Things I learnt this week

This week I have been at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds. Amongst the things I have learnt are:

1. There is no limit to the number of times the project team I currently work with are prepared to eat dinner at the local chippy
2. The brick gatehouse at Herstmonceaux castle cost about £4,500 to build
3. There is no limit to the amount of alcohol which the project team is prepared to consume
4. There was a class of servant called gentleman ushers, and you can find out about them in the Earl of Northumberland's second household book (or you can when Chris Woolgar has done editing it)
5. There is no limit to how late members of the project team will stay up attending to item 3
6. The Cistercians at Melrose abbey probably kept records of miracle stories, in much the same way that we know monasteries kept financial records
7. Its nice to be part of a friendly project team (and you can see the shiny websites here POMS and BOB)

There and back again (but with many less adventures)

So, I was sadly right about the good intentions/resolutions not lasting long, viz. nothing more to report on that front. Been quite a time actually as the larger of the two boys has been ill for some time. Spent most of last week saying, 'look I don't have to go to this conference', to be told, 'no, no, you go, we'll be fine'. Until the night before the conference. Then it was no longer fine. Then 24 hours later a reversal of opinion had me getting up at 5am to start the taxi, train, train, conference journey. Two papers in before I got summoned back south: taxi, train, train, train, train. The elder boy has gone back into work today. Hoping he does not exhaust himself as I would like five minutes off this weekend!

Paris, then and now

Then was January 1989, now September 2009. Then I was on a very short school trip for French A-level students, more recently visiting the Sorbonne for a medieval history conference. Then I could speak French (or so I thought), and couldn't get anyone to speak French to me; more recently I couldn't get anyone to speak English to help me out with my completely corroded school-girl French (never so embarrasing as in an internet cafe - why had I not considered that I had no internet or computer-related vocabulary to dredge up from the back of my mind?) Then, being a self-hating almost 17 year old, I hardly ate; last week, being a pregnant lady of six months, that was hardly the case. But there were parallels too. Then we mainly saw the outside of buildings (presumably because we could not afford to go inside); and this month I again mainly saw the outside of buildings, having been in town for a different purpose than to sight-see. So Paris remains to be 'done'. Perhaps sooner than in another twenty years, mais qui sait?

Conferences are bad for you...

...because you are

• under-exercised
• over-fed
• and full of rage at the laziness of those conference attendees for whom the courtesy of bothering to shape (and time) a paper so that it can be tolerably listened to is a step too far