Old friends
Mar. 20th, 2025 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI dreamed last night that the builders were still here. They were stampeding up and down the stairs, and they wouldn't leave until they had completed some final task, but they kept dropping things, so there was more to be cleared up, and it was late and I wanted to go to bed, but I couldn't, because builders... How odd, not to have dreamed about them until they had, in fact, gone. They left on Tuesday, while we were out, and now we wait for the painter to fit us into his schedule: end of the month, he said, and that's getting closer.
We were out on Tuesday at the second in that series of history seminars, the one about Sam Green for which we contributed to the research. It's an odd experience, to hear yourself quoted in an academic lecture. But as well as tlking to other people who had known Sam, lecturer Richard Huzzey had found contemporary press coverage, including reports of City Council meetings (because in those days, children, local papers had reporters who attended local coucil meetings). I was charmed to learn that way back in the 1970s, Sam was already urging the Council not to let the University trample all over the City (this when the University was a fraction of its present size...). There were interesting reflections, too, on the place of local history in LGBT+ history, and what it means to be a 'first' if that first is forgotten: when Richard Bliss was elected to Newcastle council in 1988, Sam was not mentioned as a precursor. I'm conscious of how much we don't know about the remote past, but how many gaps are there in very recent history?
Tuesday was history, yesterday was literature: we went to the Lit & Phil for the launch of The Long Glass, a collection of Sean O'Brien's Phantoms stories. The book is dedicated to Sean's fellow-Phantom, Gail-Nina; it is published by our former client Red Squirrel Press: I was confident that this would be a highly sociable evening, worth missing the pub quiz for - and it surpassed all my expectations . The audience was full of former clients, which is not a bad thing: we have been trying to retire for some years now. And there were one or two current clients as well.
Lots of chat, and a seriously chilling story, what more could you ask? Well, this: one piece of unexpected information. Gail-Nina, still wearing green after Saint Patrick's day, explained that actually on March 17th she observed the feast day of Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, a seventh century Belgian nun who has been declared (on the authority of Etsy) to be the patron saint of cats. I was incredulous that cats had been without a patron saint until the 1980s, she confirmed it: "There are no cats in the Bible." It's true that you have to dig deep on the internet to find any candidate other than Gertrude, though Julian of Norwich has some claim...
We were out on Tuesday at the second in that series of history seminars, the one about Sam Green for which we contributed to the research. It's an odd experience, to hear yourself quoted in an academic lecture. But as well as tlking to other people who had known Sam, lecturer Richard Huzzey had found contemporary press coverage, including reports of City Council meetings (because in those days, children, local papers had reporters who attended local coucil meetings). I was charmed to learn that way back in the 1970s, Sam was already urging the Council not to let the University trample all over the City (this when the University was a fraction of its present size...). There were interesting reflections, too, on the place of local history in LGBT+ history, and what it means to be a 'first' if that first is forgotten: when Richard Bliss was elected to Newcastle council in 1988, Sam was not mentioned as a precursor. I'm conscious of how much we don't know about the remote past, but how many gaps are there in very recent history?
Tuesday was history, yesterday was literature: we went to the Lit & Phil for the launch of The Long Glass, a collection of Sean O'Brien's Phantoms stories. The book is dedicated to Sean's fellow-Phantom, Gail-Nina; it is published by our former client Red Squirrel Press: I was confident that this would be a highly sociable evening, worth missing the pub quiz for - and it surpassed all my expectations . The audience was full of former clients, which is not a bad thing: we have been trying to retire for some years now. And there were one or two current clients as well.
Lots of chat, and a seriously chilling story, what more could you ask? Well, this: one piece of unexpected information. Gail-Nina, still wearing green after Saint Patrick's day, explained that actually on March 17th she observed the feast day of Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, a seventh century Belgian nun who has been declared (on the authority of Etsy) to be the patron saint of cats. I was incredulous that cats had been without a patron saint until the 1980s, she confirmed it: "There are no cats in the Bible." It's true that you have to dig deep on the internet to find any candidate other than Gertrude, though Julian of Norwich has some claim...
