It has been quite cold at night off and on. Thus Miss Kit has been increasingly inclined to slip in under the duvet with us. She is a very pleasant object to encounter in the small hours of the morning, since she is as silky as a chenille bird and as warm as a […]
While we are of course very concerned for various friends in the north-west, I can report that as far as we are concerned, the weather did not repeat its heroic performance up here, which is just as well, since with the days of rain which have come in between, the countryside is saturated and […]
I see ten days have passed since the last news from the North. Apologies to old & valued clients, but last week was the one in which all the courses on which I lecture contrived to want me simultaneously with the exception of History of Science, and on top of all that, we also had […]
Today was quite sunny and pleasant, so, even though the ground resembled black Plasticine, we got out our trowels and sallied forth to plant bulbs. This, while not particularly pleasant in itself, is something you never regret. I’ve been putting patches of white narcissus, scillas, tulipa tarda and grape hyacinths in the wilder bits of […]
I was contemplating some lists of students, and noticing that something has changed. Alongside Craig, Samantha, Cameron, Katie etc. I find I have an Almay, an Aki, an Ooresh and a Misha. There are headscarves on show at the Viking lectures. All these are first years. In all my experience of teaching history, I have […]
Well, that’s what it felt like. According to the BBC, some ludicrous quantity of rain, such as three-quarters of what you’d expect in the whole of November, fell in twelve hours. It was all very worrying: we were tipped off to the existence of a problem by a colleague who lives roughly in our direction […]