Lord of the Manor

I have a room in my flat. I have an office. A room in my parents' house contains lots of my things. These are the three little pieces of world over which I control (sort of), and as a result they are all a great big mess. Each one is disorganised and filthy, in desperate need of a good dusting, and largely impossible to usefully do anything in. Further, since

a) I'll be moving in September,
b) my mum has plans for a guest room,
c) I have to vacate my office in a fortnight for redecoration,

each of my little dominions will soon enough need to be gutted, stripped bare of tat and shite, hoovered and cleaned, then repopulated with as much of the rubbish as I can bear not to part with.

Algebraic Geometry is unpleasant. But not as unpleasant as cleaning and sorting, and therefore I've been getting plenty of work done. However I have made a small start on the sorting. My mighty collection of change (pennies and tuppencess and fives) has been counted. The grand total came to just under fifteen pounds. Let nobody call me autistic.

I've just been teaching revision sessions for advanced highers students. The students are therefore 17 or 18 and among the cleverer schoolgoers. And one of them still managed to fall of an entirely static chair. How I despair! (Not really.)

East Angular

Last weekend I went with my mum to Southwold (in Suffolk, East Anglia) to visit my Grandmother. If you've never seen it mentioned in every sunday supplement ever printed, Southwold is a pleasant seaside town with lots of pleasant retired inhabitants and a very clean and pleasant beach.

Good Things About The Trip:
1) Seeing my Gran.
2) Seeing the cats.
3) Bracing walks and seaside air.
4) Successfully fixing a wheelbarrow. (Despite my impractical desk-bound occupation I am in fact capable of minor practical tasks.)

Bad Things About The Trip:
1) Getting covered in cat hair.
2) The pleasant seaside air was bloody freezing.
3) I failed to fix the other wheelbarrow.
4) My lack of stealth and lumbering mathematician's gait robbed me of the chance to mercilessly bludgeon a rat with a steel poker.

Good Things About The Bad Things:
1) I now have a nice jumper to fend off the freezing seaside air.
2) Wielding a steel poker in a potential man-versus-nature showdown left me feeling vital and energised for a good three minutes.

Since the trip I've just been wandering around York learning lots of maths.

Finally, a question about adverts. When did they make Barry Scott camp? Surely he had a hard enough time using someone else's voice to sell pink acid to the general public already, but now the people behind Cillit Bang have put him in marigolds and an apron.

Alert!

Thanks to the evil of blogger's cookie habit, my brother now knows about this page. I immediately assumed that this would be a bad thing, but on close inspection (and reading through all the posts ever) it seems not. So Mark, if you're reading, why not click on `comments' and say something interesting? Ah, go on. Feel free to adopt a wacky pseudonym.

A message from suburban York; My Latest Novel

Help! I'm trapped in suburbia. Not really. I'm back here because things have wound down in Edinburgh and I can get on with work as well here as there. The particular reason for being here is that people have been having birthdays, which is always fun (well, when I remember them ...)

Anyhow, for those of you who don't know, my parents live on Windmill Rise, which has its very own windmill, pictured here. As you can see, there aren't any sails (removed for `safety' some years ago and subsequently lost by the council). Plus, it's pretty decrepit these days. This is a real shame because up until maybe 10 years ago it was fine and dandy, just that in recent times it's really started crumbling and hasn't had any attention from the powers that be. Boo!

Music News: everyone should listen to My Latest Novel, a very fine Glaswegian band with fantastic Glaswegian accents. I guess they sit somewhere between Arcade Fire and Snow Patrol. This could be a bad thing but it's not. You can download some mp3s from their site. Do!

Lots more to say about records, films, DVDs, and elliptic cohomology, but no room right now. Instead, guess what? On tuesday I'll be doing my full uncle's duty and babysitting all day. I'm a bit scared ...

How could I forget this?
Congratulations to Mairi and Simon on the birth of baby Sophie!
(Simon is my cousin...)