There is a short version and a long version of how this picture ended up the way it did. The short version is, I was being creative, and the long version is too boring to worry about. Anyway here is our lunchtime seminar speaker, Sean, pictured on my new smartphone, in turn pictured on my usual camera. I like the collage effect of how this one has turned out.
A very happy birthday to the wife, born 26/10/1976 and thus forty years old TODAY. And how can one fail to go for someone with such attention to their make-up. Hun…. love you loads and may there be many more of these.
It’s half-term, so school is closed, and with Clare at university today it fell to me to entertain the Boy. By a few miles into the walk I chose he was probably regretting this, but too late. Still, even he agreed it was better than sitting in school.
Rochdale FC’s manager Keith Hill takes questions from representatives of the local media, who, for some unfathomable reason, included me amongst their ranks this afternoon. His team had just beaten Bury FC 2-0, but that didn’t necessarily make him the jolliest of interviewees.
Dina is from Greece but works in Scotland. Ellie is from Iran and works in Australia (she helped look after me when I went to Brisbane back in 2013). Both are here presenting in the Czech Republic at the same conference session as me (from the UK) and other delegates from Croatia and Belgium, helping, in our small ways, to advance knowledge worldwide.
This is why Brexit and the isolationist, racist mentality it provokes is so utterly stupid. I don’t just mean that as a random insult. I mean vicious, ridiculous stupidity of the most damaging kind.
“U malého glena” apparently means “the little glen” and is the name of this bar in Prague. Well, this is one of the world’s great beer-drinking countries, so I was inevitably going to end up in a bar or two while here…
Well, the weather’s still very pleasant, that is undeniable. I told my students today, most of whom are from overseas, “you do realise that it’s not always like this, don’t you?”. But these things happen, in 2013 I think I got about the best two weeks of autumn weather that New Zealand had had in recent memory. It’s hard not to just sit down and chill out in it. It won’t last…
11 years of using the Calderdale line, and one learns which services have CTS (Cattle Truck Status) and which are safer. I will never aim to catch the 1726 from Manchester, for example. It just ain’t worth it. The 0742 from Hebden (depicted here just about on its arrival to Manchester) is usually not so bad but today, for some reason, it suffered from a massive case of CTS.
Why monochrome again? Because it hides a multitude of white balance sins.
Every year at this time the campus goes from being peaceful and quiet to a heaving mass of people. Still, if it wasn’t for them none of us would be doing what we’re doing. Sam Harris of the International Society at Manchester says hi to the gathered new postgraduates in Education: who collectively I am now responsible for…. (there are a couple of hundred more in the room than pictured here). Let’s hope they all fulfill their potential over the next 11 months or so.
Being 42 