I’ve reached the point at which I want to wrap up the many-tentacled texts about St Botolph, and fling the texts and their translations over the wall. The weather has been lovely lately, but a few days of rain beckon, which would be perfect for the purpose.
It’s funny how stuff disappears, even if you are assiduous in preserving copies of everything. Yesterday I had an email about a translation of part of Photius which I did more years ago than I can imagine. So I went looking for PDFs of the photocopies from which I made it. And… they are vanished. I scanned the boxes of photocopies into PDF long ago, and they sit on my disk yet, in folders marked “downstairs filing cabinet, upper drawer” and the like. The filing cabinet is long gone, I should add. Yet the Photius was nowhere. I can even remember the pages. But they are gone.
I spent much of the last two days trying to download a PDF titled “Liturgy of the Hours” from a dubious site. As such sites do, it throttled the download. At one point it dropped to 200 *bytes* a second! It was only a 65mb file, but the download kept failing repeatedly. Such a waste of time! I did get it in the end and – inevitably – it turned out to be the wrong book! That delayed yesterday’s post.
Although I am no gardener, I also spent part of yesterday trying to reseed a portion of my front lawn which had turned to moss. I’m not winning. The ground was originally heathland, so basically sand. Water it, and it forms a thin water-resistant layer, under which the ground remains totally dry. I don’t know how gardeners remain sane!