The evening with the photograph album

Well, dear Reader, the most exciting events have happened in the past week or so.

Firstly, my wonderful friend N came down from Glasgow to give a paper here, so I got to meet up with him for a few hours and catch up on old times. Haven't seen him or M for ages, so I'm planning a Scottish trip soon - their two kids are looking scarily grown-up, and I think I need to get there before they're taller than I am. We were also taken out for dinner at Pierre Victoire (=posh!) by the seminar convenors, along with othermembers of the seminar, so a good time was had by all. Well, by me, certainly!

Secondly, please admire my new camera! The old one broke, so I decided on a bit of an upgrade, and it is truly beautiful. Unlike my old Kodak (which was lovely and worked very well until its unaccountable demise), the Fuji has lots of manually adjustable settings so you can take pictures in the dark, when it's raining, etc. (See photos of our truly atmospheric gate... yes, well...) It also has good auto settings for when you really can't be arsed. Very happy, I am.

The other exciting news is that I will be doing some freelance work for the OED. OK, so, I'm not going to be the next visitor in Dictionary Corner, but still I'm very pleased.

Nothing else so much, really. Teaching going well, and I'm enjoying doing some GCSE tutoring via Jacari - this last also raises even higher the phenomenal respect I have for my mother, as I have come to realise exactly how very difficult it is to teach well, and how much time you spend worrying that you simply aren't doing a good job. Who'd have thought that I'd be revisiting Romeo and Juliet for GCSE ten years on? And, for that matter, the blasted Weimar republic, too! It's very good for my brain to have to dredge up all these old facts and convert them into English... "Germany had no tradition of democracy before the Weimar era..." Thanks, Mr. Connick, for being such a great History teacher!