mean that I have more to do than I myself feel able to handle, but it's nothing compared to what some people in this intense university manage. I have no idea how people do it when they have other commitments -- let alone children, even a partner seems like a sort of unaffordable digression of resources to me these days. Cambridge has "I don't know how she/he does it" disease.)

Anyway it's been a while since I said anything about books. My advice is, read things by Antal Szerb: the Pendragon Legend is good, and so is Oliver VII, but the first is funnier so better. He died in a concentration camp in 1945, but has only recently been available in translation, I think largely due to the Pushkin Press, which is usually just a tad too worthy for me. The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia is very good in a respectable sci-fi, Neil Gaiman kind of way; it has some excellent rats in it, which always endears a book to me. I'm reading the Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright; it's very good so far but amazingly Pynchon-y, with a hint of Thomas Guane. Consider this sentence:

One clear summer day, utterly absorbed in following the track of some clawed, padded animal the consequences of a possible encounter with he had not given a single thought, Liberty happened by chance to notice, sprouting in the shadow of a large rock, a strange bushy plant of no recognizable species, a heap of gray, stringy tendrils and leaves that seemed, as he approached, to be exhibiting a slight quivering movement curious on such a windless afternoon.

Either he'll continue to pull it off and it'll be a great book, or I'll start to find it really annoying.

Fridges and hubris

I chose a new fridge last week. I decided that it had to have: an A energy rating; a reversible door because the space is next to a wall; and an ice compartment/little freezer. I found one that fitted all these requirements! My mother bought the thing as an advance birthday present for next summer because she doesn't seem to have registered the fact that I have an income these days. (Yesterday was a landmark day because she let me buy her a meal; it was only a plate of pasta from Clowns, and she has been making constant references to it all weekend, but it's still a start.) My mother is quite like me except that she's practical, sociable, and unafraid of hard work, so she changed the door for me. And at this point we discovered that once the door was changed round the ice compartment could no longer be opened, unless the fridge door was open to about 120 degrees, which we can't do because of the afore-mentioned wall. (And wouldn't it be bad for energy anyway? Who opens their fridge door right back on itself?) The specifications of the fridge had failed to mention that the ice compartment and reversible door was an either/or situation so my mother and I have wasted large parts of the day phoning up people who gave us the phone numbers of other people, instead of palming my junk off on charity shops.

So: does this inability on my part to choose the right fridge bode badly for the much harder decision to come about students? Or will it just be one of those things where the ostensibly easy task, choosing a fridge, turns out in fact to have been the more difficult of the two? I'm lucky that the person I co-interview with has decades of experience and is not only very good at discerning for himself, but also at interviewing in a way which helps the student display their best qualities to me, too. He let me in, but made me get 3 As, which wasn't the standard offer at the time, and this just goes to show his impeccable judgement; I was worth a bit of a risk but not too much. (The risk was I wanted to switch from science to humanities, my grades were OK.) I suppose I could ask him next time I need to buy a fridge, though I have a feeling that his skillset is very specialised for survival in a fellowship environment.

The consolation of philosophy

I have to have a wisdom tooth removed. I don't think my dentist has quite understood that I am an enormous coward, and I don't deal well with pain. I'm not one of those smiles-bravely types. I make everyone around me's life a misery and mope about being melodramatically defeated.

But I am being soothed from this thought by looking at a manuscript in the library. It's a tenth-century book of the sort of stuff intellectuals liked at that period: Book IV (De arte dialectica) of Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii; pseudo-Augustine's Categoriae decem, translated from Aristotle; pseudo-Apuleius's Liber peri hermeneias; Boethius's translation of Porphyry's Isagoge in Categorias Aristoteles, plus some more Boethius; Alcuin, De dialectica; and pseudo-Augustine, Dialectica. (I have entitled the whole manuscript "Philosophical works by Martianus Capella, Aristotle, Boethius, and others"; suggestions on whether I should have got the word "dialectic" in there would be welcome.) I have learnt, among other things, that to be a human is to be risibile, because even if you're not laughing right then you might laugh at some point; while to be a horse is to be hinnibile. Horses don't laugh, and people don't whinny. I used to whinny and pretend to be a horse on my way to Brownies causing my mother much embarrassment; I think Boethius wouldn't have approved either.

