Shiver my timbers

The hot summer of 2003 was kind to capricornes (q.v.), which laid lots of eggs. Some of them in our attic. The larvae have been chomping at our beams and the wood treatment man came this morning to inspect the damage. Nothing too serious, thankfully, but we're going to get him to come in to cut back the flaky surface, insert injection nozzles, and then pump high-pressure poison in there to knock them out.

Every type of beam (poutre) has a different name in French, most of which I have immediately forgotten. The whole construction is the ossature, literally a skeleton. The main vertical beam is a poinçon, which confusingly is also the name for the metal tool which he used to poke at the holes in the wood.

We also went to look in our dépendance, where a little pile of sawdust regularly appears on the floor. His diagnosis was that this was caused not by insects but by loirs nesting in the roof. Dormice. Apparently they don't cause damage.

Dear diary

It's been a busy few days.

Saturday 10
Played as lute and theorbo soloist for La Saltarelle in their historic dance show at the Théâtre de Castres.

Sunday 11
Flew to England, rehearsed with Chuckerbutty Ocarina Quartet.

Monday 12
Filming with Granada at Sutton House in Hackney for University Challenge: The Professionals as part of the Lute Society team.

Tuesday 13
Fetched newly acquired oboe from restorers and visited the museum of archaeology and anthropology, the human-era sister museum of the Sedgwick earth sciences museum.

Wednesday 14
Flew back to France.

Thursday 15
Gaillac Primeur drinks hosted by mayor of Castres.

Friday 16
Reception for Accueil des Villes Françaises to welcome new arrivals to Castres (the same event that we ourselves were welcomed at two years ago).

Saturday 17
Dinner at chateâu

Sunday 18
Might go to piano recital at théâtre but might just stay at home instead...

An ancient university

In Cambridge earlier this week, I enjoyed a visit to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, which I never actually went to while I was studying there. It's like a smaller version of the Natural History Museum but with the distinct advantage that I was the only visitor.

At the heart of the collection are 1.5 million fossils, mostly collected in the late Victorian period and still bearing Victorian labels. Chalk, clay and cliffs yielded huge numbers of fossils of every sort of life form: sea urchins, fish, sponges, molluscs, ferns. And bigger stuff: the hippopotamus skull shown here was excavated in the chalk pits at Barrington in Cambridge. This was the evidence that dramatically changed nineteenth-century minds about the origins and development of life and the earth itself, and which showed that climate change is nothing new.

There's also a very fine minerals gallery, with lucid and non-patronising labelling explaining the crystallography of the specimens.

Commercialisation has started to reach this part of the University in the form of a gift shop. But it hasn't got very far. They don't publish a guide book to the collection. Instead, for the grand total of £7.50, I bought some very pretty samples of:
Quartz
Amethyst
Iron Pyrites
Fossilised Nautiloid
Peacock Ore
Agate slice
Haematite
Obsidian
Fluorite

Fortunately Easyjet has a more generous luggage allowance than Ryanair.