Autumn arrives

I has rained all day in bonny Lincolnshire and the temperature must have gone down 20 degrees in a week. I wore my cape today for the first time this autumn. Hoping to be able to wear boots and tights next week. I love autumn clothes! We paid a visit to Louth today after a morning game of squash. It's quite a sweet little place and we had a lovely day.

This week I have been very thankful for my Apple products. D and I are total Mac-heads and we were both very sad to hear of Steve Jobs' death. He seemed to be a wonderfully inspiring guy, able to provide techy goods for techy idiots like me. We watched his Stanford commencement speech this week and much of it has remained with me all week. I particularly like his view of death - it means that we have a limited time to accomplish everything. Urgency leads to great things!

Teaching has been fun this week, by and large. I am particularly chuffed with my first years who fully understood semiotics on Thursday morning and even managed to produce some great practical work that explored the ideas. It is really lovely to work with them and I'm looking forward to our version of R.U.R. This week the Times World Uni Rankings came out which was as exciting as election night. Harvard was pipped to the post by Cal Tech, Edinburgh did wonderfully well as always, Aber (my undergraduate institution) was on the long list and there was a good showing from our Pacific North West (Go Dawgs!) and Canuck friends (BC). Lincoln isn't on there quite yet. There were two post-92s on the long list so they proved it is possible to break through. I was talking to a colleague the other day about the amazing progress Lincoln has made in the ten years it has been around. Really outstanding for such a young institution!

Research-wise I have been reading a lot of depressing (in some cases very depressing) plays about Iraq. They are mostly incredibly bleak with startlingly terrible language because, apparently, (and I can't quite believe this) all soldiers are unbelievably foul-mouthed. Ho hum! Some of them, that said, are quite interesting. And they make fascinating contrasts with the 1914 Flecker play Hassan. Boring bit over!


It's Saturday night and I am sorting out my research submissions. D is listening to some terrible, little-known 80s music. Both these things mean that all reality TV passes us by. I'm going to do a little house sorting, read some books, probably challenge D to a PS3 game and drink some more tea. Let me tell you, this is what aspirational twenty-/thirty-somethings do with their Saturday evenings.

CSW