CURTAINS!

My mother (who's 87) asked us to help her with new curtains in the kitchen and bedroom - this means new curtain tracks/poles as well.

We did it! Replacing the plastic curtain track in the kitchen with a nice white wooden pole & new curtains (even though they had to be shortened) took about an hour. Replacing the curtain track in the bedroom (bay window) took 5 hours and nearly killed us! Still, it all got done.

Happy Easter.

Just another Tuesday ...

Another fun day. Marking, emailing, phoning, talking ...

Negotiating with the publishers to 'pay' our student participants (in kind, of course) and realising that the bad audio on our interview videos could (maybe) be fixed by using the quite good digital audio from the separate voice recordings - we'll see.

Term's Over!

Spring term seems to have been really hard work this year - there's a number of reasons for thiswhich include some issues at work: highlighted in a recent Union Newsletter which, at least, proves that we are not alone!

So now I have to start marking undergraduate dissertations - sometimes a joy, sometimes less so. Looking forward to Lyon in a couple of weeks...

Life isn't always fun ...

In the last few weeks I've lost a dear friend, sold a guitar and realised that I'm being bullied at work.
Ain't life grand?

Food

A few weeks ago my favourite restaurant rang to say they'd got me a hare. I butchered it and we had the hind legs that weekend, Tonight we had:
Scallops with black pudding and pea purée (Truly fabulous),
Hare & Venison casserole with celeriac & potato mash,
cheese
orange & lemon curd pudding.

Suitable booze accompanied this!

More snow ...

I've really had enough of it!

The Proofs are Here!

Some of you will know that I've written a research methods book with my colleague, Liz Ross. well, the proofs arrived yesterday!
Now all we have to do is read and correct them! What fun!
There are some interesting things about this process though. We hadn't actually seen the layout before (the publishers kept it sort-of secret) and we didn't know what size the pages were (285 x 215 mm), and we didn't really know how big the book was (485 pages), so it's been a voyage of discovery (Also discovering the bits that got left out!).
Well, that's what I'm doing for the next few days...

Tony Buckland

It was Tony's funeral today at Cheltenham. About 60 people, maybe 12 from the folk club. A Quaker-style event, so no service but some individual eulogies. Some songs too, 'The Ballad of George Fox' (led by Gordon, but lots joining in) then 'Poor Old Horse' sung by Mick Ryan on CD, 'The Joy of Living' by MacColl on CD. Then the CD player refused to recognise the disk with 'The Good Old Way' on it, so we (the Folk Club) sang it. It's hard to find joy in a funeral, but this came close.

Tony, my friend: requiescat in pace.

Here's another fine mess ...

Education, education, education!

Yeah, right: The future for UK universities?

A sh*tty day ...,

So, I'm at my mother-in-law's for a duty visit and become aware that the sewer manhole on the grass verge (part of the public highway) is leaking gallons of sewage onto her land (actually, into the tunnel that runs under the house).

She phones Severn Trent who, basically, deny that A) there's a manhole there and B) if there is that there could be a problem because C) the local pumping station is fine ... [we point out that it is impossible for 1 house to produce this volume of sewage and that (at 84) mother-in-law has little use for sanitary products, but they don't listen].

Eventually, I play the 'doctor card' and say that it's a health hazard: whereupon they decide they'll deal with it. The guy who arrives isn't surprised that there's a problem since the local pumping station isn't working properly...

Then the journey home (usually 90 minutes) takes 4 hours ...