Castle Cèilidh

It turned out to be dry enough to have the Castle Cèilidh actually in the castle of St Andrews this year. It definitely made for a much more crowded event than last year, but whether it was necessarily better? Dancing in your old trainers on slopey grass is only marginally better than the feat we managed at the Channel 4 dem in Edinburgh Castle last year. But above all, it was genuinely Baltic! Dancing means taking your hands out of your pockets, which means freezing your hands off. So I gave up halfway and wandered around the castle premises for a bit. Took a lot of pictures but the camera refused to cooperate while transferring them to my computer so I lost half of them. (It’d better not try this in Shetland!)

Torchlit procession was pretty from behind a wall that gave some shelter from the icy gales. The pub (which wasn’t really a pub but more something like the Human Be-In) was welcomingly warm. I survived the coach trip back only to find MG in the stairway who had managed to lock herself out. Oops.

Today was a meeting with the almighty supervisor, who was very positive both about my write-up of the Postgrad Conference paper for the online proceedings and about the talk I’ll be giving in Skálavágur (as Scalloway is apparently called on the Norse place-name map of Shetland with Britain tucked away in the corner). I told her of the agony of having to read about different methods of curing different types of fish only to find out something about trade patterns. She told me about her experience of getting a book on ‘Indo-European trees’ out of the library, thinking it was about language classification, only to find a chapter on the oak, one on the birch and one on the elm.

Kind of irritating that the haaf fisheries and subsequent labour in-migration (i.e. weak links i.e. language change) starts in the 1720s, when I have already declared Norn dead as a community language. I’ll have to think of another explanation.

I should also mention that the HTML that Blogger produces is absolute gunk.