steepholm

I'm just back from an examining job in Winchester. (It was an overnighter, so I'm a bit behind on LJ.) While there, I took the opportunity to meet with an old housemate from York who's part of the English faculty, and over lunch he mentioned that he lives on Sleepers Hill (no apostrophe).

Now, I grew up just 12 miles from Winchester, so I'd heard of Sleepers Hill. I'd always assumed that its name alluded to a legend about mythical heroes-in-waiting, or at the very least a nest of indiscreet Russian spies. Apparently, however, it refers to the trees that used to grow at the top, which were chopped down to make railway sleepers for the line running from Winchester to Southampton. Quite interesting from an industrial archaeology point of view, I suppose, but a little prosaic.

The next hill along is called Oliver's Battery. As a child I was told this name commemorated a Civil War gun emplacement. Perhaps though it will turn out to memorialize an electrical supply shop run by Mr Oliver?

Sometimes it's better not to ask.

The perpetually crepuscular attitude of many Eng Lit types towards children's literature never ceases to charm. A few days ago, for example, John Mullan (of UCL) was complaining that it was "all the fault of cultural studies" that academics paid children's reading any mind, and that they ought to be writing about Sterne and Milton instead. (Presumably this criticism doesn't apply to those analyses that use a cultural studies approach to, say, put Sterne in the context of the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality, works such as - to take a random example - John Mullan's entry on "Sentimental Novels" in the Cambridge Companion to The Eighteenth Century Novel.)

This was all in the context of an HP conference up in St Andrews, an event reported the other day in a very badly-researched article in The Guardian as if it were the first time JKR's books had ever received attention from academics, like, ever.

Not that that's entirely surprising. Those of us who've been writing (and writing about) children's literature for decades have become used to the blundering appearance of pith-helmeted academics who stumble periodically into our Amazonian grove, declare it terra nullius, plant the flag of Yale or Oxford and then stumble out again. In fact, I wouldn't have mentioned it at all, had I not come across B. J. Epstein's article in the UK Huffington Post, which - in reporting all this, and doing a useful take-down of Mullan et al - also links to a story by my friend (from DWJ circles) Gili Bar-Hillel, Rowling's Hebrew translator, in which she recounts the bullying tactics used by Time Warner against the translators of Harry Potter. If you don't read any of the other links in this post, read that one.

Probably I shouldn't be any more surprised by Time Warner's bullying than I am by John Mullan's ignorant contempt. I'm simply more familiar with the latter.

We are all familiar with this picture of President Obama and his close friends watching the crucial Champions League penalty shootout. Everyone is tense, but note particularly the strain on the face of Hillary Clinton, a lifelong Bayern Munich fan, as Didier Drogba strides up to take the decisive kick.



I couldn't help but be reminded of it this morning, when I came across this picture taken at the time of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. There's Obama again, his mouth neutrally agape, while beside him Ordinary Dave punches the air as the leader of al-Qaeda is "taken down". Angela Merkel, meanwhile, grips the back of a chair, betraying her nervousness that the invasion of another country's sovereign territory to carry out an extra-judicial murder might just possibly breach some law or other.



I don't say that two pictures constitute a genre. But I do suspect that Gil Scott-Heron and Baudrillard both had a point.

I'm looking blankly at my Facebook updates and sucking at an early-morning cheroot when an insistent knocking on my front door disturbs my reverie. Conscious of little beyond the shabbiness of my dressing gown, I unlatch the door to find an exhausted, desperate but curiously youthful woman on the step.

"What the—?” I begin, but she cuts me off.

"Quick!” she cries. “I am a young mum from your area who has discovered a cheap and effective way to fight the signs of ageing. You've got to hide me! The dermatologists are after me! The dermatol—”

She gets no further before a high-powered IPL laser shoots clean through the back of her head, emerging from her T zone. She falls at my feet, her face a bloody (though wrinkle-free) pulp...

You'd want to know more, wouldn't you? It seems to me that there's a great anthology of stories to be written based on pop-up ads (a pop-up book, if you will). After all, we all know that The Da Vinci Code was based on an email Dan Brown received from a Nigerian banker circa 2001.

But who will join me in this sure-fire moneymaking scheme? And which ads will you use?

