Nik's Saga

Contains sultanas.

Last night, hiding from the bleak evening sunshine, I made another fruit loaf. It was going to be a normal loaf until I accidentally added two tablespoons of sugar to the mix instead of two teaspoons. But then, I thought, if I make it a fruit loaf then I know I'll eat it rather than normal bread, which I might not. I'm not entirely sure whether this is a good thing or not, as it means that I'll eat more bread, but as this bread is going to be replacing other higher-sugar things I'll try it for a while and see.

This is a cinnamon-free loaf, which means it's much paler, something also affected by the fact that I set it to 'light' rather than 'medium'. I definitely prefer this one to the first version, of which there is still some remaining (it seems to keep very well; I've probably got some folks coming over this evening so I'm considering serving up some of both). Oh, come to think of it I haven't tried it toasted yet; I must give that a go later.
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Can I market the Drachenwald Academy of Defence as a slimming aid?

I've just noticed that it's getting on for 23:00 and I haven't eaten yet this evening. This is entirely due to an email I received from the Drachenrapier mailing list during a meeting of questionable usefulness today. It was very tempting to stop logging what was going on at the meeting and just starting on the fencing-related stuff there and then, but I was very good and didn't look at it until I got back from work.

The email pointed me towards the mailing list's archives as a potential data source for my project - identifying the names, ranks and academic relationships between members of the Academy. I then spent over four hours hunting out information and then another hour updating the web page with all of this new data. Somewhere along the way I forgot to eat.

Now, of course, it's getting a bit too late to eat but now that I've finished working for the night I'm definitely on the peckish side. Of ravenous. :( And I've still got to do my 15-minute workout yet. Perhaps I'll do my workout and then have a sandwich.
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This morning was cold, wet and miserable. This afternoon is bright and sunny.

Iceland has a variation in weather that is comparable to the north of England at its best. It's one of those places where the comment if you don't like the weather then wait fifteen minutes is regularly correct. Today started of very cold and very wet; we had quite a lot of rain last night and by the time I went into work this morning it was lightening slightly but was still pretty cold and miserable. I wondered, when I looked out of the window this morning, whether the mountains on the other side of the valley would have a fresh covering of snow (they didn't, as it happened).

By lunchtime it had at least stopped raining, although it was still very grey and cold. By the time I left the office at about 16:30 it was cold but beginning to brighten up. Now (20:00) it is quite bright and sunny outside, although from the looks of the trees - which finally have some leaves! - it's still rather on the windy side out there. The mountain snow is drawing back rapidly but is still bright in the sunlight. And the sunlight will still be there until the sun drops below the mountains at about 22:30 - it doesn't actually set until after 23:20 now, and will rise again before 3:00.

The sunlight and relative warmth are making their presence felt in the garden. The grass is now long enough that I'm going to have to see about getting it cut. More importantly, though, the rhubarb patch is looking good. I foresee the contruction and destruction of a number of rhubarb crumbles in the not too distant future.
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That's what I get for doing a 30-minute workout instead of my normal 15-minute one.

I've been a bit lazy recently and haven't managed to do my near-daily 15-minute session with My Fitness Coach. So today I thought I'd get back onto the horse and push myself a little by doing the 30-minute workout, thus catching up one of the missing days. Urggghhh. That does not feel like a good idea right now, as the result is that I'm knackered. I have visions of me crawling into the shower shortly, verticality being beyond me right now.

It would be counteractive to have a piece of currant bread to revive myself, wouldn't it? I actually have some currant bread at present, having today experimented with the breadmaker. The machine has been sitting in the corner doing nothing since I moved in and I'd decided this weekend that I would see if I could make fruit bread with it. I was temporarily halted by the fact that I don't have any dried milk but with the application of a little Google-fu I discovered that it was fine to replace that and the water with normal milk and add more flour to the equivalent mass of solids. It seems that the main purpose of the milk is to enable the loaf to brown more easily.

