It’s a day of celebration, but also one on a knife edge. There were slight flickers of hope in the last couple of days (I refer to the election in the UK), but it feels really precarious. Inevitable that they’ll be crushed, this is not a time of many happy endings. Please may there be, […]
Coloniser, colonised
My deadline on Wednesday has unterrified me, as it turns out it is actually my deadline on next Monday. Phew. While it’s still going to be tough, not least because I have to extract information from dozens of reluctant individuals, at least there are enough hours between now and then that it is theoretically possible […]
Days out
Yesterday I went to a conference where perhaps the highlight was one that almost no one actually knew about: that one of the virtual attendees forgot to turn off their camera and turned up wearing only a towel, and that too on their head. Fortunately for this person, only a limited number of people actually […]
Party town
Got back home to find a party going on. Not my thing at all, so I crept into my room and had a quiet dinner before going to sleep – quite forgetting that actually I had quite an important bit of work to compelete. A constitutional crisis appeared to have manifested. I daresay it will […]
Curing cancer
Read an interesting piece today, a short interview with an oncologist who wrote a book advocating for the diversion of cancer research funding towards prevention and early detection rather than cures or late-stage scrambling for every week of life. It seemed sensible – I gather a lot of oncologists feel this way – but medical […]
Day of distress
Some distress that it looks like a miserable UK election may occur on a date in December that means something to my family. I have lost all hope of remaining, of a second referendum and of a single market. The best I can hope for is a customs union and an urgent campaign to rejoin. […]
Working weekend
Finally got a bit of momentum going after a week where I found it quite hard to just get down to work, so spent most of the two days at my computer. It is somewhat frustrating work, as it’s been lingering for six months now and is really quite tricky work, but there it is, […]
World on fire
Protests in the UK, Lebanon, Ecuador, Iraq, Haiti, Chile, Spain, Hong Kong and I’m sure other places that haven’t yet crossed my radar. It feels a precarious moment.
Desperately sad
I am feeling really cast down about Brexit, really genuinely sad. Not that I have much affection for the country, but the dream of integration, open borders, cooperation, is one that I can care for. The other country which I care far more for, Pakistan, stabs me in the heart so often that I can […]
Change of weather
Yesterday I woke to find the weather had changed (as I type this I realise that there is at least one, possibly two other blog posts with the same title, so clearly I often find this worthy of remark. Shows how uninteresting this blog is, really). It was grey and windy and wet, and when […]