Tues 12 Aug: Friday: Cory Archives; Saturday: in Cape Town 10.05am, in Kirstenbosch 11am, in Kalk Bay from 1 to 6pm, back in CT till…; Sunday: 10.35am flight to PE, then drive to G’town.

Monday, it was the non-jet Cory equivalent, for I am still scoping collections, looking for things to work in detail or just in passing on. Monday’s scoping at Cory is a whistle-stop tour: Tracking ‘missing’ Mary Moffat letters, now found; working on the 1849, 1850 and 1851 diary of farmer Stritch, wherein his puzzle is, was there a war or just frontier life as usual; then 49 diaries of a Pringle variety arrive on my desk; then I change to madly reading and transcribing the 8 immensely long Mary Moffat letters that have just turned up; then back to the Pringle diaries; but oh with my head full of Lovedale riots set of thoughts still going on and clamouring for my attention. And good grief, what to do with the massive bulk of all these Pringle diaries?

On Tuesday morning writing this, I’m a bit bemused, a bit exhausted, a bit fed up with myself, and am staggering through today by working in detail on Mary Moffat’s teensy-tiny writing with hundreds of lines on crowded immense pages – just one (huge) sheet of paper per letter to minimise postage costs. This is entirely engrossing, mixing her inventive excuses for not writing sooner, declarations of thanks and gratitude, proclamations of a thanks be to God kind, and some fascinating detail of the life of the missionary station at Kuruman and these people at points seriously falling out with each other.

No, it has not been a case of archive fever but of having scrambled eggs for brains, because faced with the endlessness of the past and the ‘for all practical purposes’ endlessness of these remaining traces of it. Tomorrow, however, there will be method. Watch this space.

Last updated: 12 August 2014