Ark! Nearly a week of the damn thing collapsing on me if I so much as looked at it funny ( Read more... )

Another beautiful day, and the men digging up the road opposite my flat seem to have knocked off for tea, so it's blissfully quiet. They've been at this road for weeks, scraping off the surface pretty much back to the bedrock, and then concreting it. I'm hoping that they'll get the tarmac down and go away some time next week. The vapour trails ( Read more... )

At the British Museum on Friday, I managed to find a near-likeness to my stone axe and get a look at a small portion of the Staffordshire Hoard. I had rather been hoping for a nice old-fashioned range of glass cases with hundreds of different, carefully-labeled axes, but of course the whole gallery had been rearranged, and there were only one or ( Read more... )

Off to Paris this afternoon! I've worked myself up into the usual feeling of total panic, slightly worse this time, since I have everything ready to go, but don't actually leave until three.

Well, I shouldn't have said that about the tube strike not affecting my journey into work... Normally, it takes about forty minutes, on two buses, and this morning that was about it. Just time for a nice sit-down and a read of my nice book (A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman). There were loads of people on foot after we'd passed ( Read more... )

We had our last exam today. Two hours unseen (seven questions, most in smaller sections) on analytical methods, which wasn't too painful. Now all I have to do by Friday is produce two short essays. One is partially complete, needing just rearranging a bit and insertion of pictures and references, but the other is just a bare outline at the ( Read more... )

I'm supposed to be going to Brighton today, with the second-last installment of presents, but I'm not sure about the weather. The Met Office have issued a severe weather warning for the Brighton area, but the amounts of snow in different parts of the south-east seem to vary wildly, including an icing-sugar dusting here. Since an inch of snow ( Read more... )