Acquainted things have happened

Well, I’ve hauled the bedraggled blog from Blogger to WordPress. Why, exactly, is not quite clear to me; one of those fretful decisions arrived at through an accumulation of tiny reasons. Maybe just time to shake out the cruft.

Reviewing old entries I was delighted to recall dinner with Bill Woodcock last year, when I was in Berkeley for the Society of Ethnobiology conference. Turns out Brent Berlin was a friend of his family when he was a young ‘un. I don’t think we knew any anthropologists at all – biologists, yes, but not social scientists.

This will not be true for Eleanor or Raymond or Tanglewest, who will grow up knowing ecologists and anthropologists, lamas and priests, all sorts of people. There at least I’m doing the job right.

Today was such a fine day that I would be remiss not to make note of it. The bulbs are surging, the birds are singing, it was shirtsleeve warm for the first time in weeks, and it was even still daylight as we cycled home. Coming out of the Encountering Buddhism lecture I saw my first bee of the year and shouted ‘hello!’. I was so happy to see it. It promptly landed on a student’s face – and much to their credit they did not flinch.