Slight return

Apologies for the break in service folks. It's been a hell of a couple of weeks: exam boards, marking, a funeral over in Ireland, individual casework for the 19 professors faced with redundancy, meetings with management and so on and so on. Last and (in management's eyes, least), I have an hour-long conference paper to write, for delivery in two days' time. In those two days: long, long department meetings and what's set to be a very confrontational meeting of the board of governors. 

Panic is of course setting in. I'm starting to feel like poor old Doctor Faustus, though at least he had some fun before payback time:

O gentlemen, hear me with patience, and tremble not at my speeches!

Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years,

O, would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book! God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me. O Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damn'd perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come; Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul! O lente, lente currite, noctis equi! The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd. The appropriate music, of course, is Madder Rose's Panic On. Not that I ever need an excuse to play unjustly-forgotten indie. See you on the other side of Friday…