2008 is going to be a happy year

The sun is shining.

Adorable lambs are being born outside in the field.

2007 was a year of low-level gloom for me for a load of little reasons, not least that stupid RAE.

Now I wish everyone in the world a Happy New Year and hope that I will pick up the threads of this blog. Reason being that I have been completely uplifted by this wonderful site, that must surely bring a tear to the eye of any of the blue stockinged persuasion and that has reminded me of my calling that I do not honour:

http://curiousexpeditions.org/?p=78



And here is a picture of the bombed out library of the University of Sarajevo:

"The way to . . .

. . . rock oneself into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw."

So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on Tuesday 22nd August 1922. She walked on the beautiful Sussex Downs and that week she was reading Thackeray and Joyce, and that month was reading Homer, Joyce, Proust, Ibsen and all the rest for The Common Reader. And, as for writing: that day she wrote in her diary "It is only 11.30 and I have left off Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street."

Firle Beacon by Duncan Grant

My fresh air was to go out and find that my broad beans have all germinated in the greenhouse (where they have to germinate, as mice will eat every last one in the garden). Cheered by that, I read Virginia Woolf's diary. And now I am settling down to write on a lovely poem by anon. And this blog is the equivalent of that diary. Here I am saying that oh thank goodness the end of that horrible RAE period is in sight. I see the chequered flag -- not with the success that I was aiming for, but with a far greater thing: the peace of mind that comes from a complete change of attitude to it. I have done my best, and somehow that always does the trick. "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." William Shakespeare.

Goodbye already

A nightmare this.

I have to say goodbye just as soon as I've got this blog going. You will see the reason if you scroll down the entries to Weekending.

All day and every day my mental energy is going into my blog. I didn't know it would be such heaven being a blogger. Better than writing a commonplace book (a thing I have been doing for decades and decades), but not that different.

However, I get paid to write academical books and articles, the damned stupid things. As if we haven't got enough books and articles. Can't we have a moratorium on new ones till we've read some of the old ones? The average academic article gets read by 5 people only.

Yet, our lumpen, ignorant government (yes, they govern us) awards university funding according to our "research output", and I can't let my colleagues in the department down in the ridiculous, asinine, excremental RAE (Research Assessment Exercise).

Goodbye, darling blog. I have to harden my heart to you until I have got that elusive "fourth item" in print for this moronic government. I have till the end of 2007.

Don't even ask what happens to the refusniks. They get flushed into the scummy sub-gutters of the university system. And even doing my lovely blogging wouldn't be fun from down there.

Next year in cyberspace. xxx

I don't get bullied. I am in a lovely department; but here is a link for those who don't know all this already:

http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/2007/01/high-stress-levels-in-colleges-and.html#links