So, Kyra and I are driving back to Oxford from Hertfordshire. It's not a difficult journey at all - a few junctions round the M25, and then on the M40 all the way home ( Read more... )

There´s been a hurricane in Havana since we were last here, and the streets are covered with fallen trees, and electrical cables dangling worryingly from the pylons. This being Cuba, they don´t make much effort to get rid of the trees, they sort of push them slightly to one side, or just drive round them. Occasionally a lorry comes past and takes a ( Read more... )

1) At a bank in Santiago, the teller wouldn't accept our 100 dollar note, as it had a slight tear in it. Then the manager turned up, with a roll of cellotape, and taped up the note. The teller then accepted the note. The manager was clearly a dangerous enterpreneur who was shot shortly after we left the bank ( Read more... )

Everyone in the world here wants to sell you black market cigars. The entire population of Havana has a stock of cigars smuggled out of the factories. In fact, literally half the production line must mysteriously disappear - it´s amazing any of them make it out legally at all ( Read more... )

Best piece of communist propaganda so far: sign in childrens playground exhorting them to be the communist warriors of the future. There are also some fab murals of evil American soldiers though, which come a close second ( Read more... )

This is weirdly compulsive viewing ( Read more... )

so, try this...

Go onto Google, and enter the words "weapons of mass destruction"

Press the "I'm feeling lucky" button, rather than the normal search button.

And enjoy...

do it quickly, before someone senior at Google notices.

I actually did some today. It was most exciting and a very novel experience. (Once you're a graduate student, no one gives a damn about your work any more, which is my justification for the rampant egotism of announcing this trivial fact to the entire internet. It's got to be less socially unacceptable than cornering people at graduate parties to ( Read more... )

Two exams set... and how on earth did anyone come to the conclusion that it's appropriate to put me in charge of the grading of an innocent and worryingly diligent visiting student? And on a subject about which I've never pretended to know anything really (I've found our tutorials very mind-broadening ( Read more... )

However, it is a tempting distraction when you're trying to set an exam for an over-zealous American visiting student (the POWER...)