What's really engaging my attention however is the script. (Though I ought just to be checking the foliation and recording incipits and explicits.) It's Caroline minuscule; but it is absolutely packed with Insular and late Celtic abbreviations: including two ticks above a t for tra; the Insular secundum, autem, enim, and even per; bird-shaped v with o above for uero; and N with a bar through for nam, which is supposed to be specifically Welsh (though I would take that with a pinch of salt, personally). It was certainly in England at the end of the eleventh century or start of the twelfth, when its opening page was rewritten with a nice initial, probably at Canterbury, and it may be identifiable with a manuscript which Leland saw at Malmesbury in the 1530s. But whether it was written in England or on the Continent remains unclear; people have noted the huge number of Insular abbreviations, but I don't think anyone has really looked properly at their overwhelmingly Celtic, especially late Celtic (= post-850ish) character. Although the Irish, for example, hung on to Insular script for a ridiculous length of time (I think it was finally given up in 1952), my theory is that a better understanding of Caroline minuscule in England would depend heavily on sorting out the Celtic dimension, and the idiosyncratic abbreviations would be a way into this. I made a tentative start on saying this for an article for the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain which I wrote in 2003, and I do wish they'd hurry up and print it because while it's in limbo I feel like I can't quite move on. People often look at Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent; but Anglo-Saxon England and the Celtic-speaking world have tended to be studied in very different sorts of university course, Celtic studies versus History/English, and I'm very lucky to have had an education which has pointed out the importance of that other side of things. It's not a good idea to characterise nations, as Thomas Browne pointed out, but one does get the sense with the Irish and other Celtic-speaking peoples in the early to mid-Middle Ages that there was a tendency to an intense intellectual curiosity. Also they had this concept of self-exile from their homeland as a particular way of serving God, like being a hermit but abroad instead of in the wilderness. Even though things Caroline didn't stick back home, I'd bet the movement of Celtic-speaking peoples was a big catalyst for change in England; like the Irish who taught St Dunstan at Glastonbury, and Iorwerth the Welshman at Winchester. Hurray for palaeography! It beats dentistry in the paper, rock, scissors of life.

A seventeen-year-old is fundamentally unlike a fridge

If a sixth-former were a fridge I would be very good at evaluating its energy rating, number of shelves, size of ice compartment, and whether it has a bottle rack. I can immediately discard a fridge with a B energy rating and nowhere to put things on the back of the door. But sixth-formers are unlike fridges and in even the most statistically-based descriptions of them individual bits of interestingness shine through. Meeting them makes this even more complex. One possibility would be to think of sixth-formers as fridges; this might make me more efficient at ranking them, to the benefit of both institution and myself, and possibly even the sixth-formers. However I feel it would be morally wrong.

Things I have found out

This is quite good: a guide to recycling in Cambridge. It tells you how to get rid of a computer, for example, and who will collect old furniture. I need to get rid of my old desktop.

Cambridge was founded on seven hills: Castle Hill, Pound Hill, Honey Hill, Market Hill, Peas Hill, St Andrew's Hill, and Senate House Hill. Bath was founded on seven hills too, but the internet won't tell me what they are, and I can only remember Lansdowne Hill, where my Mum grew up. I asked her what they were once but she snorted and said it was Classicising nonsense, or words to that effect anyway. Probably not those words.

Watching items that you're selling on ebay clock up watchers and eventually bids is as compelling as bidding on and watching items you want to buy, only with the money gradient in the right direction. I am scouring my flat for more stuff to put on. I've sold one batch of icons and now I'm on to some more special ones, so I have more capacity to be disappointed.

