Time for the annual ‘student poster day’ where my charges are tasked with demonstrating what they might have learned over the last few weeks. Some even manage to do this: but I suppose they all try. This is happening nearly a week later than last year, and, definitively, marked my last professional engagement of 2025. As far as the University of Manchester are concerned I now do not exist until 5th January. Let there be celebrations, etc.
And most of us were listening to it — honest. (To be fair to the guy on the left, he’s keeping an eye on the Zoom room.) Golly, three days in a row in Manchester: that’s an outbreak of keenness, particularly in a week when I didn’t have any lectures to deliver.
Time passes, we are mortal. Swifty (Derek) was only seven years older than me — but he caught pneumonia not long ago, and that was it. Today was his funeral. Too many people now who have featured on here who have died.
It’s good to have some sustenance while waiting for colleagues (and Peter is a Professor, a rank I will now almost certainly never attain) to offer their opinions on one’s writing. That paper might even get finished one of these days.
A nice combination of shapes and textures on this one I think. Not that I am commenting on James’s texture. He’s just having a fag.
There is still just under a month to go until I start teaching the latest intake, but plenty needs doing to be ready for that day. Hence the length of the morning meeting. I skulk around, visible as a shadow in the mirror, while my colleagues emerge in the direction of lunch.
5.15pm on day 5,115 and it’s the start of the 15th year of the blog. All of which is numerologically pleasing but has nothing to do with the shot, and the shot has nothing to do with my birthday as such. As the stormtrooper helmet was there, it got worn by Mark, at least for a short time. Tony looks on in his usual measured fashion.
I knew in advance that today’s shot would be taken at home in Hebden Bridge, meaning it would become the 2,000th HB shot to feature on here. Knowing also that not a great deal was going to happen on the day I thought I might as well make #HB2000 as typical as possible. Hi to Johnny and Mary therefore, who I see often enough in this spot, particularly in the summer. (In the winter we would be twenty yards to the right, and inside….)
It’s nice when my students can still impress me, and, currently, Keela’s dissertation project is certainly doing that — although I can’t tell you what it is, not for any sinister reasons but just because it’s not finished yet and not my business to tell you. But, yes, it involves virtual reality, she doesn’t wear a rig on a regular basis. I do not believe my office noticeboard has featured before so there you go, a chance to check out the randomly accumulated display of items upon it for the first, and who knows, perhaps the last time.
Pud (a.k.a. Sean) is definitely the local wizard with this machine. I mean, I try — others try — but Pud wins. Usually. Kind of like Manchester City, maybe not always, but quite a lot.
Being 42 