The Plashing Vole

OK, it's not as long as its author envisaged , but I am going away – first to a conference and then for a holiday on the ould sod. The c...

I know I'm getting old, bitter and tired when I try to remember what I've done in the increasing periods between blog posts. Sometim...

Actually, Stuckeyville wasn't so bad. It had a bowling alley and warm quirky people with good teeth who helped you re-evaluate your pr...

After the rock'n'roll excesses of seeing The Nightingales live (two beers! out until 11!), I was in the mood for more disorienting, ...

Some of you may wish to skip today's entry: those of you who read me in search of thrills and spills, because I'm just going to dron...

After all the lectures, seminars, marking and other activities of this week, I'm off for a day's intellectual stimulation: a confere...

I get asked why I went into academia quite frequently. Sometimes by colleagues. Half of them say it in an all-in-it-together tone of voice, ...

For the purposes of search engine optimisation, I'd like to say that the first plenary lecture of the 'Wales and Revolution' con...

I went to Southampton this weekend, to enlighten people about the neo-Nazi themes in Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley . Here...

Well, that's over. I managed to get through about 3 of my points and six of my pages in the allotted half hour - it's really hard tr...

I promised photos of Bridgnorth, where the Map Twats descended on Christine and James, ate their Stinking Bishop (a phrase their ecclesiasti...

Things are looking up - interesting colleagues, excellent cheeses for lunch. Simultaneously battling the dark forces of IT services, who...

You're in for a real treat today. I'm live-blogging from Aston University's lakeside conference centre, attending a conference o...

That was fun. At a UN conference on racism, the racist president of Iran made a speech calling Israel racist - which seems fine to me, give...

There are few bright spots in my mundane existence, so it's sod's law that two of them are on the same day - my Polish fencing trip ...