Tag: From my diary

The silence earlier this week was caused by an unannounced outbreak of holidays.   I didn’t feel that it was a good idea to announce online that my house would be vacant, and I took a very welcome break from using a computer at all.

I finished work on Friday, and then had Saturday free.  This was a good idea, because the number of  things that have to be done in the last week before a holiday tends to leave the unwary exhausted!  So I wandered around like a ghost under grey skies.  I hadn’t actually even decided for certain that I would go away.  But the conviction grew during Saturday, and I packed my bags, filled up the car, and located my lists of “things to take” and “things in the house to check are closed/unplugged/etc”.

On Sunday morning I was up at a sensible time — no dawn starts for me! — and I hit the road about 8:30.  Destination … St Austell in Cornwall! 

I drove down the A12 to London, and then around the top of the M25 London Orbital motorway.  The traffic was light, and I reached the junction with the M4 motorway, near Heathrow, after a couple of hours.  Then westward, westward, as the sprawl of London fell away and the chalk hills of the downs began to rise on either side. 

I stopped at Membury service station, just east of Swindon, where I once had a summer job in 1980.  It was a hole then, and it is still a hole now!  Then on again, past Swindon.  Soon there were signs for Bath, and the Roman baths, which I have never seen.  It’s a long old trip from Ipswich, but one day I must do that. 

Then the great descent towards Bristol, through a cutting in the hill, and I gained my first sight of the Severn.  Soon I turned off, onto the M5, and headed south.  I stopped at Sedgemoor services and refueled again.  Then on, through Somerset, along roads that were not entirely uncluttered with holiday-makers, over the bridge over the River Axe, to Exeter.

At Exeter I turned off onto the A30, which runs the length of Devon and Cornwall, up hill and down dale.  These days it is mostly a dual carriageway, which makes it easier.  Soon the road rose, up onto the moors, which looked as desolate as ever.  A sign appeared for Jamaica Inn, the old smugglers’ hideout on Bodmin Moor.  This is in the centre of the county, but in truth is only a dozen miles from the coast, by the bridleways that were known to local folk.  Those paths saw much use during the Napoleonic wars, when the government duties on wine and spirits were last at the foolish heights they are today.

Finally I reached the St Austell turn off.  A narrow road threaded up through the village of Bugle, all granite stone houses and walls and narrow streets, up to the top of the hills where the china clay used to be mined and a great spoil heap still stands.  Threading through the lanes, I came over the ridge and St Austell bay opened up before me, with an immense view of sea and headlands.  My hotel was the St Austell Premier Inn, which stands at Carclaze, just at the head of the road.  It was 2pm, so I had made very good time over the 350 miles.

The rest of the day I spent pottering about.  I went down to Charlestown, the tiny old port of St Austell, where the china clay used to be loaded and tourism is now the  main thing.  It was grey, but very warm and muggy, even up on the heights at Carclaze.  Indeed I had to change room at 10:30 at night, because my room was at 24C!  Another room looked over the car park, and had a breeze, and was 19C, and there I stayed.

On Monday morning I telephoned various relatives to announce my arrival.  It can be slightly dicey  making your presence known.  Sometimes the relatives see a visiting stranger as a useful source of labour, to get jobs done!  But not so this time. 

In the morning I drove into St Austell, and parked in the new multi-storey car park.  This replaced an appalling specimen of 60’s brutalist concrete architecture, which is now gone to its inevitable, rotted concrete, reward.  St Austell town centre itself is only a shadow of the thriving town that I remember from my childhood.  I could, indeed, find nothing that I wished to buy.

The afternoon was spent with relatives, just talking.  They were interested to see the Eusebius book.  The weather was improving, and the sun breaking through.  I then went down to Charlestown again, where I had dinner and wandered around.  I also drove down to Carlyon Bay, which is the posh end of St Austell.  Everywhere I saw the blue hydrangeas — indeed I was told that they grow like weeds there!  My main purpose was to identify the dismal hotel in which I stayed once, in October, for a funeral, so that I would know never to stay there again.  It was the Cliff Head Hotel, and it looked even more run-down to me than I remembered.  But as I drove back, to my astonishment I saw that mist was gathering on the high ground, up around the spoil heaps and Carclaze.  So it proved; warm air below, and sunshine, and mist and fog a mile away up on the heights.  Apparently this happens regularly.