If I posted on every transphobic article or incident I heard about, there'd be little room for anything else on this blog, so mostly I don't. Luckily, in this country there's a very helpful organization called Trans Media Watch, which monitors these things and works to educate journalists and broadcasters. It's a case of two steps forward, one step back, but in the three years they've been in existence, I think they've made some progress. While everyone slips up, when newspapers get it grossly wrong these days they're usually either local papers or else the kind of sensationalist rags you'd expect. (There was a period just after TMW gave evidence to the Leveson enquiry when the Daily Hate made a point of writing a lurid trans story pretty much every day for a fortnight.)

They order these things differently in the United States, however, and it takes me aback to see a newspaper of the New York Times's reputation get things horribly wrong. There was that article on Tiwonge Chimbalanga a couple of years ago, of course, but - well, that was in another country, and besides the wench is... no longer news. And to be fair, the Times was far from alone in screwing up on that occasion, although probably the crassest offender. But what could have possessed them to print something as scurrilous as this piece of victim-blaming, sexualizing, disrespectful, exploitative shit?

I can't even be bothered to deconstruct it, but luckily GLAAD (and others) have done that for me. I've just come here for a little rant.

I see that Reading History in Children's Books now has a generous 28% discount at Amazon, making it virtually affordable - and is adorned with a rather lovely endorsement by Ronald Hutton.

Happy Birthday, chilperic, on your special day!

I gave two papers over the last couple of days, one at a conference on Southwest Writing in Bristol and the other at a children's literature conference in London. They both went okay, I think, but it's left me rather tired and (oddly) about two pounds heavier. (Perhaps that's a corollary of being taken seriously by academics: "Does my gravitas look big in this?") Anyway, there were some excellent papers, including a keynote by fjm (this was at the NCRCL in Roehampton).

I also learned a good deal about the Red Book of Bath, the existence of which was news to me. This, I hasten to add, was from a medieval historian at the southwest conference, not a children's literature specialist in Roehampton, though there may well have been mention there of the Big Red Bath Book. The Red Book of Bath is one those compendious and oddly miscellaneous collections of medieval Stuff, like the Red Book of Hergest. In fact, this led to some discussion of whether it was a common thing for cities to have a 'Red Book', and whether the colour had any signification, as in the red letter days of the calendar, or even the sumptuary laws. Also, how did they even make leather red in them days? Was it particularly expensive, as with cloth?

I also heard an exasperated paper from a woman who works at a local media company about the way that Bristol specifically and the southwest in general has failed to gain a national presence, beyond the twin stereotypes of the straw-sucking yokel and Vicky Pollard. A lot of TV and films are made here, but if they're not buying into one of those two stereotypes then the Bristolness of Bristol tends to get elided. There's no southwestern soap, as there is for other English cities and regions such as Liverpool (Brookside), Salford/Manchester (Corrie), Newcastle (Byker Grove), London (Eastenders), Yorkshire (Emmerdale), Birmingham (Crossroads, RIP), and even Chester (Hollyoaks). (I'm not sure whether Skins is very big on its Bristol setting, because I've not really watched it.) Casualty was filmed in Bristol for over 20 years, but never made a point of it: in fact, it called the city Holby, which made it very easy for production to move to Cardiff a couple of years ago. A similar thing happened with Being Human, which was pleasingly Bristolian for the first three series, but then was seduced by the Dark Side and moved to Barry. Bristol streets do a roaring trade in pretending to be London for drama series, but even something as quintessentially Bristolian as Aardman Animations doesn't set its work here: Wallace and Gromit live in Lancashire. And as for the BBC Wildlife Unit, don't get me started...

She also had a couple of stories that suggested that these stereotypes govern what kinds of programmes the BBC and others are prepared to set in this area. A radio playwright who'd written a series of plays about the Devon working class, for example, was told that they'd love to make it - if she'd only set it in Wales instead (because of course Devon doesn't have a working class, just a peasantry). And the writer of Mamma Mia - whose hand you'd think people would be biting off - couldn't sell her sitcom about two canny Bristol single mums using their wits to get by, because the only places people do that kind of thing are Liverpool (copyright Carla Lane) and London (copyright John Sullivan). In Bristol, apparently, single mums just live placidly on welfare, saying "Yeah but no but". No.

The New-Look House of Lords:
Clegg’s radical shake-up unveiled

Westminster was abuzz with excitement this evening as details emerged of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s detailed proposals for a radical shake-up of the House of Lords.

