Sunday 28th Feb

Well it's not been a wildly wonderful day, in that a) Villa lost the FA cup final, b) I've been a touch hung over. Last night I went to a friend's party, and I had what I think is the first drink of alcohol since not last Christmas, but I think the Christmas before. I can't really remember. I'm not fond of alcohol, for a number of reasons, chiefly because I think it's sneaks under my guard and before I know where I am, I'm wildly drunk and doing things that make me cringe the next day. All that on perhaps a glass and a half of red wine. No tolerance you see, I know if I stuck at it, I'd build a tolerance and could drink a glass a day with relatively no ill effects, but I'm always a bit worried that a glass would become a bottle without my noticing. Then there's the cost. I don't enjoy it, I don't see any benefit to it, why should I waste what's basically a vast amount of money to do it? I already have my vice, I smoke and I enjoy that, so I'll stick to it I think. Mind you I'm even thinking twice about that these days.
On top of all this, it's been a difficult week. I did finish my gender presentation, but I can't say that I was happy with it. I finished it at 2 in the morning, which is never a good thing, and I've no idea what the end result of it will be, people seemed to think it was ok. I even had one of my compatriots come up to me in M&S to say he thought it was good. But you know that irritating feeling at the back of your mind that you could have done it so much better? Ok, I will admit that I have this feeling for virtually everything that I do, every piece of university work, but on this occasion I have to say that I think the feeling is fully justified. It was not up to my normal standard and I ran out of time and patience with it, and went off on a wild tangent about this wretched pendant. I won't bore you with the details, but it was a pretty stunning pendant. Just not exactly greatly relevant to the piece I was supposed to be writing.
Anyhow today I've been going through Foxe's Book of Martyrs, for Constructing Faith. Fascinating piece. Google it, and it will reward a brief look at pretty well any part of it. It's all about the Reformation in England and the building of the Church of England. Tonight I'm going to be cracking on with, let's see.. a chunk more of Stripping the Altars? Perhaps. First though, I'm going to reward myself with a morsel of Lark Rise to Candleford - trash, but moderately amusing trash.

Friday. Late.

Had the most awful cold this week, the sort of cold that verges onto flu. Thankfully it's clearing up and really I should be in bed now - I've spent all day working on my presentation for Gender which hasn't helped. What really hasn't helped is a load of photocopying that I did has managed to miss off the page number from every single page, so unless I find either the book, or a copy of the book, or someone who has the book and will tell me what page number chapter 1 is, I can't quote from it! Infuriating!
The presentation is on Eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire. Most of my gender class are modern come semi modern historians, so I have to include a quick mop and brush up on the Byz Empire - brilliant, especially as I don't know much about it myself! I didn't take the courses on Byzantine history as an undergraduate, but as I do know quite a lot about the early church this is giving me an opportunity to do a bit of basic brushing up myself, always a useful thing.
One thing I will say about having cold/flu, if you have to have it, then have it when the Olympics are on. There's nothing like watching people hurl themselves off mountains to make you feel just that little bit better..!

Friday 11th February

Big news of my day is that my next presentation has been moved up by a week - no idea why, but I presume that someone can't make the date it was arranged for and hence it has to be moved. This may be all very well for lecturers, but it's not exactly helpful for us poor old students. Still I've spent today making notes from about 30 odd pages of Third Sex, Third Gender - the presentation is going to be on Byzantine Eunuchs, of which there were rather a lot. I won't go into the details, but the guys in the class are going to be doing a bit of squirming I think.
What else have I done? Translated a chunk of a book by Aline Rouselle, which frankly should be available in an English version, but it's not, so hence the translating. I should point out that I'm doing this by translation engine rather than by hand, my French is schoolgirl level! Mind you given that I recognise more words that you'd think, maybe the Latin is coming in handy.
Frankly apart from this I haven't done a lot. You'd think this sounds awfully boring and frankly you'd be right - but it's got to be done and there's an end to it. I have more of this to do over the weekend as well, only for Constructing Faith this time - a riveting little (ha!) article on Scale-free Networks - I think this is some one's theory that heresy spreads like a virus, ok, so I haven't read it yet, but it's top of my list for tomorrow morning, then I still have to find my copy of Lambert. This infuriatingly I saw only a few days ago, and needless to say now it's turned up on a reading list I cannot find for love nor money. I have a ton of stuff to get done for essays and the like, and blow me down, two workshops to attend next week. One is on Creative Writing for Academics, or some such and I'm hoping that it might brush up my writing style somewhat. I feel it lacks that final touch, you know? I'm pretty sure it'll be here's how to write a plan, but nevertheless, for a couple of hours I will get a grip and do my best to get the most out of it. Who knows, it could get me a couple of extra marks that will make the difference between a grade.

