A very merry Christmas for 2025 to all my readers wherever you may be!

If you are reading this on Christmas day, it is perhaps likely that you on your own today, old perhaps, or maybe sick, or sad, or all of those things. Indeed I myself had the misfortune to fall ill a week ago, which has left me glad to sit at home quietly, but still missing the company. So I do sympathise!

Christmas can be hard to bear for those in this sort of position every day, bringing back memories of happier days when there were more people around. I have a feeling that the internet is full of people who perhaps are in this position, and who could not otherwise contribute to society. It is probably a great blessing to the lonely and isolated. I think, if we could see most of the people who post on social media, we might be surprised at the lives that some of them lead. Let’s be grateful that we have this form of company. Christmas day is just one day. In the meantime, there are memories.

In the past, probably ten or twenty years ago now, I used to fly out to Luxor on Egypt for a week before Christmas. It was a quirk of pricing that made this possible. I discovered that, if you went in Christmas week, prices doubled; but if you went the week before, it was possible to get a week in a five-star hotel very cheaply. In those days there were plenty of charter flights out there – all vanished today – so it was no problem. It meant a week of sunshine in the depths of winter, and it did wonders for your mood! I can still remember staying in the Jolie Ville Hotel there, in chalets in the gardens, and gazing out over the mirror-like surface of the Nile in the mornings. At breakfast we would sit on the terrace and see the pink mass of the Theban hills in the distance. The unwary would mistake them for clouds!

Of course there were downsides. The gardens were full of biting insects, which injected mud and worse into you. Huge lumps! Also the Egyptians were negligent about hygiene, which meant that upset stomachs were nearly certain. Indeed I stopped going out there for precisely that reason, getting tired of being avoidably sick at Christmas.

One year there was a three day cruise, visiting Dendera, then going up to Esna and Kom Ombo. I knew that the dishes on these boats are often washed in Nile water – heavily polluted. I went on the first day, as a day trip. I ate nothing. The food looked wonderful, but I deliberately did not eat a thing. And I was fine. But when the boat got back from the rest of the cruise, 3 days later, I learned that everyone who had done the full trip had been sick on day 2. That “wonderful” food was all contaminated.

It could also be a bit of a shock coming home. Travelling on Christmas Eve is risky. Lots of stuff just shuts down. Also I remember one year getting back to my car – late in the evening, of course -, and finding it covered in ice. I had to chip the ice off the windscreen before I could drive home. Another year I arrived back, on Christmas morning, at 1am, to find my central heating was dead! But I had a service contract. Without much hope, I telephoned at 9am – and to my amazement someone came out and fixed it by 11am. I still have that contract.

I have thought about going out to Egypt again. The hot sun in the depths of winter really makes the winter seem short. Sadly the Jolie Ville is now far gone in decay, if the reviews on TripAdvisor are a guide. My girlfriend doesn’t want food poisoning. My own difficulties make a 5 hour flight almost impractical anyway. But maybe there is somewhere closer at hand, where the sun shines, and the light will be good for us both.

The dark days in winter are rough on us all. When I was in Iceland, a decade ago, I was told that all the Icelanders get rather depressed. The arrival of budget airlines were an incredible boon. During the winter, most of the population gets cheap flights to Spain!

But anyway, back to Patristics!

A week ago, I was looking again at the untranslated letters of St Jerome; only a handful of pretty short letters. I’ve translated a couple, which I will post. Interestingly one of them has a definite textual problem, signalled in the edition of Hilberg. I suspect Dr. H. made heavy weather of a copyist error tho. The Patrologia Latina reprints the old edition of Vallarsi, and the comments in this are very sensible.

The Hilberg edition has rather odd spelling throughout. What he seems to have done is reproduce what he finds in the medieval manuscripts, centuries later. These are the spellings of medieval Latin, in the various regional forms. They are not what Jerome would have written, of that we may be sure. Reviewers have commented on this oddity. I wonder if there is a standard approach that should be taken in these cases?

He also removes “v” and “j”, which serves no purpose other than to obstruct the casual reader. Ancient Latin may not have been written like that, but neither was medieval English, and we would not think it “more authentic” to create a barrier to the modern reader. But this I have commented on before.

Vallarsi only printed 150 letters. The last few letters in Hilberg, mostly to Riparius, a fellow cleric – from letter 151 on – were only discovered in the 1920s by De Bruyne. It seems that there are also quite a few spurious letters, about which I know nothing. I have read that when Erasmus edited the letters of Jerome, he divided them into genuine and spurious and printed both in separate volumes. I wonder what is in the “spurious” volume? Or what the origins of those texts might be?

I cannot say that I like the Jerome letters much. They are full of denunciations of “heretics”, in tones unpleasantly like those of modern culture warriors. But I will see what I can do with them.

I’ve also been tidying up after the Botolph project. I have a physical book here which I have partially scanned in, and will not need further. I might donate it to a university library that should have it but does not. I’ll drop them an email first, once they return from the interminable holiday at this time of year. It’s important to declutter.

I’m still awaiting one lose end. There is a manuscript in York Cathedral Library that I would like to collate. Unfortunately obtaining a photo of the single page is very slow.

That’s it for now folks. Again, Merry Christmas everyone!