The excellent Cavy Rescue "Recycle-a-rodent" website allows one to sponsor a rat, which has relieved some of my pent-up rat yearnings. If you prefer your rats heroic, or are particularly fond of minesweeper, you can adopt a HeroRat which is actually out there doing good for humanity in return for squashed banana. Rats are great, and I miss having them about. Statistically there's one around here somewhere, but it hasn't made contact so it's just not the same.

Graham Linehan's blog is quite good. The post about Conservapedia is pretty startling.

Clever Channel 4!

Hurray! According to the Guide, Matthew Collings is back this evening, talking about art. Does he still say gently clever things with a soft intonation? Nobody knows.

Beowulf: the monsters and the critics

Tolkien wrote a famous article by that title, in which he argued that Beowulf should be read as literature, instead of just quarried for old forms by philologists. He had a metaphor about someone who built a tower, and how years later people took it apart to see where the rocks came from and how they had been put together; but from the top of the tower the builder had been able to see the sea. Another famous article on Beowulf, by the great Anglo-Saxonist Kenneth Sisam, starts "Often, far from libraries, I have read Beowulf for pleasure". I went to see the film Beowulf in 3D last night, and something about the way it took massive liberties with the original reminded me just what a brilliant poem it is.

I enjoyed the film too. It was silly and excellent. They came up with a tediously modern explanation for who Grendel was, but really great works can cope with that sort of thing. They skipped lots of brilliant stuff like the fight at Finnsburh, which is a story told as a digression, hinting at a sad fate for Queen Wealtheow and her sons. But any film adaptation of a book has to simplify hugely. And the animation thing, which was supposed to make the people and the monsters look like they were in the same world, worked for me. On the down side the references to religion were tediously naff; Christianity didn't get that far north until centuries later. (The tenth-century king Harald Bluetooth claimed to have made Denmark Christian; his work as a unifier is why the wireless communication specification is named after him.) And I did regret the loss of the dignified pagans portrayed in the poem; they may deprive the neighbours of their mead-benches, but in the poem they're still sensible and trying to do what's right, unlike the sottish Hrothgar in the film.

Anyway I shall dig out one of my glossed editions of Beowulf and reread it. Go Beowulf! Slay that monstah! (Possibly the film was meant as a coded message to Brad Pitt from the friends of Jennifer Aniston.)

There are no rats in my home

I'm feeling sad today because I had to have my little rat Yaffle put to sleep. It was definitely time. At least now I don't have to worry about when to make the decision, and it's good that she doesn't have to cope with all the cleaning and redecorating stuff I'm doing; still, Confucius might have said "There is nothing as bitter as the convenient death of a loved one." Someone must have said that at some point.

In a spirit of appeal to the world I offer you this proof that if we all tried harder we could just get along. (Best watched with sound off.)

Found things

I have found various things so far while cleaning:

1) the cap for my USB flash drive. Yay!

2) 60 euro cents and about 80 pence in British.

3) some information about the International Planned Parenthood Federation, about which I had completely forgotten. I requested it because of something I found out about donkeys. Donkeys are wonderful things, and to stand near one will automatically improve your quality of life. (Unless it bites or kicks you, but that's not that likely.) However, donkey charities are the best supported in the UK, apparently, and those who rescue donkeys have no need to scrape together the cash to do so. I'm glad for the donkeys! But there are other charities doing excellent stuff who are hit by image problems. In particular, contraception, which seems to me like one of the best ideas ever, is such a controversial topic to some people that charities which support it miss out on huge tranches of potential income. The International Planned Parenthood Federation works to educate about contraception and distribute it, and also to reduce the number of unsafe abortions carried out in the world. My aunt is a reproductive health doctor and she says that something like 2 out of every 5 pregnancies in the UK is aborted. I hold no brief for foetuses, and am not at all sure what to think about them, so I'm going to leave that issue to one side; but look at it solely from the point of view of the women involved. That's a vast number of women going through a nasty physical and really horrible emotional experience. (A friend described her abortion to me in horrendous detail once as we went round a Titian exhibition, with all those Flayed Marsayes and Rape of Lucreces -- I hadn't asked but in humanity I pretty much had to let her tell me.) Better contraception, and more of it, I say! In the meantime the IPPF allows one to donate online.

