A long time gone

It seems ages since I last updated this blog, and it is not as if I have not been travelling here there and everywhere both in word and action. Indeed, I have even damaged my carbon footprint by travelling by car down to investigate the joys of the Taylorian library (where we once again followed the Portuguese on their travels round the world), and then further afield to Carlton to meet friends and retrieve much missed furniture. The main problem is I haven't discovered Harry Potter's time turner. If Ihad I might manage to have enough hours in the day to read all that I wish, travel through the world wide web, and meander my way around Britain in addition to teaching my courses and keeping a blog up to date. As it is, my alotted time span has to suffice. Nonetheless in this week we have managed to follow Betanzos and Zarate and de la Vega as they looked with Spanish eyes onto the intricacies of Incan customs and religion. We followed Sabine McCormack as she deciphered their reactions for us. Then it was a quick dash north to sail with Jacques Cartier up the St Lawrence and suffer with him as his men succumbed like flies to the horrors of scurvy and the terrors of a winter in a hostile land. I have also found time to follow a certain St from Hippo as he confesses the details of his life. Closer to home, I have also recently come across a real joy of a book. Perhaps it is not a joy for all but for a homesick Scot and a historian, the Flindlater's Crossriggs has provided delightful soothing reading. On which note, it is time to stop logging (or blogging) on books and travelling through the world wide web and instead to pedal my way back to a freezing Victorian townhouse that seems to have travelled back into the past. It certainly has not grasped that there are such modern luxuries as efficient heating or insulation! That said there is nothing to stop one nestling down there with a good book.

Reading week and its uses (from treatises on navigation to mind mapping)

Well it has been a while now since I updated my blog, and it seems a week of being here there and everywhere, both literally and in the pages of my books. It was a week that began with a bang with a rare opportunity to go down to London and work in the British library. What bliss (though speed reading sixteenth century Portuguese was a challenge). I journeyed with Barros and the 15th and 16th century Portuguese out to India. I suffered the terrors of passing Cape Bojador with them, and the fear of rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Considering Barros's Decades of Asia was one of the most important Portuguese books on the Age of Discovery, it amazed me that I had to slog through it in Portuguese and that the only translation I could find was Italian.
After the delights of the British Library and the horrors of early Portuguese sea voyages it was my turn to travel, and true to form, I fell victim to the problem of modern rail travel. Mind you this time it wasn't signal failures or leaves on the line; it was people on the line. What a way to endear yourselves to your fellow citizens. Still, eventually it was back to Birmingham.
After a couple of days in Birmingham where I rejoiced with almost everyone I know in the return of a Democrat to the White house, and then mavelled at the yearly celebration of Guy Fawkes, and an earlier reaction to a government it was time to return to the library. Determined to make the best of reading week, I ventured down to Oxford and continued improving my Portuguese (and worked on giving myself a headache) by following Pedro Nunes's Treatise on Navigation. It is possibly less surprising that this has never been translated than that Barros's hadn't, but oh how I wish it had been. Nunes may have been the cosmographer royal in Portugal, but it is clear that his interests, unlike mine were in mathematics and astronomy of which he was one of the greatest practitioners of his age, and not so much in people and places. A combination of mathematics and Portuguese were a challenge to put it mildly. Still his way with words left me rejoicing with him in the Portuguese discovery of "new islands, new lands, new seas, new peoples and what is more a new sky and new stars" - how to word the thrill of exploration and discovery!
Having spent so much time in the sixteenth century, I also decided it was time to catch up on the 21st and turned my attention to the world wide web. I have now learnt to use www.delicious.com , and I must admit I like it a lot. To have my bookmarks (and other peoples) accessible to me wherever I can link to the web is a great boon. Ok I am not sure that I want everyone to follow all my sites, but that is a matter for me to think about when I bookmark.
On the other hand I also took a look at www.mindmeister.com. You'd have thought that for someone with an interest in mapping this would suit me to a T but you would be wrong. I may like mapping the world, but mapping my ideas just left me confused and hazy. I lose the flow of the thought in bubbles going here there and everywhere. It began to look more like a seriously mutated spider than any form of map recognisable to humankind.
To complete my journey from books to the web, I also decided to investigate wikis, and while I am dubious about completely open access ones, having looked (naturally) at wikipedia, and also at the wiki dictionary, I can see the uses of limited ones. For someone desperately trying to keep strate Mayan cah and Aztec alteptl; the Mayan Ah Chuy Kak and the Aztec Huitzlopochtli, and a wealth of other unmemorable names, I have begun to see the potential in a wiki.
That said, after all this foraging in the world wide web, I feel it is more than time to retreat to my beloved books, and rather than turning tabs, turn pages. It is off back to the 16th century to follow Matthew Restall into the intricacies of the Maya world, and after that to journey back to the ideas of a 4th century African, and follow St Augustine through the footsteps of his life.