There's rather a stunning interview with Sven in tomorrow's Guardian about this business going on at Notts County - so much so that you rather wonder why the police aren't involved. It sounds like fraud to me. And God knows there are enough football clubs in trouble at the moment. What really makes you saddest though is the little fact tucked away at the bottom, that the supporters club handed over their holdings for free. They owned a reasonable chunk of the club, and these monster's come along promising huge investments and mythical dreams of European football in eighteen months, etc, they somehow talked Sven, Sol Campbell et al into it, and before you know where you are, the little guys are conned out of their precious bit of their local club. If that isn't worth a quick chat with the desk sergeant at the local cop shop I don't know what is. Having read this interview, my guess is that by tomorrow midday, there'll be a statement coming from the local fraud squad to the effect that they'll be looking in to it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/feb/12/sven-goran-eriksson-notts-county-interview

Anyhow I just have to thank my lucky stars that Villa seem to be in a reasonable good order, and Martin O'Neil said he didn't aim to bankrupt us in order to get us into Europe. There's a lot to be said for a good academy and youth policy. Ah well. Then on the news all this stuff about the big thing going off in Afghanistan - one of my uni mates has a brother that's just gone out there. I suppose he'll be part of it. Hopefully it will all work out well, but lord your heart goes out to the families of these people. And as for this business with MI5, words fail me. At the very least they appear to be trying to pull the wool over the publics eyes with all this withdrawn judgement and everything. In fact the whole news just makes you feel more and more down over the past couple of days, except for the baby that they've managed to get out of Haiti. This gorgeous little scrap of a girl, who's about three months old, called Landina was caught up in the earthquake and suffered a major skull injury and her arm was crushed - so badly it had to be amputated, and because her parents are lost or dead, she had no paperwork. Medecin Sans Frontiere have been funding a surgeon from Britain over there, and she must have really got to him, because he's moved heaven and earth to get her the right papers and someone - no names, but someone has personally funded her flight, and the surgeon and a colleague actually carried her all that way on the plane and she arrived at Great Ormond Street earlier today. Hopefully she'll get her operation within the next few days - she has to have tests, and then 6 months recuperation or so, and all being well, she'll be able to go home.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/baby+landinaaposs+journey+for+lifesaving+treatment/3538437
There you go, you can read it for yourself. Best story of the week, if not the month.

Tuesday 9th February

Well peeps, here I am all excited and enthused because I have some essay planning underway, and it's such a cracking subject I'm thinking about changing my dissertation plans to move towards this idea. Some of you know that I've just done a presentation on Augustine Bishop of Hippo's book On The Care To Be Had For The Dead. This is an extremely interesting book written in the 4th Century by the above, basically following a letter that he had regarding a widow who wanted to bury her son near to the body of a saint. Augustine didn't think it would do the son any good to be buried in a place that might be regarded as especially sanctified, he didn't think it would do any harm, but having considered the subject there were a few other things he'd like to move on to... and so on he went. It's oddly stream of consciousness type of writing for a Church Father, who are usually more structured, but in and amongst all of this are a few references to 'the entranced', 'the mad', those who address people who are not present, as if they were present - in other words, it's a bit of a window into how the people of the antique viewed people with mental health issues. I'm going to write an essay on this, which is a great opportunity to firstly come up with a really great bibliography, and see whether this topic really has the legs for a dissertation. So I'm quite chuffed.
The presentation itself seemed to go ok, no great shakes I don't think, but not a total disaster either.

