Apotheosis of Minerva

Today is my birthday (sorry if I have banged on about it a bit much), and one of the presents that came to the door was a polypin -- and that's -- 36 pints of the first brew of Minerva that I helped come to fruition in a rather unenergetic way last week. My bit of the job was putting the hops in, and I swear you can still taste them. (That's the design of the pump-clip you see above.)

Anyway, it lasts a week to ten days, so we may end up needing a bit of jovial help. But a jolly nice beer it is too.

Actually, the welcome beer wasn't the only interruption of the day (earmarked for finishing tax, and for finishing book correx -- both just about done). There was also the SkyNews bit.

The truth is that if someone wants me to speak out for learning Latin, any time any place I will do it if I possibly can.. even if it is my birthday and I am toasty-ing up with the lap-top in front of the fire. So today I said 'yes' to Sky News, and had a few minutes on their lunchtime broadcast from my front room. An excellent camera woman showed up on her way back from Luton airport (we can only  guess whom she might have been on the look out for there) -- and we did a few minutes live at 1.30.

This is the item. It doesn't include me yet, I dont think. But it does have some attacks on Latin from Francis Gilbert , Errr -- pardon the irritation --  but last and only time I remember talking to him, he didn't seem to know that Oxford and Cambridge, not to mention loads of other uni's, offered ab initio Latin; he's a smart guy and I had hoped (too arrogantly) that I had made a little bit of impact -- but wrong. My fault, I must concede.

Anyway, I talked the talk in which I believe... Latin is intellectually empowering, it takes you to the centre of how language works (just as important as how number works), and it gives you direct access to the most influential books of all western literature, Virgil, Ovid etc..)

And then I went back to my footnotes, and -- appropriately enough -- another glass of Minerva.