I'm currently in Antwerp - the first time I've set foot on the continent since 2019, and that was only to change planes. I'm in a hotel near city's impressive basilica of a railway station, with an anchovy-laden pizza decocting quietly in my stomach. It's only a brief visit, though, to give a lecture; tomorrow, back to Birmingham and thence Bristol ( Read more... )

I gave a lecture in Tokyo this morning - or this afternoon, Japan time, since it was of course via Zoom and I still in Bristol. It was nice to see some familiar faces from the Japan children's literature side, and the lecture went well, but... "I awoke in California, many miles from Spancil Hill ( Read more... )

I had a little adventure from Wednesday to Thursday, travelling into the debatable Welsh marches, and the even more debatable borderlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire, to check out the setting of the 2017 anime, Mary and the Witch's Flower. The film was based on Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) - which I saw in Kichijouji shortly ( Read more... )

Well, I've finally made landfall. Yesterday my final class was taught, and (since I will be on research leave in the autumn semester) I will not have to teach another until 2022. Of course, there's a lot of marking between where I am now (still sloshing about on the foreshore with saltwater in my sea boots) and the chalky uplands where I can ( Read more... )

Well, I moved house almost two week ago. I'm still living in a world of boxes, of course, partly because unpacking them is a lot of work, partly because I'm still in two minds about where to put their contents (mostly books). The day of the move coincided with the beginning of the semester, always a busy time, but especially in a year when I'm in ( Read more... )

I've exchanged contracts on a new house, and will (COVID-19 willing) be moving in on Monday! This is very pleasing after such a long delay - my offer was first accepted all the way back in January - but naturally it happens to fall on the first day of the new semester, so these are proving to be rather busy days ( Read more... )

I've not posted lately, largely from lack of matter, or rather of motivation (coruscating squibs about the political situation project a continual firework display against my cerebral cortex, but I mostly don't share them because to point out the criminality of people committing crimes in plain view seems otiose), but also because my life in the ( Read more... )

As I mentioned briefly at the time, I was in Oxford at the end of February, primarily to see a student I'm externally supervising at Oxford Brookes, but also to hear Maria Cecire give a talk at the other University. In between that and tea at St John's I also gave an interview on fantasy literature for the University of Oxford's "Great Writers" ( Read more... )

Last year, in an appropriately thrifty way, I bought two haggis for the price of one, to celebrate my birthday (also Burns's) that year and this. Yesterday I discovered, on taking it out to defrost, that haggises can only be safely frozen for one month. What a waste ( Read more... )

There's a nice John Finnemore sketch in which Pachelbel gets annoyed by people only ever wanting to hear his Canon and ignoring his more ambitious work. This is of course a common phenomenon. My brother, serious contemporary composer, is dogged by his setting of Roald Dahl's Dirty Beasts poems (initially narrated by the author himself), which has ( Read more... )