So this morning I filled up the breadmaker with flour, milk, yeast, sugar, salt and about half of the recommended amount of cinnamon for a fruit loaf. I'm don't mind cinnamon in small amounts but certainly not to the extend that seems common in American recipes. I managed to stop myself from opening the machine just to see how it was going on and then added the fruit when the machine beeped at me. Then it was just a case of being distracted by the Grand Prix while it cooked.

And it did indeed cook. The outside is a bit darker and crispier than I'd have preferred, and the bread is dark russet thanks to the cinnamon, but it's definitely fruit bread and tastes pretty good buttered. I can see that I'll be making more of this one, although on a lower browning setting and without the cinnamon (which is unfortunately repeating on me).

I suspect that making bread will be a lot cheaper than buying it, given that decent bread is on the expensive side. This week's shopping list will therefore have to include strong white flour, I think.
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It's been a pleasantly quiet day, mainly watching The Devil's Whore

And I rather enjoyed it. It was part of my viewing drive to clear the hard drive, and the episodes have now saved off to disc. My big question now is whether to polish off Survivors before the marathon Battlestar Galactica viewing or do a season of BSG first. Questions questions.

So why the Hanwei? One of the, er, amusing things to do while watching The Devil's Whore was watching out for familiar rapiers. There was a very clear shot of a Hanwei hilt plus several others that I recognise from SCA events. There were also several madelions too, which reminded me that I still have to make one for myself, preferably before Raglan this year... although I am not looking forward to about a hundred buttonholes.
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I have discovered a new use for the Wii.

It is very useful at A&S meetings for keeping the boys busy while the girls are doing dressmaking stuff. Or at least that's what happened today. It's been a bank holiday - 'Uprising Day', otherwise known as Ascension Day or the 40th day of Easter - so given that we have Revel coming up in about three weeks time I thought I'd throw an open A&S meeting as I knew that some folks had projects with which they needed a little help.

We ended up with six of us, with the boys playing with the Wii while the girls did an assortment of new fencing armour and court garb. Except for the WiiCheer break, which the girls found terribly funny and surprisingly energetic while the boys watched with looks that can only be described as a combination of disbelief, horror and despair.

As usual, I didn't actually get anything done, but in many ways that's the point of these sessions - spreading the knowledge so that they can do things without me in future. I'm hoping to do stuff at the weekend - maybe a bit of dressmaking, perhaps a little silk painting, almost certainly some more calligraphy.

In the meantime tomorrow, though, I have to return to work. If I didn't have a meeting at 09:00 I, like many other people around here, would be making a long weekend of it.
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Not only that, but I also seem to have lost inches all over, according to my "personal challenge" measurements tonight.

I do, however, fail to make it beyond low intensity exercise on the jumping jacks test (mainly because they're too painful to do for two minutes - thirty seconds is about as long as I can last) according to my heart rate. And then there's the strange case of my biceps - my left biceps contain 4 inches of extra floppiness than my right biceps. This probably has something to do with my shoulder. Still, I'm taking this all as pretty positive, particularly the fact that I managed eleven (count 'em!) modified press-ups. Okay, so my form is not very good, but I'm working on that.

Not only were there push-ups this evening, but there were a number of episodes of The Big Bang Theory. Now that is amusing. In many ways it's like a weekend at the caravan with added Sheldon-ness. Breakfast conversations with five or six of us at the van used to be equally, ah, eccentric. :) I've now finished season 1 and am definitely going to have to pick up both extant seasons on DVD at some point soonish.

The other major occurrance of the day was a new set of tyres for the car. Ouch. I've been running on studdies longer than I really should have (it now being May and all that) but I've been putting it off because last month was an expensive month. Now all I have to do it take it for its MOT on Friday and hope that it doesn't need too much doing to it.
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I eventually finished the secretary hand scroll over the weekend.

I had a bit of a panic over it, on the grounds that while its recipient specifically requested a late period scroll with all of the requisite squiggles and flourishes, I was a bit worried that it was just a bit too late; more seventeenth century than late sixteenth. But I've got the go-ahead from The Powers That Be so I thought I'd post it while its recipient is off at Double Wars. :) It will acquire the necessary ribbon and pendant seal once it reaches said Powers That Be.



