Service resumes
So I guess that this is the occupational hazard with blogs. You set up your shiny new website, enthusiastic about all the witty and insightful anecdotes that you will be sharing with your legions of followers, and then in the first couple of months you write about absolutely anything you can think of (my Christmas eating masterpiece, for example). Then, you get swamped with other stuff to do in order to pay the mortgage, you get out of your swing, and blog writing loses its u
Creative disruption
This week we bade a fond farewell to Daniel Tulloch who is leaving the Smith School to do something exciting around electricity market regulation in New Zealand. Okay, 'exciting' might be overselling it, but it's a terrific opportunity. It is always a bit sad when colleagues leave, but I've come to see that it is a prerequisite for progressive academic research. Oxford is a pretty comfortable environment, and it would be easy, I am sure, to happily plough my own little furrow
Tis the season
What with leaving parties, anniversaries and the general seasonal merriment, I've been doing a lot of eating this week. Oxford is not over endowed with good restaurants, although the new shopping centre may help change that. In the meantime, here are the highlights of my big eating week. On Monday, I had the set lunch at Gees, featuring a very tasty butternut squash starter. Lunch on Tuesday was at the Banana Tree, recently opened on George Street. Big portions, friendly staf
End of term
It's 9th week in Oxford, which means term is officially over for undergraduates. My department suddenly feels deserted, although we're gearing up for admissions interviews next week. On the plus side, when I go to the gym now (great kit, just 20 quid a month, bargain) I can simply walk around feeling overweight and breathless.... rather than old, overweight and breathless. #Chat
Clothes for the emperor
I give a regular class on Dr. David Johnstone's elective for master's students that looks, inter alia, at water infrastructure. My brief is to ensure that the class has a reasonable understanding of the basics of finance - the difference between equity and debt, what WACC means, that sort of thing. Electives in any geography department probably convene a pretty wide range of backgrounds, and ours is no exception. Usually, this group ranges from folk who have had no exposure t
