The Plashing Vole

It has been an…interesting week. I've been marking essays (some astonishingly brilliant, others 'requiring improvement'), teachi...

The week has had two or three main themes: toothache, work and culture. The toothache is self-explanatory. My wonderful dentist, who had an ...

A brief one today: it's been a hard few days and it's getting busier. Since I last blogged I finished reading a PhD dissertation, wh...

Today's duties: 1. Write next week's lecture on The Duchess of Malfi , along with a seminar task and a forum discussion theme. 2. ...

I have no opinions this week. Instead I have a pile of marking, a new nephew in New Zealand, lots of Module Specification Templates to wri...

It's been an interesting week, for me at least. Varied, anyway. The election campaign rumbles away in the background and I'm getting...

As befits the start of a new academic year, the past couple of weeks have been full of highs and lows. Management have taken decisions so br...

Life in the new Faculty is less than halcyon. It feels more like this. And yet somehow you just know that management thinks everything...

Afternoon everybody! How are you all? We're in the funny period of the year between holidays and the academic year properly starting. Ou...

Another sticky, but only partly frustrating day. Lots and lots of marking, plus toweringly angry emails from students who tell me that their...

Morning all. I feel like a broken man. Went for a swim before work. Got in to meet a student to talk about his work. He didn't turn up. ...

As you can tell from the title of this post, I saw The Tempest  this weekend, at the Globe Theatre in London. The seating was hard and open...

Hi everybody. It's late afternoon and I'm only just posting something here. I must have an outrage gland deficiency or something. ...

Hi everybody. Apologies for the relative radio silence today. It's been busy. The first thing I had to do today was finish shortening ...

Well, actually it is. But the very best thing about being (or appearing to be) an academic is that sometimes you get paid for having the ver...

Afternoon everybody! I haven't just got up, I've been marking essays all day, having sent off my Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Ge...

Good afternoon, pop-pickers. Apologies for the sporadic and slightly grumpy nature of my blogging at the moment - the Dreaded Manflu continu...

Crawled into work late today, thanks to staying in the office until 8.45 last night. Though I should admit that 45 minutes of that was usefu...

Morning everybody (well, it's morning here and how I wish it wasn't). You may have noticed that my blogging has declined from last y...

Lots of goodies to pronounce on today - my 'personal' letter from the Prime Minister, Mitt Romney's attack on 47% of the America...