Choo-Choose Life

Hi everybody. How was your bank holiday weekend, if you're in a country that had one? I spent Saturday and Sunday marking essays. Saturday was fine – a big pile of good work. Sunday was harder: some plagiarism and a lower standard in general. I managed to get 50 done, so I had Monday off to go walking in Consall Woods: a nature reserve, good hills and valleys, a canal and a steam train line. I even got sunburned (it's that pale Irish bog-trotting skin: I evolved to be waterproof, carrying the turf home to cook the family potato, not for global warming – ironically caused by my ancestors draining bogs and burning the peat).

I took a lot of pictures but won't have time to edit them until I come back. But here are a couple.

Sadly this isn't how I'm getting to Brighton

Bluebells, Red Campion and all sorts of other wild flowers were out in force, but I discovered a field of bluebells off the track

So here I am. 50 more essays to do and I'm away at the UCU annual congress from 7 a.m. tomorrow. On the plus side, it's in Brighton. On the minus, I'll be marking rather than taking advantage of Brighton's joys. And at £10 per day for internet access at the hotel, I don't think I'll be blogging much either. Perhaps it'll be a good opportunity to recover my sanity.  Although perhaps not: last year Congress voted to abolish capitalism and to object to street lighting reductions somewhere down south. Now I'm all in favour of abolishing capitalism, but I cannot for the life of me work out how voting for it at a small trades union's meeting is actually going to do anything. Nor do I think a national education union's congress is the right forum for objecting to street lighting changes. Write to your local council!

Still, I can add to my extensive collection of leftwing sectarian groups' newspapers. It's not so much one paper for each groupuscule, it's one for each member. Which makes at least 40 newspapers. Why they aren't all blogging instead, I don't know. It's warm and dry in here.