In the morning there was bright, hot, sunshine.  Back in Ipswich it was cold and grey, I learned, so this news delighted me!  I had arranged to meet with an elderly aunt, and take  her out for the day.  She chose to go to Mevagissey.  We drove down there, detouring to look at some fields that my grandfather once rented, and a lane in which stood a cottage where my aunt was born, well before WW2. 

Mevagissey was a delight.  It was also flat, which was important for the frail old lady whom I was with.  We parked in the large car-park, and walked into the town and soon found ourselves on the harbour.  The sun beat down, and the smell of the sea was in our faces.  We sat there on a bench for some time — long enough for my arms to prickle and warn of impending sun-burn!  A man drove up on a little blue motorcycle with boxes on the back and, as people do in those parts, got talking to my aunt.  He was off to go fishing in a little boat that was tied up in the harbour.

After more walking around, my aunt stopped at an ice-cream shop where she knew one of the ladies, and asked her where we should eat.  She recommended “number 5, market square” as the best place to eat, and there we went.  And it was!  My aunt had a jacket potato, and I had a ploughman’s lunch.  The furniture was good solid wood, we were served quickly but not rushed, and everything was nice but not pricey.  After that, we drove back.  Again in the evening I went down to Charlestown, and what a difference the sun made!

On the second day, I went to see another relative, to talk about an aunt who had made a will which was giving concern to those who might end up as executors.  A local financial advisor has been appointed co-executor, and nobody knew who he was, or on what terms.  There is, of course, very little that can be done with my more mulish relatives, but after much discussion I formed the opinion that what had been done was sensible in principle, and that the family should be able to involve the financial services regulator if anything amiss transpired.  The main problem, really, was that in making her will, my aunt had been secretive about the details of the executorship which had worried the others who would have to do it all. 

After all that business — and some third degree from the lady responsible! — I again took the same aunt out for the day.  We drove down the road from St Austell to Lostwithiel, and down to Looe.  The road meandered down the country lanes, and past a sign for “Herodsfoot”.  Some of the place names in Cornwall are a delight, all by themselves!

Looe is more down-market, as evidenced by the number of people sat on benches smoking and indeed tatooed individuals sitting on the (packed) beach smoking.  But we enjoyed ourselves.  Lunch was at a converted pub called the Golden Guinea, where the girls were extremely kind and thoughtful to my old aunt.  Food there was just as good as at Mevagissey, and in some respects better. 

Again in the evening I went down to Charlestown.  The sea was as flat as a millpond.  One of the tall ships had gone out, and was loitering about, offloading people onto a launch and taking on supplies of various sorts.

In the morning, the weather had gone grey, which reconciled me to going home, although I learned that later on it got hot again.  The same trip back, in reverse, took a little longer, and I got home about 3pm. 

And now I’m back home, and it’s cold and grey out there!  But I shall be going back to St Austell again, when I get the chance!

I can’t read PDF’s on-screen, and so this evening I’m putting together another PDF to upload to Lulu, so I can get a printed form that I can hold in my hand.

But disaster!  Lulu will only do paperbacks up to around 740 pages, and this one is 1,000 exactly.

I suppose what it means is that I shall have to split it into two halves.  Not a bad thing, necessarily; but it feels a bit odd!

I’ve tried to use Xoom.com to send money to the St. Ephrem Ecumenical Institute (SEERI) in India, for the copies of the English translation of Aphrahat’s Demonstrations that they sent me.  The last time I used this, I could fund it from Paypal.  This no longer seems to be available, and only US bank accounts or credit cards can be used.  Oh well.

Fortunately I have a bank account with an international bank.  They’ll probably charge me an arm and a leg for a bank transfer.  But let’s see.

Meanwhile the story about the Keston College archives thickens.  Keston, you remember, is the group that monitored the Church in the old USSR.  The archives are now held at Baylor University.  Apparently the people at Keston would like them to appear online.  But the word that I am getting is that they are kept offline, supposedly because of Baylor’s lawyers’ concerns over copyright.  That this also means that this precious resource is exclusive to Baylor is, I hope, coincidental. 

