Stale cava

It's a busy time here, what with all the marking and grading and reading and registering and writing reports and agreeing marks and viva-ing and chasing scripts from other examiners or students or finding someone has answered some question here and not there and so on.  I don't think I've been able to think about any of my own work for at least two weeks because I've been squinting at other people's handwriting or leafing through bundles of printouts.  Soon, soon, I promise myself.

And it's raining most of the time.  Which at least washes away the smell of stale cava from the pavements when it has dripped off a pale undergraduate who has emerged blinking from an examination hall to find some 'hilarious' friends ready in ambush with poorly-aimed sticky fizzy wine.

I'm not in the best of moods.

On the other hand, the work I've read is pretty impressive given all that our students have to do and the slightly eccentric method by which we decide to grade their achievements.  Some clever things, some hard work and only occasionally the feeling that what I'm reading is the complete and undigested contents of a rapidly-acquired superficial acquaintance with information that should have been thought about properly.  So hooray for the students who work hard and are clever.  Not that this means I won't curse them in the coming week as they roam the street in be-blazered and chino-shorted gangs, bumping into respectable civilians and imagining that they really are quite the most important people here.  They will all leave soon.

And then.  And then I have a year of sabbatical to do some proper reading and writing.

One last moan.  CUP have at last produced Myles Burnyeat's collected papers.  Two volumes.  Nice paper and sturdy binding (certainly feels sturdier than some recent OUP things).  But £75 per volume.  £75, for pity's sake.  That's £150 for about 740 pages of things.  I'd been saving up credit from reading and refereeing work for the Press, but this has now blown a big hole in my account.  £150.  Really!  (But, the good people at amazon will do you a deal on the two volume set -- see below -- and I am pleased to see that unlike some other volumes of this kind it has the handy marks that indicate the pagination in the original publication.  That's a very good thing.)