The Plashing Vole

This has been a whirlwind week of literal and intellectual travel, hence my relative absence. A week ago almost to the hour – a treat partly...

I've read a couple of detective novels recently, part of my effort to familiarise myself with popular 1930s-40s culture as well as the L...

And how many sources confirmed your story? Last week I read this piece in the New Statesman , by professional journalist Andrew Gimso...

The end of the academic year is always bittersweet. There's always the violence-inducing and inaccurate comments from friends and family...

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...