In the reformed Upper House, seats formerly reserved for cronies will now be given over to hangers-on, timeservers will be purged in favour of jobsworths, and the section of the green benches previously earmarked for has-beens will be significantly reduced in favour of a new intake of toadies and hacks.

“This is the most thoroughgoing reform ever attempted,” declared a senior Government source. “I am confident that this sleek, modern Upper House will be fit for purpose well into the next millennium.”

The Reforms in Detail

By chance I caught a programme last night in which Michael Portillo travelled to Greece and Germany to talk about the Euro crisis, both with "ordinary people" and with policy makers. It was interesting, and not least because, while everyone admitted that it had been a mistake to admit Greece into the Euro, and everyone was aware (not only now but at the time) that the books had been cooked to permit it, very few people in either country wanted Greece to leave. Portillo's party trick was to produce, at the end of each interview, a 20 euro note and a drachma note (I forget the denomination), and ask Greeks to choose which currency they wanted for the future. (He did the same in Germany with euros and marks, though that was a more predictable exercise.)

Not one Greek - from the finance minister, to the civil servant running a soup kitchen, to the unemployed woman with no hope of a job - chose to take back the drachma. Even those who were against the bail-out package and its attendant strictures, were still in love with the euro that had brought them cheap money, German cars and a general buzz of twenty-first century modernity in the early 2000s. Portillo seemed genuinely puzzled.

Now, there is a cynical explanation. If I walked into town right now, and said to the nearest junky, "Which would you rather have? Some more of the heroin that has brought you so low, or this bag of cheap but healthy muesli?" I can guess the answer I'd get. But, amongst those Portillo talked to at least, the euro still represented the Future. The fact that its corollary was poverty and humiliation without any foreseeable end seemed not to have dented that sense, or indeed to have registered. Then again, when the alternative is cheap muesli, it's not much of a choice.

With the Germans, Portillo's line was that Germany's success as an exporter was partly built on the poverty of poor Euro-states such as Greece - not only because they seem to be addicted to buying Porsches (as one German pointed out, there just aren't enough Greeks for that to have made the key difference) - but because their poor economic performance dragged down the value of the Euro as a whole, making it much easier for Germany to export around the world. While the Chinese were able to keep the yuan low by government fiat, the Germans were able to do the same by keeping the Greeks in the club. By this cynical reading - although Portillo didn't spell this out - Germany not only needs the Greeks in the Euro, it needs the Greeks (and/or Spain, Portugal, etc) to be in a state of perpetual crisis, which it can manage by drip-feeding enough bail-out money to keep them ticking over, but not enough for them to grow their way back into prosperity.

Of course, there's a good deal more to German prosperity than a low euro, and the German commitment to the euro is founded on more than their wish for a healthy balance of payments. But it cast an interesting sidelight on the current situation.

Or so said a five-year-old girl to her mother as I walked passed them this afternoon - thus demonstrating her mastery of anatomy and the subjunctive in one elegant couplet.

(You must supply a strong Bristol accent to get the full effect. If you have no Bristol, then West Country will do.)

Inspired by George Osborne, with apologies to Siegfried Sassoon

"Does It Matter?"

Does it matter?—that you can’t be wed?—
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
Making do with your drab civil partnership
While straight folks get married instead.

Does it matter?—not having a vote?—
Some people were just born to rule,
And you might have elected a fool;
Democracy’s way overrated,
So please don’t start rocking the boat.

I've not been diligent about catching Neil MacGregor's Shakespeare's Restless World, in which he attempts to do for Shakespeare what he previously did for the whole of human history by finding a selection of representative objects that tell us about his times. It's always been interesting when I've caught it, though, and some of the objects have been new to me, such as James's abandoned designs for a Union Flag.

Today he was talking about clocks. While I knew about the anachronistic striking clock in Julius Caesar, I hadn't taken in (though it should have been obvious) that in Richard II, too, when Richard compares himself to a clock, he is using much later model than any available in the fourteenth century:

For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.

The minute hand was a very recent invention in Shakespeare's day, so that this passage is a bit like a modern playwright having George III compare himself to an iPad. (MacGregor wasn't vulgar enough to use this analogy.)

