How Soon Is Now?

This blog is called Topologist Now, and yet so many people -- their lives barren and dull without a regular sting of up to date me-news -- have been asking me "Topologist When?" Well, none of them phrased it like that, nor did anyone have the basic sense to phrase the question as a Smiths song. Indeed, the ceaseless whingeing clamour for new posts has been so crushingly monotonous -- "What happened to your blog?", "So what about your blog?", "I can't think of an original way to ask you why you stopped writing your blog..." * -- that my only hope for a quiet life of productive mathematics is to waste my time writing a new entry. I hope you're all happy.

So what is my excuse? Well, I guess I can only really claim that it's a settling in thing. I don't spend so much time in the office, since it's small and I have to share it with my very serious officemate, whose very presence makes me feel bad for faffing around on my computer. Nevertheless, I am now over this little hurdle, and having overcome my criminally vulgar shyness I am ready to rock your tiny world.

Over the next few weeks or so I aim to a) update everything on the sidebar, and b) barrage you with an encyclopaedic run-down of all things Richard. So prepare to hear how I transmogrify into an algebraic geometer, bake many fine tarts, hold dinner parties, commune with hedgehogs, walk in the Peak District, get enslaved by gadgetry and addicted to television (including a dangerously close encounter with the X-Factor phone poll), write campaign speeches for coffee machines, be terrified by Meadowhall, be usurped by a haggis and above all still fail to have finished Middlesex by now. Watch this space people!

* This is a little unfair since Old Man Urmintrude actually threatened to delete me from his blogroll. If he so much as tries it, I'm off round his house to chainsaw him in the trunk. That's right Dave. I'm calling you a tree! Tree!