4) A sermon I wrote a long time ago. A couple of times the chaplain suggested I should preach, and I always demurred, rightly I think. But I did once have an idea for a sermon so I wrote it down. It was about the problems with the secular view of self-respect.

5) The service sheet from the funeral of Jeremy Maule, a great scholar and teacher, who died in 1998. It was the first Cambridge funeral I went to, with the choir singing the nunc dimittis around the coffin under Trinity Great Gate. He had had a few weeks' notice of his death and had planned the obsequies himself, with hymns and readings from Donne; they were distinctly uncomfortable, as of someone who did not want to die. This was appropriate. He was only in his early forties. Just to be selfish for a moment, I imagine my life would be different if he had lived, because he was very supportive of my wanting to branch out into early modern stuff.

The angel in the house

I have a lot of admiration for people who keep houses clean and tidy. It's not one of my virtues. At the moment, as I start piling up things to get rid of, doing anything in my flat is like one of those slidey puzzle games: I have to move large numbers of things in sequence in order to get at any one particular cupboard. The water here is so hard that even Cillit Bang! (hardcore remix here) won't remove the encrusted limescale on my bath and instead I have to scrape it off flake by painstaking flake with nylon pan scrapers from Lakeland.

I looked on the internet for ways to clean grouting, and someone recommended a mixture of bleach and baking soda. This alarmed me, because it sounds like one of those home-made bomb recipes. And if you put the wrong cleaning products together you can produce chlorine gas -- apparently people do die from mixing toilet cleaners, though I think it has to be bleach and something acidic, which baking soda isn't. I know that baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, and wikipedia tells me that's NaHCO_3. I would consider myself well-educated if I could predict whether that would be a safe thing to mix with chlorine bleach. But I have no idea, and therefore I am not.

Tomorrow my mother is coming up, and because she had a scientific education she may know the answer. But I'm afraid she'll be so annoyed by the messiness of my flat that she'll be in no mood for speculations. Even my dad was shocked at it when he was last here, and this is a man who developed a proper forest floor ecosystem in his study while writing a book on trees by just dropping herbarium specimens when he was done with them. (Eventually my mother passive-aggressively bought him a new carpet for his birthday.)

The Seed of the One who Roars on High

1. Someone who lives near my parents is a professional fireworks display man, and he arranged for the village to get a cheap, late, display composed of all the fireworks which had failed to go off in the displays he'd already done for Guy Fawkes' night. Presumably unexploded fireworks are a perk/hazard of the job. My mother seemed to think this quite reasonable, but wouldn't it be tremendously dangerous? The fireworks factory in the nearest small town exploded a couple of years ago. It was amazingly lucky that no one was killed; the caretaker broke his leg, I think, and lots of people were bruised from being blown off their feet, and that was it. The explosion was more than usually dramatic and could be seen for some miles.

2. I visited Bologna university last summer to see the friend with whom I will be working when I go out there next year. Her department is in a fifteenth-century palazzo, just up the hill from an amazing complex of early medieval churches. She showed me the loos, which are divided not into two but three: men's, ladies', and professors'.

