حِبْر
root: ح-ب-ر / noun / definition: ink
Never have I veered so close to spontaneity before.
It was a Thursday morning and I had just applied for a linguistics summer school—without realising that it was due to start just four days later in Sardinia’s capital, and that the deadline had passed weeks before.
Somehow, the admissions team accepted my application the following day. So, forty-something hours after I had booked my flight, I was atop Bastione di Saint Remy overlooking Cagliari, the mountains, and the sea.
It was one week of intensive lectures and nine-hour days at the university, learning about the languages and linguistics of the Mediterranean—including exploring evidence for the (non-)configurationality of Latin and analysing what is considered the first Lingua Franca text of the region which harbours traces of Arabic.
A lot of new stuff for me.
Having arrived back in London two days ago, I haven’t quite processed my spontaneous week away yet. Maybe it was the 1% Sardinian DNA in my genome—according to Ancestry—that drew me there. Or maybe it was a by-product of a quarter-life crisis… which sounds more realistic.
But who can regret a trip in which you wrote so much that your pen ran out of ink, and sea salt softened your skin, and the sun darkened the beauty spots on your face?
I also stumbled upon an amazing Kyrgyz restaurant when I was there. Not exactly the cuisine I expected to indulge in during my stay, but delicious nonetheless.
I guess languages really do open up new worlds for you.
And I feel relieved (and that really is the best word to describe it) that I was more PhD-productive last week than on my previous trip. I mean, I didn’t write up that methodology chapter, but I did get some reading and notes done.
But I really do need to re-open those tabs and get to drafting that chapter now…
.في أمان الله
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