From my diary

I’ve been trying to get into a mass of material about chapter titles that Matthieu Cassin has kindly sent me.  I hope to blog about some of this over the next few days.  In particular he has located scholarly material which tries to develop some criteria for the authenticity of these things.  This certainly sounds very interesting to me!

But blogging will be light for a bit, for a daft reason.  You see, for the last few weeks I’ve been working out of a hotel.  The hotel has an air-conditioning system which has the kind habit of generating noise at regular intervals, thereby waking me up every four hours during the night.  Somehow it manages to do this, even when turned off by the room switch. 

It’s remarkably difficult, after a while, to concentrate on anything, under the effect of that treatment.  This weekend, indeed, I was almost drunk with tiredness.  Why is it, I wonder, that it is nearly impossible to get a good night’s sleep in any hotel with which I am familiar?  In an type of establishment that exists for no other purpose than to supply sleeping chambers for rent?

So of course I have not got very far with the material in Latin and German. 

The hotel have promised me that tonight the problem will not recur.  So … cross your fingers for me! 

And let’s laugh at the absurdity … for this, friends, is the stuff of life; the things that we spend our lives on, while planning to do something else!

I saw this evening that Mark Goodacre was commenting on the curse that email has become to many scholars.  I’m luckier than most, in that I tend to get a reply eventually.  But I too get a fair amount of email myself; but then I try to handle each email only once, and reply as soon as I read it.  I do not envy him, tho.

But some emails are blessed.  One email this evening cheered me more than I can say.  It showed that God had heard some prayers of mine, made every Monday for many years, and answered them fully.  Very cheered by this.

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