Anyhow it's gone extremely cold up here. In fact I shall have to go and put the heating on in a minute, I've been sitting here all morning searching the library catalogue to find sources for my essay. My but I've come up with some interesting looking stuff - what do you think of Demonical Possession among primitive races in antiquity? It dates from the 1930's, and a lot of these very old history books have lots of references in them to the primary sources that I can dig out and use - you wouldn't necessarily use a book that old as a source, but trace it back to it's original roots. Mind you I was writing my presentation on books written in 1909, and 1907 - one of which is Van Genneps Rites of Passage, which frankly I can't believe is that old. It's certainly lasting that's for sure.
Anyhow that's it for now, I'm desperate to go and put the heating on!

Friday 5th February

Well here I am again, well gone midnight and not a yawn has passed my lips. I have a new secret weapon though, a Valerian tea that I picked up in the supermarket today. Valerian is a herb that's long been associated with getting people off to sleep - although it's supposed to take an hour to work and I've only just brewed it, so I'll report on it's efficacy at a later date! Mind you I have to say that anything you buy off the common shelf in the supermarket is probably not going to be of the knock you out strength that may be required (two teabags perhaps? mm.. )

So what else has been happening - I have a working first draft of my presentation for Monday. This has been something of a struggle. Augustine is not the easiest of theologians to be doing battle with, he's not one of those chaps to use a single word when he can think of fifteen that would say the same thing only make you think that little bit harder before you get to where he's wanting you to go. And my first draft is something of a mess, and won't be anything like what I expect to end up with - but it's only late on Friday and it's not due till Monday. Plenty of time. I'll not be panicking until say... midday Sunday. Ok, well maybe there will be a slight frisson of the p word coughing quietly in the wings from Saturday night onwards. But what I have got, I can hear myself saying - which frankly is not always the best of signs. To wit, the RRSH lecture on Thursday evening when Stuart Airlie is trying to draw out a bunch of near silent post grads, stunned witless by his oratory, to whom he is demonstrating the prejudices of nineteenth century editors of the Monumenta Germanica. He has highlighted the fact that they have printed 'father' in the place of a word which another edition of the text has as 'mother'. Why, he is saying, did they choose to say Father when Mother could have done just as well. Silence. (I should point out that there's not a man jack of us that's not perfectly well aware of exactly why they did it.) Cue me, first thing that comes to mind as usual - 'Because he's a man!' Not gender theory, Tess, not an elegantly turned phrase to make it sound like you have historiography on the tip of your tongue. No, you come out with because he's a man. Typical. It's my problem you see, I open my mouth and out comes whatever's on the tip of my tongue. Happily I can usually substitute a more elegant phraseology when I'm writing.


Ah the Valerian tea is fit to be drunk. And yes, it is truly revolting. It's cats piss. I'm sorry but it's vile. It'd better send me to sleep or I can't see myself drinking this very often. The smell alone is just revolting. Have you ever tried drinking whilst you hold your nose? Actually it tastes a lot better when you do this, and I can live with the chance of choking. But oh my God, it's revolting.

Sunday 31st January.

At any rate I got through a good deal of work yesterday, and another load today - although I think I drew the line at linguistic ritual theory. I think my eyes pretty well gave out at that point, so I took the rest of the evening off! Since this gave me a chance to watch MOTD 2, I think that was more than enough work for the day. And on top of this I've sold a bookmark, yay!
I don't have very much in the shop right now, I'm trying to keep my costs down by not listing a lot. I'll let it build up rather than overload it with stuff right now, although I've got some done that I was going to get listed this weekend and promptly forgot. Maybe I can squeeze them in at some point tomorrow. What else have I been up to - had a nice chat with Martin on the phone, who was chatty for once. Always a good sign. Maybe because Jo & Ken were both at work, he fancied having someone to talk to.
Anyhow, I have a date with a library book first thing tomorrow, so I'd best get myself off to bed in the hope that I will get some sleep tonight, and maybe get up on time tomorrow. Here's hoping!