Never even got close to leaving the house today. The living room was mostly out of bounds, thanks to deliveries of stuff in cardboard boxes that has just kept on coming over the last few days, and some of it isn’t even ours. If Kevin from Morpeth is wondering where his box of chocolate bars is, we’ve got it, it’s one of those in the picture.
Time to do some work. I didn’t travel out here only to access this room, but it was certainly a contributing factor. Did you know that when the Royal Navy handed over control of Ascension Island in 1922, the place was in possession of 4½ pounds of Bovril? Now you do.
A place I can still find reason to frequent now and again. There were a few students seen to be doing the same (none of mine, though…).
It’s not easy to categorise a post as both “Interior” and “Landscape” but I’m claiming it for this one. Farewell to Gibraltar, it’s been a decent few days and if things work out I will be returning at some point.
The University of Gibraltar is why I am here, indirectly anyway. It is one of Europe’s newest, founded in 2016 and built into a converted old barracks. It’s also one of Europe’s smallest: what you see here is a considerable proportion of the whole. Something about it reminds me of the atrium where Heywood Floyd and the Russian scientists have a conversation in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the red-and-white theme that does it. And no, there didn’t seem to be any students around. They’re all ‘on placement’, apparently.
I am still making my fortnightly Monday visits to the John Rylands Library for my Palaeography (literally, ‘old writing’) course. With two classes after today’s to go, we have reached “Early Modern English Scripts”. I do not know whether this will ever have any impact on my life, but it’s been interesting enough. Manuscript pages should be touched as little as possible, so rather than holding them down by hand, one should use weights, two types of which are seen here. These will be the kind of thing, never seen in other contexts, that some tiny specialist company based in an old mill in Bradford-on-Avon has been manufacturing and selling for a few hundred years.
Not many students are seen on campus at just after 9am on a Friday, then again, nor am I, all that often. She seems engrossed enough in something, anyway. I hope I managed to keep my class entertained too.
Pinocchio joined us in the Railway this afternoon courtesy of Toby, the Gepetto in this particular relationship. Toby makes things, it’s what he does, and he’s pretty good at it too. But even he declared this particular creation to be ‘a bit creepy’. Perhaps all puppets are, to some extent.
I have rarely* had cause to complain about the food in the Middle East and the offerings here at the hotel in Dubai are no exception. It is no coincidence that this is the second shot from here to feature food, and in only four pictures thus far — see this similar effort from March 2019.
[*] there was one legendarily bad meal in Jeddah, though — the exception that proves the rule? Either way the memory of a liver-and-banana stew still lives with me.
A study in blue, or possibly, ultraviolet. A study, also, in how full symmetry is so rarely possible, however hard one tries to achieve it. I will be flying out of here tomorrow, but for tonight, the airport hotel.
Being 42 