Drank too much tea yesterday and...

This fussed with my sleeping, ending with me not rising until 0500. So am only now, at half past seven, after the Night Office and then Prime, moved on to other morning chores. I should hide the tea pot from myself somehow. 

It is the feast of Saint Raymond de Peñafort, a Spanish cleric and canonist of the 13th century who became a Dominican (CE, Introibo, Wiki). 

Cardinal Schuster, in his Liber sacramentorum:

The feast of this eminent canonist, who died January 6, 1275, chaplain and penitentiary to Gregory IX, dates only from the time of Clement X. The Mass is that of the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop; but the Collect, composed by Pope Clement VIII, is proper to the feast. It alludes both to the office which the saint held in the Pontifical Curia, and to his marvellous voyage when, as some writers tell us, he went from the Balearic Islands to Barcelona, using his cloak, which he spread upon the waves of the sea, in place of a ship. The Introit is the same as that of the feast of St Sabbas on December 5. The Collect does not follow the rules of the cursus, but it must be admitted that the author, intent, like the generality of modern composers, on introducing the historical facts of his hero's life, has succeeded in so doing with a certain degree of grace and ability. "O God, who didst choose blessed Raymund to be eminent as a minister of the sacrament of penance, and didst marvellously guide him through the waters of the sea, grant that through his intercession we may have strength to produce worthy fruits of penance and to reach the haven of eternal salvation."




Post Tertiam. I'm listening to Verdi's Nabucco from the Hofoper in Vienna. Am actually about to begin reading a couple of essays, one by Roger Wright on 'Late Latin' and the other by Kristin Hagemann  amounting to a look at the same subject, so poor Verdi (and Placido Domingo) will be but voices in the background before much longer. 

Post Vesperas. Have begun the third episode (there are eight; the Dr Watson actor died, requiescat in pace, after the first and only season, which might explain this) of the 2013 Russian television serial Sherlock Holmes. A very... creative version of Conan Doyle: Holmes's nervous energy is well done, and he's quite dirty, having the higher things on his mind; Dr Watson is timorous and a Catholic from Sussex? don't recall (nor have I yet seen any indication why Holmes brought his religion up, unless he was simply showing off his deductive skill). Mrs Hudson is fairly loopy and indeed all the female characters are typically sentimental Russian types from the melodrama, even Irene Adler. It is much nicer than the Benedict Cabbagepatch series. 

I find myself obliged to admit that I haven't read the Conan Doyle stories for fifty year and so am not certain which plot elements in the television version are from the texts and which are from the imaginations of the television writers.  

An odd sort of coincidence. There is a tavern in this episode called the 'Bimbom Bramsel'; no idea whence that name derives but there is a Fleming, a former lawyer it seems who now does 'regenerative farming'-- he uses the name @bimbombram on Twitter. Is the English rhyming slang, perhaps, or related somehow to similar words in Vlaams?  


LDVM



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