Name-dropping at Eastercon [S. Worthen

I've eaten two wonderful meals in the past few days at some of Glasgow's best restaurants, but instead of a restaurant write-up, I give you a few Glasgow and Eastercon encounters.

Over breakfast on Friday, before the con had even begun, I ran into paul_skevington and S. at breakfast. They're two of my four Worldcon buddies, and SO good to see them again.
pittenweem - had I known that St. Mungo = St. Kentigern, I wouldn't have asked you silly questions like where to go for Kentigernish tourism. As the patron saint of Glasgow, to whom the cathedral and a museum are dedicated, he's hardly obscure here. After a wander around the lovely, sun-dappled Necropolis, high over Glasgow, I paid pilgrimage to Kentigern's tomb. The choir above resounded through the stones above in the contemplative dark of the lower church.
guyelfkin and I have managed not to see each other since Worldcon, which is silly since we're both in London. We caught up on life news, and I updated him on darkling_dreams and revengel, among others.
makyo was not much more than an LJ username of someone who gave useful PhD-related advice to me for the past few years; until last night, when I ran into someone I knew from the SF circles at York years ago - and it turns out that that's who makyo is!
fjm's been telling me about a third person perfect for our eventual masquerade entry for the past six months. Three hours after he and I started chatting (along with paul_skevington, S., and D.), we realized who each other were. Also, some of you will be interested in knowing that he and D. are pirates.
SF cons are not all frivolity, you know. Alice Jenkins, lecturer in English at Glasgow University, gave an excellent and accessible lecture on the early Victorian interplay between science and literature and its development. It drew together things I knew, things colleagues of mine are working on, and a number of prints which I'd examined in detail at the London Print Fair a few weeks ago. Also, I've met another professional medievalist. See? It's professionally useful to be here.

I first encountered Kentigern when "my friend the medievalist", working her way through all items in vernacular languages in monastic library manuscripts, asked my linguist opinion on "munghu", being the Pictish term of affection. It's so close to the Old Welsh for "my dear one" as to be disconcerting; it even uses nasal mutation after the first person possessive pronoun, which Welsh does but various forms of Gaelic and also Cornish and Breton don't.

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Thank you! Nothing I ran into on Friday explained the relationship between the words Kentigern and Mungo. It seemed as inexplicable to me as the early 20th century re-reading of the ideograms previously pronounced "Izdubar" into "Gilgamesh".

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Name-dropping at Eastercon

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