Good things

In the spirit of feeling incredibly cheerful lately, I'm giving you a quick survey of some Good Things from the term so far.

Choir stalls at Peterborough Cathedral

Right at the beginning of term, the Trinity Hall Chapel Choir sang evensong at Peterborough Cathedral.  This big, beautiful, historic place -- oh hello, Katharine of Aragon's tomb -- was a far cry from our usual digs.  We put in a lot of rehearsal time to blend our voices into the kind of sound that should hang in the air between 800-year-old arches.  The results were good.  And being early evening on a Wednesday, there were maybe 8 people there to appreciate it.  Oh, well.  In Tit Hall, that would have seemed a healthy crowd.

Bursts of summer weather.  A few weekends ago, it was absolutely gorgeous!  While our rowing outings were sadly cancelled due to races on the river, I took the free time to walk to Fen Ditton, an unbelievable picturesque little village just down the river.  My destination was The Plough, a pub with a beer garden right on the river.  I row past it all the time, and that day I could sit and observe the various crews racing past while trying to mitigate my ridiculous sock tan.  The following day, the MCR had a barbecue.  Since then, the weather has only gotten better, and today I could easily imagine that I'm back home.

A field outside St Ives (Cambridgeshire)

Taking advantage of the warmth, a friend and I asked George, my favorite porter, where we could go on a day trip.  He recommended St Ives -- not the famous one in Cornwall, the village in Cambridgeshire.  We reached said spot after a half-hour ride on the guided busway -- a bizarre transformation of an old rail line into a dedicated bus path, distinctly lacking in charm or much of a view.  We saw one of the few statues of Cromwell that are around (he was local to the area), though it dated from the early 20th century.  We also poked inside an unusual chapel built mid-bridge over the river Ouse (pronounced "ooze").  But as usual with these kinds of things, the best part was unplanned; having spied people walking across a neighboring field during lunch, we decided to have a wander and ended up sitting by the river listening to the birds go crazy in the humid air.  Sigh.

Meanwhile, W1 has gelled nicely in terms of rowing together.  There are still enough adverse circumstances that I don't think we'll do well in bumps (sigh), but the outings are a real pleasure, in terms of both the sunshine and the feel of the boat.  And when I manage to make it to cricket practice, my atrocious bowling has become mostly passable now!  We just got our new kit, adding yet more sporty clothes to my swelling collection.

Here's hoping the upward trend continues for another week and a half, so I can get my final chapter in shape by the deadline I gave my supervisor.  He said in so many words that I can't miss any more of them, and it should be possible.  Fingers crossed that it will be another Good Thing for this magical month.

Precise words

I started mulling over the theme of this post during the NVSA conference a few weeks ago.  As with most conferences, the presenters had approached the theme ("Victorian Senses") from an impressive diversity of directions.  Sometimes, to be honest, their highly articulate vocabulary had the effect of making me feel thick-headed.  If you don't regularly work on phenomenology and can barely even remember what the term means, if the word haptic is new to you, if you have difficulty absorbing by ear a densely theoretical essay about a work of literature you've never read -- well, there were moments of NVSA when the universe gave you an opportunity to make peace with your littleness.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure much of the material I couldn't soak up was brilliant.  But if nothing else, it demonstrated the sheer number of words in academese which I simply don't have in the rotating drum of my word-hoard.  (Incidentally, word-hoard is a term I lifted from Beowulf to become the theme of one of my chapters.)

At the same time, I found myself jotting down words that might be useful someday: perhaps something is germane to my argument; perhaps I could call Tennyson's group of college friends a coterie; and I really should look up what it means to deracinate something.  [It means 'to pluck or tear up by the roots, to eradicate, exterminate'.  Just try to imagine the daleks crying, 'Deracinate!  Deracinate!']  It's just so satisfying to fit exactly the right word to something.  Like the old skill of building dry-stone walls, you find the contours that fit snugly together, and temporarily collapse the gap between thought and speech.  I think it's part of what people love about Shakespeare: he can describe common emotions with such eloquence.

Then there's the fun of happening upon something in my research reading that corresponds eerily well with what's going on in my life at that moment.  The day after I'd sent a very incomplete chapter to my supervisor, I read a letter from Tennyson saying that he had given up his latest book draft to the editor with many remaining flaws and he was very annoyed about it.  The last day of April featured a glorious spring afternoon in Cambridge, during which I was reading some of In Memoriam and found the lines,

          Can trouble live in April days,
          Or sadness in the summer moons?

Fortunately, the answer seems to be "no".  Work must proceed, preferably faster than it has been, but spring is banishing sadness and trouble -- at least for those who don't have exams.  The iridescent leaves, the trilling birds, and the strolling Sweaver thrill to the returning scent of life in the air.  If only I could think of better words to fit the shape of what I mean by that.