Doing the flourish under 'Regina' was a real pain. It's easy to get the 'Rex' flourish working because the two lines come off the R and the x in different directions. The 'Regina' flourish required me to write the 'n' using the structure of 'h' just so I could get the tail to balance that of the 'R'. I was quite pleased with myself when I came up this that workaround.

The geekbroidery is also coming along nicely. I've almost completed the outlining of 1-50, so I'm hoping that by tomorrow evening I'll be able to start filling in the colours. Once I've got some of the colours in I'll post a photo.
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As part of my ongoing involvement with what in the UK would be called "Public Understanding of Science" activities I have a podcast featured in the 365 Days of Astronomy series. This is a international project undertaken as part of the activities of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 and provides a short (5-10 minutes) podcast every day for the entire year.

Today's podcast, entitled The Life of a Proton is available here, while my previous podcast Ptolemaic Cosmology - The Universe Before Copernicus is available here.
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It's been a very lazy day today.

That's lazy as in a bit of embroidery, a little reading, some calligraphy, a snooze, and watching a couple of episodes of Being Human.

I've got the geekbroidery canvas mounted on the frame and have started on the black grid structure. I reasonsed that if I did this first it would be a lot easier when it came to adding the colours as I wouldn't actually have to bother counting anything, I'd just have to fill in the gaps. As I said the other day, microencephalic rather than anencephalic needlework.

The reading is Charlie Stross' The Jennifer Morgue which, although I'm only a couple of chapters into it, had already had me laughing aloud at some of the references. I particularly liked the idea of Tanenbaum being one of the greats works of literature (having recently read it myself) and of something being as safe as a C++ compiler in the hands of an eager computer science undergrad. The latter really got me. I'm so glad that I've read most of Lovecraft; there are so many reference I'd have missed if I hadn't.

On the calligraphy front I'm doing something a little out of the ordinary. So far all but one of my backlogue scrolls have been gothic textura with a variety of different styles of illuminated versals. For this one, though, I checked with the recipient as to his wishes because I was pretty sure that I needed to do something completely different for him and had my initial thoughts on an appropriate design for him confirmed. The result is that I've been spending some time practicing my secretary hand and hunting out images of Elizabethan warrants and letters patent. I've now for the design done, settled on most of the wording, and am now satisfied that I can do the elongated first line in an appropriate manner. Hopefully I'll get at least a full practice version done tomorrow; I might even get the real thing written if I'm lucky.

The other good thing about this is that as I'm running a scriptorium for Revel I need to have a selection of different designs as examplars for anyone wanting to try their hands at creating scrolls themselves. I think that I might also do a couple of blanks as well as the normal backlog selection in case anyone wants to have a go at a 'standard' award scroll.

It's taken me quite a while to get around to Being Human but I at last watched the final four episodes this weekend. I do rather like it, sufficiently so that I'm hoping for a second series. Another reason for watching it now is to clear up some space from my hard drive. So far I've managed to watch seasons one of 'Allo 'Allo and Being Human ready to transfer to disc. Next is, I think, likely to be The Devil's Whore. All of this is interspersed with BSG, of course, which is probably the real reason I've only got about 20 GB free on my 160 GB hard drive. Hmm... my, er, previous life as a player of Star Fleet Battles still breaks through occasionally - I keep reading BSG as battleship (gatling). Also lurking on the hard drive are some MIT lectures from iTunes and season 1 of The Survivors. And on DVD already I have two seasons on Spooks, one each of Bugs and Terminator as well as half a season of Angel to finish.

In the meantime I'm watching Richard the Lionheart night on Channel 4. Unlike Eurovision, they have trebuchets. :)

You see now why I need a microcephalic embroidery?
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The whalemeat issue is rather more complicated than I thought.

It turns out that in food terms the Icelandic word for 'whale' is pretty generic, similar to the English word 'meat'. The Icelanders don't just eat minke and fin whale, but are also quite happy to eat a variety of cetacean-derived meats. If you want minke whale you must ask for minke whale. If you just want 'whale' you're likely to get porpoise, specifically harbour porpoise.

