Home again, home again, lickety split !!

I am informed that there was a near-riot in Dublin Airport last night. Late Saturday night, when all the charter holiday planes arrive, just before the last buses depart for all parts of the city and beyond, there was but one Immigration Officer in his box checking IDs. A huge bottleneck soon developed of angry, tired returning holidaymakers, who had had to walk through the shaking kilometre of portakabins before coming to a complete halt on entering the relatively solid ground of the airport building. Those who decided to attempt to evade the box entirely were escorted back to the heaving waiting masses by gardai, who refused to take any other action to help ease the situation.
How different it was early Wednesday evening when I arrived. The airport was almost deserted and there was no one in the Immigration Officer's box, a newspaper lying folded on his desk. I can only assume he had gone to eat his dinner, it being such a peaceful evening, there couldn't possibly be any unwanted people trying to enter the country.
I had to ask myself, if I were unable to get out of the airport until after the last bus to Bray had long since departed from the city, how would I get home? I think the aircoach runs until the small hours and if so, I would get out at Trinity and get onto the Nitelink from College Green. This is something which the offspring have expressly advised against, given the behaviour to which I would be exposed --- (apparently) of drug-taking and drunkeness, all amid scenes of general lewdness. So far I have managed never to have to take this ride with the devils of Youth of Today.
To add insult to injury, it seems that this vehicle refuses to take passengers actually into Bray, so they are turfed out somewhere short of Shankill - the roundabout by the church maybe - and left to the tender mercy of the local taxi-drivers. Apart from this 3-part journey, there is only the choice of a single taxi ride all the way from the airport, if you happen to have enough cash on you, although I believe they will drive you to a cash machine. I don't like to think how much they charge.
The lesson being: one more reason not to go on package holidays, people!!

That's Archaeology for you

It is a strange thing that Archaeology seems to swallow one up; there is no escape from this science. I went to Sark thinking that I would be having a relaxing thoughtless holiday as an antidote to the 3-week archaeolgical site-fest that was my trip to Crete.

Not to be: I found myself more-or-less in the middle of a very active excavation of a Bronze Age enclosure, complete with hearth and pot in situ. The pot had been decapitated by ploughing or possibly, the removal of the ploughsoil for this very dig.
The excavation was conducted by an eminent, newly-knighted archaeologist, some of whose books are among the favourites on my shelves, amd his team from Oxford University. Coins, jewellery, pottery fragments and stone tools also showed up in the course of excavation. This was close to the find spot of the disappeared Sark Hoard so the area seems to represent a palimpsest or at least an occupation over millenia.
The members of the Societe Sercqeraise,interested locals (and I) were treated to a very interesting end-of-season talk from the Professor and his excellent Phd student about the Hoard, the finds of this year's dig and future plans for a larger excavation next year. We were shown stone axe-hammers and mauls and locals appealed to, to watch out for them and also asked to search attics and cupboards to try to locate the missing treasure! The Professor would dearly like to find an axe factory that he is hoping may exist on the island which was an active participant in the trading chain from Europe to Britain. Because the geology of Sark is varied but extremely easily identified as to place of origin, this should be possible - if the evidence still exists after all the quarrying and building that has taken place on this small island.
We talked to a fisherman one of whose ancestors was among the finders of the treasure, which included metal horse-decorations(?) - plaques originally from Thracia. Excellent engravings were made of these at the time but they, along with a possible amber lump and identifed Iron Age and Roman coins, have vanished along with the pot, bound with an iron hoop, in which they were found. The antiquarians and the local gentry seem to have passed it around among themselves and it was 'lost' along the way.
The Societie has some lovely flint arrowheads found nearby on the surface by the nearby mill. Good flint is not found on Sark so these were imported. A number of Neolithic stone axes have also been found and many are in the Guersnsey Museum, in the F C Lukis (Antiquarian) Collection, with a great mixture of Channel Island, Breton and other objects from farther afield.
So now I am enthralled by the unfolding story and may have to return next summer for my next dose. And all because my friend, who has no particular interest in Archaeology, but is fascinated by Geology, insisted on my coming. She has stayed as a paying guest with members of one of the oldest island families for more than a dozen years and it is on his land that this dig is being conducted, so I was lucky to have an entree rarely granted to visitors, let alone first-timers to the island.
I only wish that there were an equal opportunity to be involved with paintings, so that I didn't feel as if my History of Art studies had been totally neglected at the expense of all this archaeology. I do always feel that Arch is a greedy subject that could eat one alive and spit out one's bones (for some future arch student to wonder over?)disdainfully.

