The German Guests went off today, having provided a great deal of interest, tactful general back-up, and general dog walking over the last ten days. We will miss them. In the course of yesterday, we let slip that it was Dr Biswell’s birthday today — he is named for St Andrew whose day it is […]
The bells were ringing out, we gather, far to the south, where a friend of ours was elected Abbot of D——. Everybody, but everybody, was there, so we are told by the Martyrologist, who was one of them — if some ill-wisher had dropped a bomb on the Abbey, every posh papist in England […]
It is a soggy sort of day with a faint smell of snow on the wind: I took Miss BF out for her walk as the light started to go, around 4, and, since she wished to come, Miss Kit. By the time we had squelched along the side of a field and I was […]
The Professor and I were heading off into work this morning; deadline, my first lecture of the day, but with the certain calm that is induced by the knowledge that there is half an hour in hand. We were about to take the roundabout leading onto the A90, which is the big, busy road which […]
Miss Best Friend is adjusting rather slowly to being Miss Dog: ‘I was always taught’, she says, ‘not to put myself forward’. It is difficult for her to have first go at the griblets, and so on, she spends ages staring at her tea in case somebody else ought to be getting her nose […]
Dr Biswell has been awarded the Portico Prize, which is awarded biennially for a book about Manchester or the north-west of England more generally — for the Burgess book, of course. What is particularly nice about this is that it is the only prize Burgess himself ever won, so it has a certain fearful symmetry. […]
Dear everyone, we have lost Miss Dog. First of all, we lost her in the literal sense. She disappeared at about midday on Monday, and by four o’clock we realised that she was not dozing on one of her beds, or illicitly, on Dr Biswell’s or the sitting room sofa, but was nowhere to be […]
The week that just passed was the half way point of the term, which is sort of good news, but it always seems in fact to be rather a low point. So much energy has been expended already; essays and other written work are now pouring in, exam papers are due this week, and the […]