As far as I can tell, porpoises are not actually hunted here; rather they are part of the bycatch of the fishing industry as they tend to prey on commercially exploited fish such as herring and cod. In an ideal world there is no bycatch as nets are designed to prevent it, but this is not an ideal world. Iceland appears to be pretty good at managing its fish stocks and as a result its fishing techniques therefore tend to be pretty good on the sustainability issue. So what do you do with the dead porpoises that turn up in the nets? In the current economic climate, where imported goods are becoming more and more expensive and people are turning back to locally-sourced food, you eat them.

I've learnt all of this today at a faculty barbecue. Where the meat was, indeed, porpoise. In general I'm an antisocial creature and don't tend to do after-work socialising, but as I spent most of today working on organisational strategies and one of the areas is improving the integration of the different parts of the faculty, I felt that I really ought to turn up. Besides, there was the possibility of barbecued chicken. Or barbecued lamb. Or barbecued fish.

I was not expecting barbecued 'whale'. I stood there and let everyone else get to the meat first, thus buying myself an extra ten minutes to ask questions and think about this very uncomfortable situation. It certainly felt as if there was a level of so will the outlander eat this? curiosity around me. In many ways I was very relieved when the difference between 'whale' and 'whale' was explained to me, and although I was not prepared to eat great whale I felt that I could eat bycatch porpoise. After all, it would not have done the ideal of greater integration any good had I, one of the people responsible for coming up with new ideas to promote cooperation within the faculty, refused to take part.

For the foodies (or otherwise curious persons) amongst you, we had thin slices of porpoise meat grilled on a barbecue. I don't think that the meat was marinaded in any way before cooking. The meat itself is very dark, and when cooked has the consistency of veal but the flavour of liver. It's quite tasty, and not at all what I expected - there was none of the fishy taste you get with puffin and, I'm told, other fish-eating birds.

So what is the moral of this story? Quite possibly never go to a works barbecue in Iceland unless you know precisely what they're planning to cook or are willing to make a scene.

Postscript: Before anyone starts attempting to berate me for this, allow me to point out that I have already refused to eat minke when it was served in the cafeteria at work. I disapprove of the hunting of whales, but I believe it is more respectful to a bycatch animal to eat it than to just throw it overboard (and considerably less wasteful).

Today was the Big Presentation.

The faculty had sent out over 50 invitations to local companies to come to lunch and hear a presentation on the planned new applied computing degree, in the hope that lots of people would come along, see what we are planning and, hopefully, tell us how to improve it so as to more closely meet their needs as employers.

We had a 10% response rate (I'm not sure whether that's good or bad) although, as is common in Iceland, we started late. I did tell my boss that if no-one turned up I was going to retire to my office, cry, then come out and commit wanton acts of havoc and destruction, and as we've already had the rapier discussion and demo I think he might have believed me. :)

Anyway, people did eventually turn up, I gave the presentation and we got into discussion about how it met their needs. It turns out that it's actually pretty close although there are, of course, a few tweaks that would improve it. It was quite a relief to hear that, as it's been a lot of work. I can now go away and apply those tweaks and turn the draft degree definition document into a final one that we can put to the university council as the faculty's recommendation for the structure and content of the new degree.

On the way back from work I went for my weekly shop, this time with a couple of detours. First, I'd been told about a new craft shop in the shopping mall - well, I had to pay it a visit, didn't I? It's basically a wool shop with some embroidery kits and their needlework collection is small but reasonably varied. I almost came out with a cushion kit from Agneta Engman (the 'Hidden Roses' one, which is based on a stained glass window at Little Moreton Hall) but instead came away with a very, very modern abstract gross point kit in purples and blues and greens and yellows. Sounds awful, but isn't. Well I like it... It's charted rather than a printed canvas and...

