AcuTect - the difference is acute.

In which St Cuthbert (above) is gratuitously distracting.

Christ knows who AcuTect are, but there's a Post-It (PostIt? Post-it? I can't stand things like this) stuck on the wall in front of my desk bearing their inestimable logo and slogan. It also carries the following note in my girlfriend's dramatic scrawl:

'Alexandrian - Allegorical

Antiochene - Literal'.

Then it says 'Diatide, Inc. Nycomed. Amersham', but I don't think that's relevant.

I'm so desperately lost with the essay I'm supposed to be writing (into the last half a dozen of my academic career, happily) that I've spent a good twenty minutes staring at this note trying to work out what aspects of whatever schools, traditions or so on can be termed 'Alexandrian' or 'Antiochene', and how they qualify for description as allegorical or literal. I don't want to Google it, because I'll end up link-surfing on Wikipedia for another half an hour and find myself eventually reading about cephalophores or the LHC or something else which doesn't really relate to my neglected academic concerns.

For fuck's sake. I had to check how to spell cephalophores for that last sentence, so I Googled my stab at a spelling (right, as it happens) and I've just ended up reading the entire Wikipedia article on them after all. They were the subject of a group of bonus questions on University Challenge a few weeks ago, and I got all three answers - surely I don't need to know anything more about Saint Cuthbert? He wasn't a real one anyway, he was carrying St Oswald's head rather than his own. Pervert. AND I didn't even find out why the Antiochene something or other is literal.

This is what happens when you sit down to write a blog without deciding on a subject, isn't it?

I very much doubt anyone's reading this, but if you are then I'm assiduously digging around for any publication which wants to give me the opportunity to scribble them an occasional or regular article, byline or column. (Did you notice my use of the A, B, C pattern there? It's a reference to me being literate, although it sort of backfired because I was forced into my choice of words by preordaining their first letters and they're now all a bit redundant). Anyway, if you should happen to know of someone who fancies having an arrogant country boy spewing modernophobic twaddle over their pages, do drop me a comment.

Cheers.