Looking back (I'm not doing one of those lists that assume that life is more or less NORMAL, not that they ever particularly match the lifestyle of a Crabby Ol' Bat Hedjog.
Best thing I got during the year: 2 A-Z + 1 Pfizer vaxxes.
Best things I bought during the year: new computer, it really does show up how massively, massively sluggish the old ( Read more... )

Jeremy Bentham has moved!!!
My impression is definitely that they are making the Auto-Icon more of A Feature as opposed to something in a wooden box that you come across unexpectedly at the top of the stairs on your way to the library, in the days when one might be popping in and out of UCL Library as one wended one's merry way about Bloomsbury. ( Read more... )

I.e. today I received my second solicitation to review a new Big Fat Book on the history of STIs for A Learned Journal.
Which made me think about that thing that was going about on Twitter about And What Did You Do in the Great War, Daddy? in the last decade that has barely a month left to run?
Though on further reflection I think I might have ( Read more... )

There is a weekly column in the Guardian in which readers respond to financially-related queries. This week it was answers to a question about putting a spare room on AirBnB.
To which there was a very mixed bag of responses in the light of personal experiences and one that was whoa, that is still a thing?
In the splendid tradition of the old-time ( Read more... )

Well, that was interesting.

I definitely got into a typical
( Read more... )

That meme that seems to be all over the place in various slightly variant versions, and omitting those questions to which I really have no response except no, duh, whut, or irrelevant, or else something very long and All More Complicated:
( Looking backwards )

There was a time when, for various reasons, I stopped keeping up with popular music (and I've never really got back into it).

However, this didn't, of course, mean that I never heard it: what it meant was that I tended to hear things as background music in shops, pubs, restaurants and the gym, by the time they were probably no longer new and fresh ( Read more... )

I'm glad that Jo Shapcott came through her cancer, and that she found it a valuable experience and got poetry out of it, but I am still irked at this narrative trope that terrible experiences - if they don't actually make you stronger if they don't kill you - make people in some way better persons or are some kind of transformative experience.

(I ( Read more... )

My 2010 wasn't as bad as some peoples'. It was the year that The Biography went into press!!! and I got commissioned to do a second edition of The Textbook!!! and generally began to feel as if I was getting my academic groove back a bit, which isn't just about major publication projects but about going to conferences and enjoying them, writing new ( Read more... )

Well, that was a peculiar year.

For some reason it feels like it was a slack water/sitting spinning my wheels year, even though I

• Published The Monograph
• Did extensive revision and cutting of The Biography
• Was awarded a short-term Research Fellowship
• And therefore spent a month doing intensive research in the Wells archive

Maybe what gave this ( Read more... )