[Gacked from fractaltime.]

So, it's all over. After 41 years of employment I am, as from the end of September, officially retired. For the time being, that won't make any noticeable difference to me. I still haven't finished clearing out my office, and the Chairman has said that he doesn't have anyone else wanting to move into that room for the next few weeks, so I have ( Read more... )

The end of this month marks my official retirement. As from the first of October I shall have no further obligations to the university, though in truth I have not had any for the past eight months anyway, so it won't make a great deal of difference to me. I expect I'll still go in once a week or so to meet colleagues and to attend our research ( Read more... )

The good thing about being retired is that you can go out for the day whenever you feel like it. No need to wait for the weekend when everyone else is out and about and the roads are congested with traffic.

Yesterday was a fine, warm, late summer's day, and I took the opportunity to go for a walk in the Yorkshire Dales. I drove to the tiny hamlet of ( Read more... )

Journal entry (back from Spain).

It's still not at all clear whether or not the huge terrorist scare last week was a false alarm, but at least the government has begun to relax the emergency airport security measures that were introduced in such a panic, and it's now permissible to have a small amount of carry-on baggage including books. It seems that dangerous materials such as ( Read more... )

I hope the people who were grumbling about the heat last month are happy with what we've got now. It's more like November than August here, with dark grey skies and a blustery wind threatening rain any moment. Temperatures didn't even reach 60°F today.

This is obviously the time to be heading for warmer parts, and for the past few days I have been ( Read more... )

There's an interesting and heartening little item in this week's Sunday Times. It reminded me of something I wrote about in my journal four years ago, when I gave a short review of Benjamin Britten's opera Albert Herring after seeing a performance of it by Opera North. Here's part of what I wrote then.

Albert Herring is an interesting opera by ( Read more... )

The annual walking holiday in Scotland is always the highlight of my year, and this year's was as good as ever. I stayed for a week with the usual gang, in a farmhouse they had rented somewhere north of Inverness. As last year, I drove up to Scotland a few days before joining them and did some walking and climbing on my own in an attempt to get at ( Read more... )

It's less than a week until my annual walking holiday in Scotland and I seriously need to get into shape, having had virtually no exercise at all this year. Mary is worried that with me being as unfit as I am, I'll collapse on some Scottish hill through overexertion. Last weekend, she more or less insisted that I should go for a good long walk in ( Read more... )