Fortunately Michael Bourdeaux has told me to make the book that I scanned — Risen Indeed — available online as widely as possible, and I will do my best, as soon as I get any time.

It’s been a thin week.  Lots of people are away, and the pressure at work has left little energy in the evenings.  This is why it is so important, if you want to do research work in the ancient world, to obtain a PhD and a research post at a university — even if combined with teaching.  Because those who have to spend their days at meaningless tasks, done for hire, can only devote a fraction of their time to the things that excite us all. 

The leaflets promoting the Eusebius book arrived, and I went up to the DHL office, opened the box and inspected them.  They’re OK — the design is good — but I’d hoped for  a higher-gloss finish.  Too late now, so I crossed DHL’s moist palm with silver, and the leaflets should be at the Patristics Conference tomorrow.  One more task done.

It looks as if the Michael Bourdeaux book that I scanned will be going online at the Keston College archive site at Baylor university.  I shall have to find out where that is!

UPDATE: The Baylor archive of materials at Keston is for Baylor people only, amazingly enough.  That means that the book won’t be visible to anyone much.

This is not good news — I didn’t spend my evenings hunched over the scanner for the benefit of Baylor University.   I’ve written back to Michael Bourdeaux and asked if the book can appear somewhere that the rest of us can see it.  In the mean time I shan’t scan any more of his stuff until I know whether I am wasting my time.

A parcel arrived today, containing the German reference book which I laboriously scanned, turned into a PDF, and had printed as a book by Lulu.com.  It’s the same general standard as all books printed there — rather too thick paper, rather too thin cover — but it’s entirely serviceable and I shall feel no hesitation in scribbling in it.  Much better than a pile of photocopies, certainly.

A card from DHL lay on the mat when I got home.  That must be the leaflets to promote the Eusebius book.  DHL are difficult to deal with — I shall have to ring them tomorrow, and then probably go and get the boxes at lunchtime.  Once I have inspected them, I shall rewrap the parcel and despatch it to the conference.

Still sunshine and showers here.  I get a bit of holiday next week — I must find nice things to do with it, and get away from the daily routine.  Of course once you book holiday, you find an enormous number of things have to be done before you can go away!  Isn’t that a funny thing?  I would like to go to Pompeii, but unless you book 6 weeks in advance you get charged huge sums.

I’ve been rereading Tuckwell’s Reminiscences of Oxford, about life in the university in the 1830’s.  On p.95 we find the following notice of Solomon Caesar Malan, who translated from Armenian the homily of Eusebius of Emesa that I have online.

Contemporary with these was a genius perhaps more remarkable, certainly more unusual, than any of them. In 1833 Solomon Caesar Malan matriculated at St. Edmund’s Hall, a young man with a young wife, son to a Swiss Pastor, speaking as yet broken English, but fiuent Latin, Romaic, French, Spanish, Italian, German; and a proficient at twenty-two years old in Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit. He won the Boden and the Kennicott Scholarships, took a Second Class, missing his First through the imperfection of his English, was ordained, became Professor in Calcutta, gathered up Chinese, Japanese, the various Indian, Malay, Persian tongues, came home to the valuable living of Broadwinsor, where be lived, when not travelling, through forty years, amassing a library in more than seventy languages, the majority of which he spoke with freedom, read familiarly, wrote with a clearness and beauty rivalling the best native caligraphy. In his frequent Eastern rambles he was able, say his fellow-travellers, to chat in market and bazaar with everyone whom he met. On a visit to the Bishop of Innereth he preached a Georgian sermon in the Cathedral. He published twenty – six translations of English theological works, in Chinese and Japanese, Arabic and Syriac, Armenian, Russian, Ethiopic, Coptic. Five-fold outnumbering the fecundity of his royal namesake, he left behind him a collection of 16,000 Proverbs, taken from original Oriental texts, each written in its native character and translated. So unique was the variety of his Pentecostal attainments that experts could not be found even to catalogue the four thousand books which he presented, multa gemens, with pathetic lamentation over their surrender, to the Indian Institute at Oxford.