... Oh dear. I've just opened it. It's not actually an abstract, it represents the numbers 1-100 with primes as full squares and non-primes made up of colour combinations based upon their factors (of which there may be more than two). IT'S GEEK NEEDLEWORK!!!! Yes, it's the shipping forecast blackwork all over again! I can't find a picture of it online but will certainly photograph it when complete. I only bought it because I wanted something not quite brainless... more microencephalic (as opposed to the big cross stitch crewel cushions, which are truly anencephalic) and it has turned out to be a hidden treasure. Well worth the 3750 Ikr it cost me.

My goodness, that makes my other (considerably more expensive) purchase pale into insignificance. My remaining pair of decent shoes (no, I don't have cupboards full of shoes - I forgot to take 'compulsive shoe-buyer' as a disadvantage during character creation; I took 'compulsive needleworker' instead) have been feeling a little bit as if they're about to wear through for a few weeks. I was going to go shopping for shoes while in the UK for Rent-A-Don but you know the way that sometimes things just don't happen. I eventually decided to go into the shoe shop in the mall and came away with a pair of Skechers which are a size smaller than I normally buy in shoes. They look reasonable and feel quite comfortable, sufficiently so that I may be able to dispense with socks in the summer.

Speaking of which, it may be on its way. The sun isn't setting until after 22:30 nowadays, and right now it's very dry and bright. There's a lot of dust around, not just on the fields but also kicked up by the cars on the road. So those of you in the UK, if you want to divert some of that rain that's coming your way back up northwest towards me I'd be happy to accept it.
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I've just uploaded my second 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.

This is an 'emergency' podcast, filling a hole that appeared in the schedule when a podcast wasn't delivered on time. Unlike the last one (still available here), which was the podcast version of an article I did for the Baelfyr, this one is a completely new work entitled The Life of a Proton. It's due to be broadcast on May 18th.

After yesterday's issues with the Line In slot I borrowed a USB headset from work to record the podcast this evening. It worked reasonably well, in that it provided a far higher input level so I could actually record without straining my voice, but I ended up having to hold the mic away from me rather than wear the headset otherwise it gave too many of the plosive pops. I think that if I'm going to do more of this podcasting thing (and I admit to the occasional urge to read poetry - other people's poetry, that is) then I'm going to have to buy a seperate freestanding USB mic.
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There I was, sitting recording my latest podcast when my voice went again.

I've had quite a lot of problems with my voice recently. Some days I'll wake up and it will be perfectly normal. Others it will have dropped into what was once described as my 'Margaret Thatcher' voice - somewhere on the deep and husky side of normal. On a really good day it will start in 'normal' and suddenly drop into 'Maggie' over the space of a few sentences. It tends to happen more while I'm projecting but that's not guaranteed to trigger it.

Tonight that was probably the cause. I've been recording my latest podcast, and since the MacBook has (for some unknown reason) a line-in rather than a mic socket I'm having to use built-in mic rather than a headset. It seems that I need a powered headset for the mic to work... which means that whenever I've assumed I was using the headset mic I was actually using the built-in mic. I think I'm going to have to pick up a USB headset tomorrow so that I can record the podcast without having to push my voice. Grr...

At least lectures are over so I'm able to rest my voice a bit.
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Today has been secretary hand.

Not entirely secretary hand, of course. First there was the F1 qualifying, which was quite exciting really. Then there was the guilty pleasure of watching She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Yes, thanks to my grandfather I grew up on a movie diet high in John Wayne. I'd forgotten what a wonderful soundtrack it had, apart from anything else. But the afternoon has been secretary hand.

It left me wondering about differences in handwriting. Most of the blackletter exemplars are sacred texts and I can therefore quite imagine monks spending many long hours perfecting their skills as a devotional activity. They are therefore pretty consistant. Once you get into secretary hand and batarde there's far more scope for seeing individuality in a script.

Which is what got me thinking. If I'm doing a piece of calligraphy in a partiular hand, how close to the version in the book does it have to be? If the basic form is still there then how much variation is acceptable? Should I be trying to slavishly copy the precise structure in the book (and, if so, which book?) or is that merely a starting point for my own writing in that general form? There is a huge amount of variability in modern handwriting even though at school we've all learnt the same fundamental letter forms. Was there the same variation in 16th century handwriting? I haven't seen enough extant documents to investigate this but I would suspect that there is quite a lot.

