Friday!

What a weird Friday. My post about the True Blue Cookery Book made The Guardian, to the amusement of my colleagues. The university got restructured to general disbelief and horror (sorry: the new structure will be put to Academic Board, just like Kim Jong-un's election was a close-run thing). I've had a steady stream of panicking dissertation students coming in for last-minute advice. And now the National Library of Wales is on fire. I hope my friends working there and all my lovely books, manuscripts and archives are OK.

In general, I'm feeling like this:



whereas I'd like to be feeling like this (as would the dissertation kids):



Or indeed this:



On the plus side, lots of good books have come today. I've dumped Amazon for new books because they don't pay their taxes, which feels excellent. I've received Kevin Barry's Dark Lies The Island, short stories by the author of the excellent City of Bohane, Tristan Hughes's Revenant to complete the set; Tim Armstrong's Scots Gaelic SF novel Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach (On A Glittering Black Sea), Nick Barclay's literary/crime classic Hooky Gear, Melvin Burgess's new drugs/death YA novel The Hit  and the latest in Simon Morden's Petrovich series, The Curve of the Earth, which annoyingly doesn't have the same lovely uniform design as the previous three. Damn you, marketers!