Silliness, Seamus & Sleepiness / The Passing of Professor Grierson

To complete my run of doing silly things last week, on Sunday I killed my phone by dropping it down the toilet - I retrieved the phone, but it displayed "No SIM present" for a few hours before the screen went dead entirely. However, on Monday I retrieved from Caius the two bags I lost last week so hopefully it's an upward trajectory from there.

Today I went to a lecture/reading by Seamus Heaney (an Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize for literature a few years ago). I'm afraid that due to sleepiness I didn't concentrate on every word he said, especially when he read his poems, but it was a relaxing experience since Seamus has such a nice soothing Irish voice.

Professor Philip Grierson of Gonville and Caius College died last week. According to the obituary in the Daily Telegraph, "Professor Philip Grierson, who died on January 15 aged 95, was a medieval historian, a leading numismatist [expert on coins], and a symbol of continuity at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a resident fellow for 70 years."
There is also an online obituary from The Times. I think he's the man I spoke to at the bus station in September - while he didn't give me his name, he meets the description. Strangely, he died the day before I ate at Caius (and left my work there). Apparently the Caius students got to toast his 95th birthday last November in hall. It's also a bit surreal that someone I spoke to for several hours without really knowing who he was is no longer with us. Although he told me he was a professor of medieval history, he didn't mention that he was a world expert in medieval coinage. He left behind a collection of 20,000 medieval coins which he bought with his own money. Philip Grierson was at Caius from the time he arrived as an undergraduate in 1929 aged 18 until his death last week. I don't anticipate staying in Cambridge that long (at least in one continuous stretch), but I guess Professor Grierson embodied an era of lifelong bachelor scholarship which is passing.