I am a mole and I live in a hole ...

... well, not exactly, but I live in a basement flat in Jesus Lane. Perhaps college is trying to hide me underground so I don't cause trouble. The flat, after some rearrangement of furniture, actually looks quite nice, and I had seven people round to eat last Sunday. (Seven is the biblical number of perfection - could this be significant?) I have also just got connected to the college network. It took me a while to do this, my problem being that I was trying to connect with a modem cable rather than an ethernet cable. Hence I may be posting here more regularly.

Since my last significant post I've been involved with the International Student Welcome (welcoming international students to Cambridge). This involves sitting out at the bus station and train station in the cold and greeting people, and also going to visit people. This was great fun, and on one given evening I met and conversed with a Bolivian woman who had missed her bus and wanted to know if her ticket was still valid, an official from the Italian consulate and a 95-year old professor waiting for a bus from Luton who came up to Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1929 and has been here ever since.

The other thing I've been busy with is starting my MPhil course. I've just finished week 1 (Cambridge terms beginning on a Thursday and ending on a Wednesday). I actually only have a three day week, all my seminars being on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so I guess I can have a four day weekend :-) Yesterday I was 20 minutes late to my textual studies seminar, since I got lost in the labyrinth of the UL. Since I seem to be in the mood for fanciful typology, I propose that this is an allegory for the perplexities of scholarship, where mazes of speculation seem often to impede the possibility of access to the text. Anyway, on that note, I'll leave you with a quote from Francis Bacon (the writer (1561-1626) rather than the painter (1909-1992), though the latter is a collateral descendant of the former (meaning he's related but not by a direct line of descent)):

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."