MacGregor doesn't mention it, but hearing his programme also made me realise (with a cry of "Duh!") that at school I'd misread a line in Henry IV Part 1. When Falstaff claims to have fought Hotspur "a long hour by Shrewsbury clock" I'd fondly imagined that the battle must have taken place within sight of the clock-tower, so used am I to thinking of the telling of time as a visual act. But to Falstaff, as to most Elizabethans, it was an aural experience: Falstaff's referring to the sound of the bell, not the sight of the dial.

This got me thinking about the phrase "tell the time". It's a two-way phrase: the clock tells (i.e. communicates) the time to us, and we can tell (i.e. perceive) the time by looking at the clock. But in both directions time is also being told in another sense, that of counting. The clock tells the hours as the beadsman tells his rosary, one chime at a time; and we tell them the same way, by counting off the chimes (at midnight or otherwise). So there's a little fossil of the aural primacy of time-telling, hidden away in a phrase that has been assimilated to other senses of "tell".

Tolling, on the other hand, has a different root entirely, and seems to be related to the action of pulling on a rope to make the bell ring.

Bugger - it's as I feared, and Bristol has voted for a directly elected Mayor, on a turnout of 24% (in one polling station, as low as 6%). The figures were 53.35% to 46.7% - a difference of 5,100 votes.

So far, we have no idea what powers the Mayor might be given, nor how he (or just possibly she) might be got rid of, nor much else. That's all to be decided later, apparently! But whatever the dispensation, it's now been pre-approved by the electors of Bristol - or rather, by just under 13% of them, which was enough.

So far, only Bristol has voted in favour. I'm not sure whether it was also uncoincidentally the only city where a referendum was being held but not council elections, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised.

Well, I walked through the Brizzle drizzle to the Polling Station today to cast my vote. There aren't any elections here this year, so the only question on the ballot was about whether I wanted Bristol to be run by a US-cum-London-style Mayor. Having heard no arguments for changing the system beyond emotive threats that if we didn't we'd be left behind by the Cool Kids, I naturally voted to keep things as they are. I'm not sure what to expect of my fellow Bristolians, though. I suspect that the bad weather will mean that only those randy for change will have been motivated to go and vote - and me, of course, and a few others of the ornery sodden.

A couple of days ago, during a brief sunny interval, I decided to celebrate the end of my first big batch of marking by taking a trip. Despite living in Bristol for 22 years, I'd never visited Dursley, and I thought it was time to make this good. It's about 25 miles north of here, and more to the point just 20 miles north of Winterbourne, where J. K. Rowling grew up. I've long assumed that she gave the name to Harry Potter's unpleasant step-family because she disliked something about the town, and I was curious to see what was wrong with it.

Actually, it's a very pretty, small, Gloucestershire market town, although not a prosperous one, as the Lidl on its approach road blazons from afar. I took several pictures, but I'm unable to get them off my camera as yet, so here is a random one from Flickr, taken from the church tower and showing the pillared market house (a typical Cotswold feature). I did see several roads named after plants, but no Privet Drive, alas - and in fact, Streetmap.co.uk informs me that there's no such road in the country. No doubt JKR was careful to check that.



ETA 4th May 9.21am: All the other cities that have so far declared (four of ten) have voted No. But the Bristol turnout was especially low (25%), there being no council elections, and I suspect that will work in the favour of what we might call the Yes campaign (except that there was no campaign).

I realise this isn't the most important aspect of the affair, but isn't it strange that the BBC can't seem to refer to the Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng without sticking the word "blind" in front of his name? I mean, his blindness is there in the suite of things that one might mention when introducing Chen to an audience ignorant of his existence, but why bring it up every time, when it's not a material element of his case? The Beeb leaves a fixation on Abu Hamza's hook to the tabloids, but blindness seems to be a different matter.

Meanwhile, hypermetropic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected in China soon to hold talks with myopic Vice-Premier Wang Qishan and State Councillor Dai Bingguo, of astigmatism fame.

Dozens of Bristol billboards have suddenly sprouted advertisements paid for by the Mayor of London, Transport for London, and the Olympic Committee, informing us that "Certain roads will be affected during the games".

Well, I'd guessed that, but since London is over 100 miles away and no events are being held in Bristol, does it really require an expensive advertising campaign to tell us? (Actually, that's not quite true: the Olympic torch will be snaking its way through the city at some point, but I doubt that's going to cause more disruption than, say, the annual Bristol half-marathon, the St Pauls Carnival, or the occasional protest march, all of which take place quite happily without the need for all the city's hoardings to be booked up.) Now we know where the money went...

