Registration opened very recently for new modules, and the price for this next academic year is £3,200. That's for two modules, one compulsory and one other (evidence law). Lord Sumption chose to go into law, even though he has a penchant for British medieval history (an excellent subject, and one very close to my heart) because, he "did not want to be poor." Now, I'm not like 'Stalin' my housemate/landlord (a backwoods clodhopper aka 'The Cookie Monster' or 'Oscar'), cloying after every penny. Even his partner said recently, "[Stalin], you're so tight!" This guy has a fork in the sugar bowl and leaves the dirty washing up water to go tepid and wash up again in to save on the water bill (not that he washes up, for the dishes are still filthy once he has dipped them in the cold, dirty water, not even bothering to clean the things). Anyway. I am no Scrooge, but, after twelve years of studying (three years unofficially studying in Cambridge, among its magnificent architecture, illustrious history and most of all: the best book shops I have ever seen in my life, a veritable thesaurus of wisdom and repository of sacred knowledge), and it has gotten me absolutely nowhere (I still do the same job, now, today, as I did while studying as an undergraduate, as a post graduate, and now as a so-called 'master') I cannot justify forking out £3,200 a year. I simply cannot afford it. And for what exactly? There are no books any more, much less any tutorials (and this was before the Neo-Plague struck, cost cutting). Virtual 'tutorials' and eBooks are not real tutorials, and real books. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the Benchers at the Inns of Court would ever accept me as one of their own. I am at their mercy. I would (probably) need to get a first (highly unlikely considering the fact that I've been studying a completely different subject for the past twelve years) in order to be permitted to become a barrister. Furthermore, to what end? What? Become a paralegal, doing the donkey work of a lawyer for a measley fourteen grand a year, the same amount I have often earned as a plate-scraper and washer upper? Is that not slavery? No?
So, Max is working on a secret project, so secret in fact, that I cannot even utter the name of the book I am translating, lest some insidious and wily classicist gets there before me. There is no translation of it available anywhere online (legally, at least, and not even in certain darker corners of the web, though I am unsure about torrents: because I do not use them). Even so, this is a strange, curious and interesting little work (only 98 pages of Latin), which appeals to a wider audience than the more esoteric works on magic which have not yet been translated. I was collaborating with a Ph.D. student on translating one of those books, but seemingly the one translation which has been done of it (a partial, and into Russian) does not reach a wide audience. The subject of my most recent endeavour, however, has a much wider audience, potentially, and might be one of the cornerstones of the newly built Ivory Tower I am constructing. Nennius' History of the Britons is not going to sell well. There is already a free translation of it online. I did that more out of my patriotic duty, as a scholar and an Englishman (even though Nennius was Welsh, if indeed he existed at all - remember that most historians are very much like conspiracy theorists, they doubt everything unless they are presented with a complete set of dental records, several letters from and to the person concerned, and a number of inscriptions and coins with the author's name stamped on, otherwise he is a 'literary fiction' and never existed). Besides, no two historians can agree on the colour of shite, much less anything else.
Anyway, Max's new secret little project (so secret, that I even blog about it) is a very strange creature. It is full of symbols, spirits and celestial wisdom, prophecy (my usual occult, mystical and oblique interests). The reading material around it is also quite interesting, even though much of it is in ancient Greek (which I have to pull my finger out and learn, finally. I can still only identify perhaps one in five words when I read Greek, and even that is usually the prefix not the infix or suffix, especially verbs). Righty ho! I must get back to working on it. That is, before I have to journey into that... place, among those... people (my 'learned' colleagues). Were you to combine the ages of my two immediate superiors, they are still half a decade off my own age. Were you to combine the reading and learning they have collectively done, that is as nothing by comparison to my own. Yet one cannot complain too much. This is Britain, therefore we are ruled by impetuous youths, thugs and unlettered foreigners. Education here has no meaning, no significance, no purpose. This is not Renaissance Italy, evidently.
Max.
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