I was slogging away on a planned submission to an academic journal tonight, my first – deadline yesterday – when just a minute ago I popped on to its website and discovered submissions have been extended to November 20!!!! A slight feeling of anger, then relief that I will actually have time to read it properly. I have to ask any academic readers, is this standard? Do deadlines always get extended?

Anyway, while distracting myself this afternoon I started work on my personal, fully owned Georgian manuscript; I hope to post at least a partial transcript, probably with lots of question marks, in a day or so. The description as purchased is here, although I don’t think it was quite right.

The date is actually “the second year of the Reign of our Sovereigne Lord George the Second by Holy Grace of God of Greate Britain and France and ???? Defender of His Faithe or Anno Domini One thousand seven hundred and twenty nine”, not 1722.

The term “indenture ” made me think of an apprenticeship, which was probably my error: it is certainly a legal document concerning “by estimation eight acres” of “pasture land” and its “premises” – whether to lease or buy I haven’t quite worked out: while it is in English there are I suspect a few Latin legal words. The sum involved is “Eighty three pounds, three shillings of faithfull(?) money of great Britain” which is being paid by Amariah Impson (or Empson) to Elizabeth Heales, spinster. (At least I think that is her name; I might have to get some expert advice on this, or buy a book recently recommended on the Shakespeare listserv – Letitia Yeandle (Folger) and Jean Preston (Princeton) — English Handwriting 1400-1650:
An Introductory Manual, to be found at www.pegpress.org.)

I don’t usually have the patience to persevere with this sort of thing, but now I’ve promised I’ll have to – you might describe it as personal blackmail.

For those, like me, who weren’t around in the Sixties (or at least not in a state of development sufficient to take them in), or those who were, but as the old joke goes can’t remember them, an interesting (if very US-centric) piece on The Other Sixties. Found on Arts and Letters Daily, a website I’ve been reading for at least eight years.

I sometimes think it is not as good as it used to be, but that’s probably just a trick of perspective; when I was in Bangkok its updating was the intellectual highlight of my day. Now it has more competition.

“I meant to tell you that if you had a television, you’d approve of Channel 4. There are a lot of women on it. Well there are a lot more men, of course, but we must give thanks for small mercies. One documentary programme a week is entirely composed of women. The reviewers keep calling it ‘an all-woman team’. They do not call other programmes ‘all-man’. For ‘all-man’ read ‘all human beings’. Women, as S. de Beauvoir said so long ago, are still The Other, as in A Bit of The Other.” (p. 78)

(First published 1983, could have been published 2004.)

My copy of the second Jill Tweedie book, More from Martha: Further Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist arrived this morning, and surprise, surprise I’m already half-way through, but I am going to go to sleep soon, honest.

A small sample, proving my papal theme unusually persistent this week:
“I thought the picture of you and Mo as the Pill, in a yellow dinghy, was very novel …
Anyway, you’re right, the Pope has to be lobbied on behalf of women, though it’ll do no good. You can’t get at Infallibles, you see. They just turn around and say look, you horrible little person. I’m infallible and I’m wearing my infallible Hat, so shut up while I’m talking or I’ll excommunicate you. Josh has a fit of the infallibles once a week, so I know the symptoms…” (p. 51)

Prescient words, those “it’ll do no good”.

More about the Jill Tweedie.

Over at Random Acts of Reality, a wonderful bloggers’ hierarchy. Who looks down on who? Place yourself on each line – cat posts at the bottom.

And to complete the tale of the Australian election, little Johnie Howard now has control of the Senate, and hence complete, unfettered control of the country. There go any remaining human rights.

I can’t resist a little on Monica’s experience at Flower Gardens, the hostel for female munitions workers.

“One day, a woman in the catering department, whom I cultivated because she so often let fall useful information, said to me: ‘Listen. If you want to see where most of the trouble in this place starts, go and look at the Bottom Pinchers’ Parade on a Saturday night.’
‘The what?’ I said, aghast.
So she explained to me that the noble sport of Bottom Pinching (introduced, it was said, into this blameless country by the wicked Americans) was Scoreswick’s most popular outdoor game.
Its focal point was the churchyard en route to town. Here, especially on Saturday evenings when the girls walk down to Scoreswick to the pictures, the soldiers would lie in ambush among the graves. And, as they passed by, giggling and squawking according to the manner of their kind, the men would pussy-foot after them and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, nip their behinds.
When the welkin had ceased to ring with their laughter and screeches, it was customary for pinched and pinchers to join forces and proceed arm-in-arm to spend the evening in the town.
‘Come along with me one night and watch them at it,’ my informant suggested. ‘It’ll open your eyes to quite a lot of things.’
In the end I allowed myself to be persuaded. She was perfectly right. It did.” (p. 157-8)

Finally, I did a quick web-check on Monica and found she seems to have written one more book, about nuns. Otherwise she mostly appears on quote sites, most commonly for: “The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn’t, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there.”

Speaking as a night-owl – ugghhh!