Parituriunt montes

The Duchess of Newcastle allegedly used to sit up in bed in the small hours, yelling ‘I Conceive!’ At which point a rabble of amenuenses who were curled up like dogs under her four-poster would crawl out and reach wearily for their pen and ink. We are not thus blessed. Both the Professor and I are wrestling with books so long in the gestation that they are in danger of turning in to wind-eggs, if not plain old sulphuretted hydrogen. Both books were perfectly lovely ideas, but both have been interrupted by this, that and the other thing over the last few years, and the problem with that is that one gets to a sort of gloomy ‘surely everyone knows that so it can’t be worth writing about’, based not on what might be called out-there published knowledge, but merely on having outlined the idea to umpteen people. We are both having a trying time, and since most of our waking hours are thus employed, there is not much to blog about.

One interesting thing in the course of the last week -  by a circuitous chain of coincidence, I discovered that a seam of opal had turned up in Ethiopia, about 3,000 feet above sea level. The Mountains of the Moon was the classical geographers’ name for the source of the Nile, and some nineteenth century explorers identified this with the mountains of Ethiopia (the Nile has several sources, in fact). But I liked the idea of being able to say to someone, here is something which was fetched from the Mountains of the Moon. It was my mother’s birthday, so I did.