Dot has no friends

Dot writes: actually, I have lots of friends – certainly enough to make me feel happy and grateful – but what I don’t have is people coming to the concert on Monday. We’ve just had a rehearsal and it seems that my friend Aura may not be in it either, unless she has suddenly changed [...]

Concert Monday 1st December

Dot writes: just in case anybody reading actually lives in or near Dublin and would like to go to a concert on Monday…

The Goethe-Institut Choir
National Concert Hall
Monday 1st December, 8pm
Schutz, The Christmas Story
Bach, Christmas Oratorio Part IV
Messaien, O Sacrum Convivium
plus a selection of Christmas Carols
Tickets are available from the NCH website (or ring the box [...]

Hugh parties on down

Taken on Sunday. The second birthday party of the weekend!

Oooh! Oooh! We got tagged!

Dot writes: we got tagged by Salty Miss Jill. I don’t think this has ever happened to us before so I am terribly excited. Now we have to post six facts about ourselves. Since I am doing the posting it is going to be a little skewed towards me, but I’ll try to bring in [...]

Lazy but attractive post

Dot writes: so, we have fallen off the NaBloPoMo bandwagon. I was feeling rotten last night and went to bed early, and Ken was busy doing philosophy and inexplicably prioritized his actual work over posting. Truly, women are from Venus and philosophers are from Pluto or somewhere. But here are some nice pictures of Hugh [...]

Thpppptt

Dot writes: I have been a largely absent Mummy this week. I’ve been attending a series of talks by a visiting palaeographer, meaning that I’ve been out more than my usual one evening and haven’t had a day ‘working at home’. (Working at home involves putting a load of photocopied articles on the table, and [...]

Talk about red tape…

Dot writes: for those who complain about the proliferation of bureaucracy, it can be illuminating to bring in a historical perspective. Recently I have been reading Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), the main argument of which is that the major stimulus to the growth of lay [...]

Obligatory Rugby Post again

Ken writes:
Munster 16 All Blacks 18.
I seriously thought the All Blacks were going to choke.
Munster were sensational. It got off to a good start when Doug Howlett, Rua Tipoki and Leifemi Mafi and I think another Kiwi called Jeremy Manning did a Munster Haka as a kind of welcome for the All Blacks. But [...]

Interesting Map

Ken writes:
Strange Maps has an interesting map demonstrating a marked correlation between the counties that voted for Obama and the counties that produced the most cotton just before the US civil war.

Kiwiness ‘home and away’

Ken writes:
Dot’s recent posts on the subject of Englishness cajole me into saying something about being a New Zealander. I should clarify the title first, which of course alludes to an Australian soap opera. I hereby violate the first rule of being a New Zealander by saying ‘ I don’t really care. There’s not much [...]