3. Anglo-Saxon charters are sometimes great. When King Athelstan decided to give Wootton Bassett to the church of Malmesbury he started like this:
The insolent fortune of this deceiving age, not worthy of love because of the milky whiteness of unfading lilies but hateful because of the bitterness steeped in gall of corruption that is to be lamented, bitingly tears to pieces the sons of stinking flesh in the vale of tears by raving wildly with its poisonous jaws, which, although it may be attractive to the unfortunate by its pleasing manner, yet shamelessly is it declining downwards to the depths of Acherontic Cocytus [i.e., Hell], unless the Seed of the One Who Roars on High [i.e., Jesus, the Son of God] should assist. And so, because that ruined thing [i.e., fortune] is going mortally into decay through its failing, one must hasten with the utmost effort to the pleasant fields of indescribable happiness, where the angelic tongues of hymn-singing jubilation and the scents of verdant roses flowing with honey of incalculable sweetness are captured by the good and blessed nostrils and the sweetnesses of musical instruments heard by the ears.
In case you care, here is the Latin:
Fortuna fallentis seculi procax, non lacteo inmarcessibilium liliorum candore amabilis, sed fellita eiulande corruptionis amaritudine odibilis, fetentis filios ualle in lacrimarum carnis rictibus debachando uenenosis mordaciter dilaceret. Que quamuis arridendo sit infelicibus attractabilis Acherontici tamen ad yma Cociti ni satus alti subueniat boantis, impudenter est decursibus, et ideo ipsa ruinosa deficiendo tanaliter dilabitur, summopere festinandum est ad amena indicibilis leticie arua, ubi angelica ymnidice iubilationis organa mellifluaque uernantium rosarum odoramina a bonis beatisque naribus inestimabiliter dulcia capiuntur, sineque calce auribus cliuipparum suauia audiuntur.
Go King Athelstan! One of England's greatest kings. One of his others has a great anathema clause which sentences the infringer to being beaten about the head by devils with frying pans.

What's Italian for yay?

I'm going to Bologna for six months! I've got an Early Career Research Fellowship thing at the University there. This is good. I will miss 4OD and the Literary Review (maybe I can get the latter sent out to me) but everything else is a plus. There are some gorgeous old churches there and they really know what to do with a dead pig.

I only have a couple of months to empty and redecorate my flat though, which will be challenging in terms of possessions. I think most of my poetry books will have to go to Oxfam, and most of my collection of icons will have to go on ebay. My parents have offered me some space in their garage, but academic books need to be somewhere less mousy. I had a preliminary attempt at clearing out a bit at the weekend, filling eight bin bags with totally useless items. The record for expiry date so far is October 1998, on some cough medicine. But it does sort of validate my slobby lifestyle, because instead of regularly clearing up over the past ten years, now I can do it all in one go. I remember this about moving; it's much easier to throw things out when the alternative is physically carrying them somewhere.

Britney

I had this dream the other night that a race of super-intelligent and compassionate aliens shaped like large green slugs grew so worried about Britney Spears' mental state that they sent an ambassador to earth to befriend her and help her get back on the rails. It all worked really well and she got her children back and became a UN ambassador or something. But even without extra-terrestrial intervention, and with neither hair nor pants, Britney seems unable to mess up the music. Her new album, Blackout, is great, although she didn't chose any of the mentalist titles she had offered for fans to vote on on her website. Toy Soldier is probably the next single. (It's not, alas, a cover of the Martika hit which was the first seven inch I ever bought.) But there are loads of excellent songs on it. I like them more when they're rap-like rather than too R'n'B, but they're very good, and I'm not usually that keen on R'n'B. Poor old Britney; I do hope she sorts her life out.

Most of us rein it in

I've just discovered passiveaggressivenotes.com. It's very funny if a tad depressing... I particularly like this note.

This and that

1. My current new toy is a graphics tablet. It's good for my RSI, and the handwriting recognition is impressive; it can cope with my terrible cursive scrawl, and seems to recognise names used elsewhere. I'm not the neatest writer, unless I'm really trying. It occurred to me that this could be a solution to the problem of the handwriting of students who type all their work, possibly including their lecture notes, but still have to write exams long-hand. If they used a graphics tablet instead of typing then when they got into the exam room they would at least have had plenty of practice at writing to a certain standard.

2. I was fed up with Calvin Harris but he made quite a good video for that sofa advert song.

3. The photocopier in my faculty can now e-mail things to you as pdfs instead of spewing them out on paper. This is a fantastic thing. I tried it out with a lovely letter I had just got from the Politest Man in the World, and now I don't have to worry about losing it. I have visions of spending all my weekends there for the next year or so, copying the articles which take up 67 inches on my shelves, not including a couple of years of unfiled stuff.