It's been quite a while since I've used either secretary hand or batarde, which means that I was rather out of practise this morning. Now, having spent several hours copying texts from an astronomical article in New Scientist (might as well use something interesting!) I'm a lot happier. Not quite up to scroll-writing standards yet but another page of practise should see me there.
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... Like a derelict swimming pool.

That's how I feel right now, and have felt since about 15:30 this afternoon when I finished marking this year's exam scripts. It was is if the act of completing this was some sort of unconscious signal that I could now give in to the cumulative exhaustion of the current semester.

It's not quite all over - I will have a couple of resits of various types to write and mark, but that can be put off until next week (unless I have enough energy to do them tomorrow). This is the point in the year when I find myself thinking right, what do I do now? and then start looking at a) rewriting modules for next year and b) trying to do a bit of research at last. I've still got a host of admin meetings lined up for next week but perhaps I'll manage to get something useful done. Yes, I know, meetings count as work too.

I've also been terribly enthusiastic and managed to buy the wood to make a silk-painting frame. It was a little touch-and-go at times as it all happened in Icelandic but now all I have to buy are the rubber bands and safety pins and I'll be ready to get started over the weekend. I've got the materials to do gonfalons for myself, the shire and the Academy of Defence and also to do my standard (eventually). The aim is to have them completed by Revel at the start of next month but I'll see how everything goes, considering the pile of things I was hoping to do by then.

For now, though, I think I'm going to have a very quiet evening. Probably with a book.
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Stupid arms and shoulders. Stupid bum.

It was physical challenge night with My Fitness Coach. She had me going through the self evaluation thing again soas to check my progress. I'm not sure if she does it every ten sessions or every fortnight as the two seem to coincide at present. I can do more crunches but am still incapable of doing press-ups, modified or otherwise. And star jumps are still not my friend. I still roll like a weeble and there are all sorts of shoulder/arm things that are too painful to do much of. Bah.

Okay, more cheerful thoughts. I've now marked the first set of exam papers and released the final grades. It was very pleasing to find that the distribution was a nice normal curve even under the challenging circumstances of this strange combination of students. Tomorrow is time for the other two papers, and while I hope I'll get them completed I'm not going flog myself about it. It's not as if I'm going to need anywhere near the allowed ten days to get them done anyway, and now that we've given up on the quality assurance examiners' meeting so as to get in line with the rest of the faculty there's no need to wait to release the results.

There are some things that are definitely more cheerful. I've got about 25% of the podcast script done so I should have it all recorded and uploaded by the end of the weekend. And I've also started looking at batarde/secretary hand for one of the scrolls I'm doing. Part of the trick with that one is going to be coming up with a good text that allows me to make the most of the ascenders on the top line. I want to do the current batch in a wide range of styles as I'm running a scriptorium at Revel and it would be nice to have a wide range of exemplars to look at in terms of hand, layout, border and versal.

Right. Off to bed. I had planned an earlier night, but you know how it goes.

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And, indeed, back with My Fitness Coach <

At court on Saturday there were a lot of people given awards or otherwise called up into court for things that required me to go up as well - the staff, the order of Ffraid, the Academy of Defense - with the result that my knees are feeling a little on the delicate side. This was not helped by tonight's exercise session, which seemed to have deliberately sought out as many exercises as it could that involved kneeling in some manner. I might have to search out my snowboarding kneepads if it keeps thus up.

Tes, I flew back up to Akureyri this morning and went straight into work. It was much the same as usual, so it was a relief to get home at about 17:30. I'm now in the final exam marking stage so there is light at the end of the tunnel, I suppose. I can now take a breather and relax for a couple of weeks, maybe make a bit of garb, do a bit of embroidery, get a bit of sleep. Oh yes, and do a bit of shopping. I seem to be completely out of bread, which is a bit of a disaster.

