The Plashing Vole

I'm drowning in work this week: mostly induction talks and trying to find out where the students who missed induction talks might be and...

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

It's been a strange couple of weeks. New office (still being built). Job interview (failed again, but at least they met me before decidi...

I've been seeing a lot of memos about 'resilience' recently, the latest buzzword in corporate personnel management. Firstly orga...

Happy Tuesday to you all. I'm officially on holiday so obviously I'm in the office, avoiding unpacking crates. It's been rather ...

Hello everyone. I'm back from my holiday and settling in to my new life in a 14-person call-centre style shared office in which we'l...

(I gather that there's a desperate shortage of online commentary about popular science fiction franchises: here's my contribution to...

When did I first realise that I was destined for a career in academia? Obviously as teacher of sorts I should add some qualifiers: 'care...

Today is my birthday and the cosmos has bought me The Apocalypse, at least politically. I've been chairing panels at the British Compara...