The Plashing Vole

Bit of an odd week. Firstly, let's talk about the weather. I hate it. I evolved, as far as the genealogy suggests, a waterproof skin p...

Funny week this week - lots and lots of the more formal end-of-year administration to do, much of it important but also quite tedious, along...

High up in my Faculty's main building perches a nest of vicious, self-interested killers. Motivated solely by their own survival, they s...

This week seems to have passed in a blur of marking and marking-related administration, but the weekend saw one of the highlights of the yea...

I watched the BBC adaptation of King Lear  the other night. I don't know if you are familiar with the plot, but a man incapable of r...

The annals of junk science are long and storied: one only has to look at the work of Ben Goldacre , David Colquhoun and Edzard Ernst ...

Like most academics right now, I'm marking: dissertations, essays, presentations, performances and online collaborative work. Unlike man...

Apologies – if any are necessary – for absence for the last couple of weeks. It's been the end of semester, so I've been marking pre...

Things that have really ground my gears this week : Unpromising election results; The most outrageous bullying from management (apparently...

Good Friday! You catch me in a mood of unaccustomed indeterminacy. On the one hand, my wonderful students voted to give me an award yesterd...

Good afternoon from what is surely the only university that simultaneously threatens the entire teaching staff of c. 750 people with discipl...

I'm back in the office - have been for a couple of days, after popping over to see the mother and assorted siblings and their children o...