I had a really enjoyable weekend; I got to do a bit of fencing, I managed to catch up with a lot of people I haven't seen for a long time, and I even managed a little shopping. It was, as is usual nowadays, something of a downer to come back here. I suppose that this means that the other thing I need to do over the next couple of weeks is another intensive jobsearch - just in case.
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Rent-A-Don 0 - Friday

Sleep is a good thing.

It is not, however, something I've got much of recently, including last night. There have been a couple of late nights over the past week, then last night I managed a couple of hours of dozing rather than real sleep given that we had an oh-dark-hundred hours start to get to the airport. The original plan was to do at least some sleep, but then there was last-minute stuff to do and E didn't get out of work until after 01:30 so she came over to M's then rather than us getting up and out three quarters of an hour earlier than normally necessary in order to collect her on the way to the airport.

Never mind, we got there eventually. I decided against coffee with my normal "travelling breakfast" cheese and ham croissant and instead had a hot chocolate. Mmmm... Kaffitár at Keflavík do a superb hot chocolate with cream. Just what I needed to get me into the mood to sleep a little on the plane. We were on time (Icelandair have been much better about their punctuality recently) and made it to Costa's in terminal 1 arrivals just in time to receive a text from C to say that she was just awaiting her luggage. Soon after that we were all enjoying a variety of drinks and cakey goodness.

The car was awaiting us and we headed off towards Bristol, stopping off at the largest Hobbycraft I've visited. It's so convenient having a "points of interest" list of Hobbycraft stores for the TomTom... I then proceeded to cackle evilly as I introduced my innocent victims friends to the joys of a craft superstore. I won again, by dint of spending the least amount of money. In spite of this I came away with lengths of silk and silk painting materials to do several banners and a few embroidery bits and pieces. The only downside was that we then went into a nearby shopping mall for something to eat (which involved side trips into Evans and Past Times) and I discovered that the sauce for the KFC Zinger Tower contains sweet chilli sauce. Fortunately I had only had a mouthful when I recognised the chilli burn.

We got onto site at about 19:00, well in time for an evening of sitting chatting to people before turning in for a long-overdue night's sleep.


Rent-A-Don 1 - Saturday

Ow ow ow...

Yes, there is not only a sore shoulder, but also sore ankles. Mind you, that's nothing to what some other people will be feeling. Part of this is down to the classes during the day, but a significant part is thanks to the evening - pretty much a full evening, for that matter - of fencing.

The morning was given over to three one-hour sessions introducing the styles that were available for the longer classes in the afternoon: Fabris, Giganti and Capo Ferro. Fabris was fine, particularly as that's the basis of the fencing I've been teaching over here. By half way through the Giganti though, not only was my shoulder sore but my ankles were protesting as well. The Capo Ferro class was, in many ways, a study in pain and frustration because I just could not get any of the sequences to work. There was a return to my bunkroom for a bit of a wobble during lunch, and the decision that my shoulder really wasn't up to an afternoon on concentrated drills. Had I done one it would probably been Fabris, but instead I did a bit of embroidery and talked to some of the non-fencers.

After dinner was time for the prize playing of four of the fencers, two for the rank of Free Scholar of the Academy of Defence, two for the higher rank of Provost. In these the applicant must fence three opponents twice in each of three (or five in the case of Provost) weapon styles and then hold the field against all comers for fifteen minutes (thirty for Provost). I'd been asked previously if I would like to be one of the three Free Scholar opponents but had declined as I felt that my fencing skills had atrophied from lack of use, that I was no longer fencing to Free Scholar standard. My assumption, therefore, was that I'd fence in the open section at the end. As it happened we were short a Free Scholar so I agreed to fence as one of the three anyway. I was rather surprised but pleased to find myself dispatching my opponents most of the time. Clearly all of this teaching stuff has stuck somewhere (although I was making more mistakes fighting Italian rather than Spanish, which is curious given that I've been teaching more Italian than Spanish - very strange).

This continued until well after 23:00; by the last half hour there were only five of us cycling round to meet the applicants again and again so we were all getting quite a good workout by that point. The late-night post-fight pancakes and tortilla were very gratefully received.


