Well, I am here to do some work, at least. In fact it’s been a busy week, and one I was relieved to get to the end of: maybe Friday afternoon isn’t the best time to ask others to do some work on my behalf, but we got through it. Colleague (and former student) Gareth sits in the background and makes his third appearance on the blog.
The building at which these guys are arriving — Nutclough Mill — now makes audio equipment instead of fustian cloth, but I guess this scene would have appeared much the same if seen from my house 130 years ago. The cobbles won’t have changed at all. You must promise not to notice the telephone wire though.
Yes, I did first type ‘2023’ as the date in the heading. Don’t we all do that for a while? But 2024 it is, and as it starts off in a work sense, here’s my definite aspiration for the year expressed on the cover of the work diary I quite deliberately bought back in November sometime.
Look, it’s got my name on it (on the pink bit), my handwriting and everything. The ideas were those of everyone around the table however, and things are not yet finished, either. I can occasionally still be motivated to think about things that matter to my employer — and thus my students — rather than me personally.
At least I live in a town that still sustains not just one, but two proper butchers’ shops. These guys must make their entire annual profit at this time of year; I know in advance what it will be like when I go to collect my bird two days before Christmas. (Never a turkey, which is a meat I have never found all that appealing, to be honest.) There is no advertising intention to this blog, so can I also point out that despite depicting one of the establishments here, I actually ordered my meat from the other shop.
This is nothing whatsoever to do with today’s global media event, which I could not have spared the time to watch even if the desire had been there: declaring a national holiday at short notice is all well and good but it didn’t mean the jobs went away. Not least the new Mac, that is still in the process of being shaped to look as much like the old one as possible. Though no thanks to Apple, for taking away most of the useful ports on anything they shipped after about 2017. That’s another £64 to the Cupertino coffers for the umbilicus one now needs even to look at all that data sitting on the backup drive.
After the expanded horizons of yesterday, it was back to work today. I could have posted a pic demonstrating that I am a Pinball Wizard (all-time high score on the pub machine) but that would just have been me showing off, so let’s try to make out that I was engaged in some gainful employment. Whether the message on the pen is a metaphor or not, that’s up to you to determine.
Eight and a half hours’ work today — almost all spent in online meetings. Even in the depths of lockdown I did not do such a day. These objects marked the limits of my real world. (Yes, that’s a sticker of Graham Chapman’s face stuck to the Macbook.)
Data analysis done the retro way, on the train. Who needs expensive software packages when you have highlighter pens of differing colours. And months after the fact, too — these are interview transcripts from St Helena. But hey, I got to them in the end.
No point claiming that I did anything other than this kind of thing today — and there were almost another three hours of it to go after I took this shot. Jet lag, I seem to have avoided. Work lag, I have.
Being 42 