I encountered him at three periods of his life. First as a young man at the evening parties of John Hill, Vice-Principal of St. Edmund’s Hall, where prevailed tea and coffee, pietistic Low Church talk, prayer and hymnody of portentous length, yet palliated by the chance of sharing Bible or hymn-book with one of the host’s four charming daughters. Twenty years later I recall him as a guest in Oxford Common Rooms, laying down the law on questions of Scriptural interpretation, his abysmal fund of learning and his dogmatic insistency floated by the rollicking fun of his illustrations and their delightful touches of travelled personal experience. Finally, in his old age I spent a long summer day with him in the Broadwinsor home, enjoying his library, aviary, workshop, drawings; his hospitality stimulated by the discovery that in some of his favourite pursuits I was, longo intervallo, an enthusiast like himself. He was a benevolently autocratic vicar, controlling his parish with patriarchally imperious rule, original, racy, trenchant, in Sunday School and sermons. It was his wont to take into the pulpit his college cap: into it he had pasted words of Scripture which he always read to himself before preaching. They were taken from the story of Balaam : “And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said–” He died at eighty-two, to have been admitted, let us hope, in the unknown land to comradeship of no ordinary brotherhood by spirits of every nation, kindred, tongue; to have found there, ranged upon celestial shelves, the Platonic archetypes of the priceless books which it tore his mortal heart to leave.

Tuckwell, as a secularising late 19th century clergyman, had little understanding of the gospel and tied his fate firmly to the aspirations of the Victorian age.  But his book remains a charming picture into past days, although one that can make us all rather too conscious of our own mortality!

Grey, drizzling, with bursts of heavy rain.  Must be summer!  Hard to wake up today, although the arrival of a postman with the hardback of the Eusebius book at 7:50 am did force me out of bed somewhat sooner.  Fortunately I was semi-awake, and I know the knock on the door.  The postie had tried to get the book through the letterbox and had wedged it halfway.  He told me that he knocked, because he didn’t want to leave it in the rain. And then scarpered, leaving me stood there in rather less than was decent.  As I stood there, a parcel van arrived with a box.  Fortunately the parcel chap was braver, and managed to free the book.  The packaging protected the book OK.  The box contained a couple of acrylic plastic stands for books — which I shall use at the patristics conference.

Into town to return Brockelmann’s Geschichte vol. 1 to the library.  No sign of my other interlibrary loans, despite the fact that some were ordered earlier.  Summer is in everyone’s mind.  Even I shall be going away for a few days in the not too distant future.

I vaguely intended to scan another of Michael Bourdeaux’s books, but I didn’t.  Instead I am working with Finereader on this German textbook.  More tweaking, and I think the scans are as good as they’re going to get.  Time to start proofing.

I did toy with running a German spell-checker in Word.  I bought the Office 2000 proofing tools many years ago, but I’m not sure these are compatible with Word 2010.  Microsoft want quite a bit of money per language, it seems, to buy new ones.  I found a site on the web with some bootleg ones — but I don’t quite know about that.  It seems to me that pirate items like these might well be booby trapped.

I spent this evening turning Michael Bourdeaux, Risen Indeed: Lessons in faith from the USSR (1983) into PDF form, with the consent of the author-copyright holder.  In a way it was just like old times, when I spent many a happy evening on a Friday night, after the week’s work was ended, hunched over the scanner.   I’ve just emailed him the PDF, and, with luck, we can get it online.

Today I learned that major UK media industry figures have been meeting secretly with the government to get a “copyright firewall” installed in the UK.  Let us hope this attempt to create a protected market for information is stifled. 

Time for a bath, and perhaps a film, and then back to the OCR software.  I need to experiment some more with combining Arabic transliteration characters with German language in Finereader, so that I can scan Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur with a minimum of proof corrections.  Once I can get some text, I can start using Google translate on it, and so can get some idea of what lies therein. 

It still seems remarkable to me that no English translation of Brockelmann exists.  Mind you, it seems to me that Georg Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Litteratur is a better book.  It’s better organised, more detailed, and generally superior.

I’ve also requested a printed copy of the PDF from Lulu.com, because, in truth, I can’t read a book of that kind on-screen.  The second edition is available to buy in printed form — but only for those who will not miss $1,000!  I think I’ll manage without, thanks.