What a lovely day! A bright, crisp blue sky, it’s Amy’s seventh birthday, I’ve hung out the washing and Another Country is complete. David sent me the final PDF this morning, and I have burned it on to a CD ready for Rob to pick up tomorrow. Nice to meet a deadline – thanks to David, who has really made the book look good. We shall have to make him an honorary Paston trustee…
The temperature has certainly dropped, but when the sun it shining it’s hardly noticeable. All right, it is noticeable, but not objectionable. Quite marked in the evenings, though, and we’ve been out the last three evenings. On Monday we went to the Cathedral to hear a lecture by Cambridge Professor Colin Humphreys, who has done some in-depth research on the events of Easter week, resolving apparent discrepancies in the Gospels. Fascinating stuff: he has established that the Last Supper was on the Wednesday and the Crucifixion on the Friday, with much of the Thursday taken up with the trial. The actual date of the Crucifixion was April 3, AD 33 – at 9am. None of this may seem to matter much, but it is encouraging to see that apparent discrepancies can be resolved if you accept the rather obvious fact that people writing at the time knew more about how things worked at the time than we do. A key factor in this is that different calendars were in use, for example. Prof Humphreys is a scientist, and he was assisted in his work by an astro-physicist, among others. His book is called The Mystery of the Last Supper.
The lecture was very good, but even more entertaining were the attempts made beforehand to get the technology working. At one stage nine cathedral clergy and lay people were clustered round, trying to make a laptop communicate with a projector. It proved beyond them until a young lad in jeans came forward and solved it almost instantly. He should get a cathedral post – a canon, perhaps.
On the Tuesday our group met at the Archers’ house on the other side of the city. We gave Ian a lift, and I walked up to his house (about a mile) to give myself some exercise. Invigorating. David cooked jacket potatoes, Vick supplied sublime pears in cider, and Bridget took the evening off at the theatre with David Essex. Some people have no idea…
Last night we were at the Cathedral again – this time in the lovely Westron Room at the Hostry – to hear poet Anthony Thwaite speak about the King James version with special relevance to poetry. Some interesting stuff, much of it autobiographical, but he rather marred his argument by comparing the KJV with the New English Bible all the time and not mentioning (till questions) the NIV, which is a far better modern translation. The NEB, in fact, is pretty awful, and the Dean, who was in the audience, pointed out afterwards that it was not used in the Cathedral at all. The Dean also made some good points about the importance of using language that was familiar to the audience. I have the feeling that my mother or one of her friends knew Mr Thwaite some time in the past (he is 81), but I didn’t pursue it.