Meanwhile, Diana is recovering her strength slowly and will return in a few more days. She could not brave the water but I swam at least once a day in many different locations and we biked and walked all over the island. She swears that there are still corners of it which she has not visited. I now have the thighs of a Tour de France cyclist without the drugs.

Go ahead; see if I care

I am off again - to investigate the island of Sark, leaving male offspring to water the bonsai and feed the cat and, possibly, remember to put the garbage out This Time.
Furthermore, I have told him that, should any of his mates see fit to insult me in my absence, he need not consider it incumbent upon him to respond by headbutting them in the chest - or elsewhere.
My friend is much recovered and can continue her convalescence on holiday. I do hope she is still able to run up and down cliffs, swim and bike around the island. After all, I don't want to get bored and there are NO cars on the island to tootle around in.
I suppose this means we can be sure of NOT running into Jeremy Clarkson.
Back in a couple of weeks.

A gut feeling

Having envisioned a fairly uneventful interlude between holidays in Crete and Sark, with nothing more stressful than a round of bill-paying, house cleaning and gardening, with a little catching up with friends to enliven my days, I was caught by surprise by a friend's suden illness. I have been commuting between her house and mine, trying to co-ordinate 2 households as well as communicating with her by text message to hear of her latest diagnosis/prognosis for our holiday plans, only days away.
After the hospital has run through three or four suggested diagnoses, we wait for the blood, X-ray and scan results. After the completion of these, she is finally permitted to eat again; it has been 29 hours since she had anything to eat or drink, although she was on a drip. They did eventually give her a nicotine patch to cope with her nicotine cravings.
Nearly all the information my friend was given by the hospital staff, or that given to concerned friends of hers who rang up, proved to be untrue. Fotunately, although her condition is probably chronic, it is treatable and with better diet management she will probably be relatively uninconvenienced by it.
However, it is a solemn wake-up call for those of us near twinned in age. It doesn't bode well for any future stays in hospital, as I suppose are almost inevitable as we age. The hospital system here seems to be more interested in running itself as an efficient institution, rather than patient care per se. Toward this end they ignore any gaps in treatment or good communication with patient or family as intruding on their organisation - - in other words, patients actually get in the way.
She should be out of there tomorrow and it can hardly come soon enough for all of us.

It's been ages, but here I am again

I'm back from the ruins of Crete - and very interesting they were, while possibly not meriting the 3 weeks I had allotted to them, but I did revisit some places I hadn't been for, oh about 36 years, to realise that I had changed over those years, whereas those few people who apparently never left, had remained in their own little time-warp world. Still, I am sure they are quite happy selling VERY poor quality artwork to tourists, who amazingly were handing over actual cash in exchange for excrable daubs. And I was not in the least jealous.
Some new places I visited were lovely and one or two worth revisiting. The Museum of Heraklion is full of all the finds from the Minoan sites, well, all except for those to be found in the museums of Agios Nikolaos, Siteia and Archanes ans I felt privileged to revisit it now, since it is on the point of closing for several years for a complete refit. I daresay when it reopens, there will be a lot less stuff on display, but more interpretative information than at present. It remains to be seen if this will be a real advantage.
I found the seals to be the real winner of the displays and regretted there was not more information about them. The degree of restoration of the frescoes and the ruins themselves, made me question the authenticity of some of the given interpretations. Once a thing has been presented authoritatively in a certain light, it is hard to be objective about it, in order to see it clearly and possibly reinterpret its meaning.
Anyway, here's hoping the exhaustive research helps me in the Aegean Bronze Age course which I hope to(- had better!) sign up to next year.
Exam results were not out until after I returned and all is well, I passed with a first and a 2.1 for Archaeology which is almost a miracle after the way I bollixed up the first 2 papers. I am really pleased about the first for History of Art, because I made a mess of that last year, so it was good to improve on that result, although I didn't feel I did all that well in the exams. In archaeolgy I dropped 10%, but felt relieved it wasn't worse. Of course it would be good to get Firsts in both subjects.....
Everyone I know of so far is through, although I haven't heard of too many firsts. My 'running mate' in Art, Finola, also got a 1st, although I was slightly ahead on points. We suspect that that won't be good enough for the prize however. She was overall ahead of me on aggregate points, whereas last year I was ahead, but she won the Art prize and I didn't get the Archaeology prize. An Italian girl won that. The previous year the Art prize was won by a Finnish girl, neither of whom are easily understood when speaking English, so their written work must be outstanding.
The feeling of relief, to get the exam results before I go away again, is wonderful and makes one realise the amount of background stress that waiting for them induces, especially as they were released 2 weeks later than last year. 3rd year students also got their results on the same day we did.
Blame Modularisation - they got their results 5 days before ours were out.