Christmas Joy!

Oh joy! The post-woman has just delivered two eagerly awaited volumes from the Book Depository which I am just about to unwrap as you read this: No1, in a jiffy bag (no sniggering now, you North Americans!) is Thought and Language, a revised and enlarged edition of Lev Vygotsky's seminal work that I have decided is utterly necessary to my doctoral studies and , along with Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Time and Consciousness will be the touchstones of my thesis. The second (pause to fetch scissors for the altogether more serious cardboard wrapping and shrink-wrap) is a beautiful burgundy Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament with full apparatus criticus! I am running my hands over it appreciatively and feel the urge to kiss it.

Not that I am actually short of Greek New Testaments, you understand, as you might expect for someone in my field. The count up to present include my workhorse NA27 (complete with apparatus criticus, blue, underlined and well-thumbed) that I've had since my undergrad days with Keith Elliott, a UBS 3rd edition with app.crit. and dictionary, a UBS 4th edition Reader's New Testament with gloss, both burgundy too, a small, black Englishman's New Testament (1877, interlinear literal, plus KJV translation around the margins, the font almost too small for my poor old eyes to read), a British and Foreign Bible Society 1931 NT, a 1907 diglot Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine and and interlinear with parallel KJV and NIV texts. So I guess you could say that I collect them,but the thrill of opening up a brand new, pristine text is unsurpassable. It's my Christmas present to myself.