Anyway, I was wondering just how far afield the London Olympic street closure posters had reached. Any advance on 100 miles? sheenaghpugh, are you awash with them in Shetland?

Meanwhile, I am meant to be voting soon in a referendum on whether Bristol should follow London's lead in having an elected mayor. So far, I have received no literature or canvas visits from either side, although the local paper is certainly cheerleading for the change. A couple of weeks ago it ran a lengthy piece by Michael Heseltine, urging Bristolians to seize this historic opportunity for a place at the high table of British politics, not to get left behind by the tide of history, to prove itself worth of its glorious heritage, to grab this special offer while it was still in the shops, etc. I am guessing that the same article appeared in other local papers too, with 'Bristol' changed for 'Sheffield', etc., because there wasn't a word in it that related to the city specifically.

As readers of this blog will know, I react badly to high-pressure sales tactics (c.f. all the reasons why it was imperative we join the Euro lest we get left behind by the tide of history, etc.) and Heseltine's piece has almost convinced me to vote No. But I'd still be interested in any actual arguments on either side, since I've heard none yet.

I also wonder, only somewhat tangentially: how many directly-elected mayors around the world are women, and is it a significantly higher or lower proportion than mayors elected by councillors (like the female mayor Bristol has now, for example)? I can't help noticing that all the people who've said they will stand for the post should there be a Yes vote are men, and I don't recall any female candidates for Mayor of London either (I may well be wrong about that), but this is of course too small a sample from which to draw more general conclusions.

As I understand it, it's not usual practice for the first monarch to use a particular name to take a regnal number. Elizabeth Tudor was crowned Queen Elizabeth, not Queen Elizabeth I (pace certain historical novels), and didn't get her number until 1952, when another Elizabeth appeared with whom she might conceivably be confused.

So, what about James VI of Scotland? When he became King of England in 1603, he was the first English king to be called James, so ordinarily would not have had a number. But he was already known as James VI, and presumably there would have been some impulse to distinguish him in his king-of-England capacity. One way of doing that would have been to call him James I of England, so that he would be known as James VI and I, just as he is today. On the other hand, to call a living monarch 'the First' might be thought to allude indelicately to the fact that he would one day die.

So, how was James styled after 1603 (and indeed up to 1685, when the accession of his grandson rendered the question moot), when people wanted to refer to him as reigning over both kingdoms? "James VI and I"? "James VI, also King of England"? "James VI and [null]"?

I begin to see why he was so keen on establishing Britain as a political entity: I'm guessing his motives were nomenclatural.

The house I live in is only six years old, but it was built in an area that was once, before the Reformation, monastic land. After the Dissolution, that land was sold on to private owners, of whom I'm the latest in a long line. But it did not come stringlessly. The monasteries had acquired rectorships to one or more churches, meaning that they were entitled to tithes from the church's parishioners, but also that they were liable to keep the chancel of the church in good repair. (Why just the chancel? I've no idea.) When the land was sold, those rights and liabilities were sold with it.

The right to tithes has long since ceased, but the liability to repair chancels continues, and will do so in perpetuity (or until some future government decides otherwise). In practice, churches seldom call on hapless householders to repair their chancels, but it does happen, and can be ruinously expensive. For this reason, most people (me included) take out a once-and-for-all insurance against that contingency when they buy the property. From memory, it cost me about £120, which seems quite a lot now, but against the background of the many apparently arbitrary sums large and small that one gets stuck with in the course of buying a house, appeared trifling at the time.

Still, it tickles me to think that I'm a rector (even if a lay one). I didn't choose the role - which means I suppose that it must be a vocation - but I'd like to make the most of it now I've got it. What can I do with this title? Will it get me a better seat in a restaurant? Can I administer extreme unction to small mammals? What are the possibilities?

