Nick Gibbins

Gacked off and . The first ten tracks selected randomly from my computer’s media player (DigitalDJ). 2πr – Clint Mansell (Pi soundtrack) Spiderman – The Ramones Love minus zero/no limit – Bob Dylan Death-Cab For Cutie – Bonzo Dog Band The Domes of G’Bal – Ozric Tentacles Death Don’t Have No Mercy – The Grateful Dead (from Live/Dead) The Wind That Shakes The Barley – Dead Can Dance Midtown Instrumental – Tom Waits (from Rain Dogs) Rising For The Moon – Fairport Convention Midnight On The Murder Mile – Carter USM

…so I shall be going to the Tun. Big ship was v. cool.

If this foul weather keeps up, I may very well not be at the Tun this evening (don’t fancy the two mile walk back from the station at 1.30am, especially since I’m besuited today)

Just applied for a lectureship at Manchester. Will also be applying for a lectureship at Edinburgh. Scary stuff. Should really tell Glorious Leader when he returns on Monday, since I’m using him for a reference (no repeats of the Bath fiasco).

Tch. Just had a phonecall regarding the meeting I’m going to tomorrow. Looks like the meeting will no longer be aboard HMS Ark Royal, so I can’t get all excited about being on a ship that bears the same name as a ship which fought the Armada. Instead, the meeting will be aboard HMS Invincible. Bah. The fact that it’s the fleet flagship is some consolation, however.

As I type this, the whole episode is mercifully beginning to fade from my memory… Perhaps not quite that bad. Yesterday was my research group’s christmas meal , which was at The Rose Bowl (warning, bad website). Unlike previous years, this was a sedate affair; no members of senior academic staff picked fights, passed out in the ladies’ loos, threw up in the gutter or injured themselves in the course of their homeward journeys. Shame. We’ll have to rely on the old anecdotes for a while longer. One of the longstanding traditions (sadly missed last year, revived this year) is… Read More »IAM eating turkey and not seeing The Return of the King

For the past six years, and I have been operating in the sort of split household that I suspect is far too common amongst academic couples. I live and work in Southampton during the week, and she lives and works in Bath. On weekends I travel to Bath (since she has weekend work commitments that tie her to Bath), so I’ve probably travelled on the little train that runs from Portsmouth to Cardiff about six or seven hundred times during that time. Just outside Salisbury station (on the Bath side, and on your left hand side if you’re facing the… Read More »Enigmatic graffiti explained

As some of you probably know (and the rest of you probably yet don’t, but are about to find out), I’m an Essex boy1. We all have our crosses to bear, you might say. I’ve not lived in the south-east in over ten years now, and have never suffered from the worst excesses of the Estuary accent (although as will attest, I am still incapable of pronouncing the word ‘ball’ as anything but ‘baw’, and I frequently lapse and use glottal – or glo’al – stops). Last weekend, we visited my folks in Upminster, and I realised that I was… Read More »Gone native