Rent-A-Don 2 - Sunday

After a late night on Saturday, there was an early Sunday morning.

And it was entirely because I'd volunteered to cook breakfast - Gloriana porridge and Rent-A-Don omelettes (although I find myself agreeing with M that nothing that large can possibly be -ette so I think that in future they'll have to be known as Rent-A-Don Omls). I was aided in this exercise by G and V, and between us we made sure that everyone was well-fueled for the day.

The day was mainly given over to classes given by members of the Academy of Defence and included a lot of stuff on the various forms of cut and thrust ('light' C&T appeals to me but I think that longsword is a bit too heavy), plus a long class on Silver. The only class I did was the one on cuts in 16th century rapier, from which I came away with what promises to be a rather bruised upper chest - no fault of my drill partner but rather a natural consequence of needing to be closer to my opponent do a cut than a thrust and thus being in line for more powerful parrying thrusts).

There was a break at lunch for a meeting of the Academy (during which I managed to become the interim Academy Scribe, lunatic that I am) and then a great deal of amusement (and indeed education) helping G with some mundane stuff. It had got quite hot and sunny by that point so not fencing (other than marshalling a couple of authorisations) was not too bad an idea.

After the evening's feast there was quite a fuss outside. Someone had a sharpened longsword and some of the C&T brigade were taking turns slicing plastic bottles filled with water in two. If you've ever seen the television footage of someone slicing bamboo in two with a katana then imagine something similar being done with a longsword. It was quite impressive how smooth the cuts were and how easily they split the plastic. It certainly impressed upon me just how dangerous these blades can be once sharpened.


Rent-A-Don 3 - Monday

Monday started a little later than planned, but well all the same.

The viceregal car had failed to start, so we formed an impromptu breakfast brigade and rustled up more porridge, omls and pancakes. Unfortunately this had a bit of a knock-on effect on timing, leaving things running about an hour late. I had hoped to get a couple of authorisations of my own done but there wasn't time. I've developed a theory that it's a much better idea to get all of the authorisations you think you're going to want before you become a marshal, because there are never enough marshals to go around and you'll therefore spend your time doing authorisations for other people rather than getting your own. Ah well, maybe at Raglan.

Oh yes, I'm planning to go to Raglan, and not just for the fencing. I am looking forward to having the honour of standing as consort to M at Viceroy Tournament... so I'm going to have to start sewing a new dress or two for the event very soon!

We eventually left the site at about 13:30 to head off back towards Heathrow, via Hampton Court Palace. Sadly it was almost 16:00 when we arrived, so we didn't have time to see much. We did have a good long chat with one of the living history interpreters in the kitchen - three of us wandering around wearing cloaks but not obviously part of the local team raised a few eyebrows but led to a fascinating discussion of recipes and other re-enactment issues.

We were also slowed down by the queue to see the exhibition on Henry's Women, which was actually a bit of a disappointment in many ways. It consisted of nine portraits (Henry, wives and daughters) that have been brought together from other rooms in the palace into a single cramped room. In spite of this it was quite useful - C and I had gone armed with sketchpads just in case, and I've not got a lot of small sketches of details of jewellery. I was particularly delighted to discover that all of those pendant pearls are drilled right through and held in place with small beads rather than being half-drilled. This will make it so much easier to make suitable jewellery in future. Even better, I now have a sketch pad full of details that will make up part of the documentation for future A&S projects that have been drawn from original sources at a level of detail that you just don't see on photos of the paintings.

I didn't have time to see the tapestry workshop, nor the maze, nor several of the more important artworks, nor even the Royal School of Needlework shop (the last of which was a major disappointment, particularly since I'd been quite excited by the prospect after its existance had been revealed to me the night before). I'm definitely going to have to go back for a far longer visit. Even so, by the time we'd got back to the airport there wasn't much time to do anything other than eat (and I'm really going to have to try some of the other eateries as Giraffe has a terrible selection of nuked-from-the-packet-and-therefore-unchangeable dishes) before having to leave for the departure gate.

Labels: rentadon, SCA

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