I was intending to do a full report on the Diana Wynne Jones celebration on Sunday, but I didn't have a moment until today, by which time of course there are several excellent accounts already out there, such as these two by gillo, and this by Cheryl Morgan. I will also be doing a brief account tomorrow over at The Awfully Big Blog Adventure. So these are just a few interstitial notes.

ashkitty had come down from Aberystwyth the previous evening and was staying over, and at 10am I arrived with her at St George's to help get things ready for the Event. (There was, throughout, some hesitation in my mind about what to call this happening. Memorial service was too grim, while celebration - though it was the official title - seemed to evoke balloons and party poppers, especially in sentences such as "When does the celebration start?") Getting things ready largely consisted of heaving many boxes of books down to the crypt and setting them out on trestle tables. I cannot, however, claim credit for the magnificent Babel Tower of Diana's foreign editions, which had been accumulating in her house for years: that was I think the work of ashkitty and Diana's son Micky, who was directing operations. I did however nab a rare copy of the German Skiver's Guide: Handbuch zum Webtauchen. I also had to sort a set of her book covers into chronological order for a display by the bar - something I think I did more or less correctly from memory, although I was a bit hazy about the late '80s and early '90s. Upstairs, the Steinway concert grand which is a fixture at St George's (which is often used by the BBC for lunchtime concerts) was being expertly played by an array of Diana's relatives, including her daughter-in-law, grandson and nephew. I state as a matter of record that the latter two musicians are both named Tom.

I was expecting a bedraggled Polly to turn up, but instead nineweaving came, amongst various others of Diana's friends and relatives, and after a while she, ashkitty and I made our way up the hill to the pub where an ever-increasing number of DWJ's fans was assembling, including fjm, chilperic, gillo, Cheryl, Gili Bar-Hillel and her husband who had come from Israel, and (all the way from Australia) splanky, who was doing Eastercon and this on a kind of fan scholarship (I had no idea such things existed), as well as many friends from the 2009 conference and other DWJ meets past. Apart from having to wait almost an hour for a burger, it was a very pleasant lunch - and our party eventually ran to four concatenated tables, taking up much of what was, thankfully, a particularly cavernous pub.

The Event itself is already well described elsewhere. I thought it went very well, and managed to stay dry eyed until Dave Devereux's account of being with Diana at the end of her life - but there was plenty of laughter too, and I think Diana was approached from enough angles that we managed by a process of - not triangulation, perhaps, but polygonization? - to see her before us, if in a fitful way like a Star Wars hologram. It was the kind of event where one thought, "I wish Diana could see this - she'd really enjoy it!"

In the interval and afterwards, I met more old friends, including a student whom I didn't recognize because she was in the wrong context - agh! - and the indefatigable and generous Jessica Yates, whom I never see but she gives me some carefully-selected photocopies from her bag. Blackwells had taken up position in the crypt, and were selling advance copies of Reflections, which looks a handsome volume. I hear that David Fickling, its publisher, was also somewhere about, but I managed to miss him.

Speakers, partners and dogsbodies went to Diana's house for a bite to eat afterwards, and I did a bit of ferrying of both people and unsold books (giving directions to Diana's house is like playing three-dimensional chess: it's generally easier to give the person a piggy-back). This occasioned my meeting the charming Megan Whalen Turner, who had come over with sdn and who helped me defy gravity by carrying dozens of books in a box that had very largely ceased to be. My opening conversational gambit was, "I guessed the twist in The Thief!" (I am so gauche.)

nineweaving was staying overnight, as was ashkitty, and we spent the evening watching The Owl Service on DVD - or at least a portion of it, for ashkitty, despite her expertise in matters Mabinogioniac, had somehow neglected ever to read the book, and I didn't want to give her too many spoilers. In the morning I went with nineweaving in a rather chilly drizzle to see the underestimated stones of Stanton Drew, the pockmarked grimness of which is mitigated by the rosy pink with which they are flecked, and by the little rock pool worlds of moss and lichen that have evolved on the flanks of their fallen. It was both too wet and too early to have lunch in garden of The Druid's Arms (where three outlying stones stand next to the picnic tables - the Cove of the monument), but we went the extra mile to Chew Magna and ate there. I've been round Chew Magna church several times, but only on this occasion did I stop to read the list of incumbents and their patrons. Most of the latter are local noblemen, although in the mid-16th century several of the Chew Magna vicars seem to have been installed directly by Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth (I wonder why?); but the most striking entry was for 1643, in which "Stubbs - a Preacher" was listed as vicar, while the entry in the column of patrons read simply: "The Mob".

Later that afternoon I took nineweaving to Bristol Airport, whence I hope and trust she made it to the next leg of her European tour - and so came home to catch up on marking, European bids, and proofing of articles - from the tight deadline parts of which I have just emerged.

Altogether, an excellent weekend.