4. I would advise you not to read Ken Follett's Pillars of the World. It made me very nostalgic at first because, when I was a daunted twelve-year-old at my grandparents' house surrounded by loud extrovert relatives I would rifle the shelves and end up reading exactly this sort of well-constructed, engaging trash. I read it to the end to find out what happened, but it made me feel a bit car-sick. Also, it has that rather dirty sexuality which is big in those sorts of books -- lots of rapes. All in all, it's on a par with Jeffrey Archer, and should be avoided.

Historical loonies

I've just finished a fantastic book about millenarianism, The Pursuit of the Millenium by Norman Cohn. There were some excellent mad sects in the High Middle Ages who tried, in various creative ways, to usher in the kingdom of a thousand years which would precede the end of the world. I particularly liked one young man called Eon, Eudes in French, who claimed that the "eundem" in "per eundem Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum" referred to him, and that therefore all Latin prayers ended "through Eon Jesus Christ our Lord". Later he decided that he was also the "eum" in "per eum qui venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos et seculum per ignem", and that Eon was the one who would come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire. He died in the custody of the archbishop of Rouen, but not before gathering many disciples, several of whom ended at the stake, and generally causing chaos.

The topos of the ruler who didn't really die but is actually living as a wandering hermit and will come again is a familiar one; there were legends that Harold II survived Hastings, for example, and the idea that Edward II wasn't killed with that memorably gruesome poker but survived for decades as a wandering holy man is still current today. I was pleased to learn that not only were there several convincing imposters who claimed to be Frederick II, the stupor mundi, but that one of them, who mustered surprising international support but eventually betrayed himself and was burnt at the stake, even had his own imposter who claimed to be him raised from dead after three days -- a sort of pseudo-pseudo-Frederick. They killed that one too.

But the anabaptists rule when it comes to eschatalogical lunacy. The story of the kingdom of Münster is a sort of nightmare of odd but not completely unreasonable ideas slipping away into outright insane terror. Through a series of mad lurches they ended up ruled by a king called Jan Bockelszoon, whose first act as leader Cohn describes thus:
"Early in May he ran naked through the town in a frenzy and then fell into a silent ecstasy which lasted three days".
He instituted polygamy, from Old Testament examples, and made it illegal for women of marriageable age not to be married to another anabaptist. (Bockelszoon had fifteen wives at one point.) Women were executed for refusing to comply with this, and also for arguing with their new co-wives. He renamed the days of the week, and became a sort of Caligula, demanding strange shows of loyalty from his subjects, who were starving from a complete siege of the city by the ejected bishop. Eventually someone managed to let the bishop's army in, and a massacre followed. Bockelszoon and two others were tortured to death with red hot pincers, and their bodies hung in cages from a church tower in the city centre. The cages are still there, apparently, but the bodies were taken down after about fifty years. The whole episode was included by Luther Blisset in his book Q, which is quite readable; the author(s) claimed to have taken the name of Luther Blisset, a 70s footballer, as a pseudonym to conceal their identity as four Italian professors of semiotics, though the image of four Italian professors of semiotics choosing to get together to co-write an English novel about the North European reformation strikes me as the less likely of the two options. Still it's on Wikipedia so it's either true or someone's been reading too much Borges.

Odd

I've noticed this wierd thing when I get bad colds: at first, as my symptoms are just developing, I feel a bit ill and really miserable; then, when I'm fully unwell I feel physically much worse but get this sudden flush of feeling actually rather cheerful. Yesterday my cold was just starting and I was really very down; today I'm much more obviously unwell and I'm in an unusually good mood. Previously I've always assumed the grumpiness is because of how annoying it is to know you're coming down with something, and I've attributed the cheerfulness to the effect of people being nice to you once it's obvious you're ill, but I wonder whether there's more to it than that. Though it seems odd that a disease should make you happy. I suppose recreational drugs are mild poisons, so maybe it's like that.

What?

From the BBC's website:
"London's police force broke health and safety laws over the shooting dead of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes."