Happy New Year

A very happy New Year to all - ours was a quiet one as usual. Old age kicking in, or perhaps fumbling in in comfy slippers.

The new Sherlock (Steven Moffat's version) on the BBC is very good - clever and witty. Some weak endings, but I do like seeing poor old Watson getting a word in edgeways and the occasional revenge in this version.

Back to lecture writing for the new term though, as we abandoned the cats for the weekend to go dog-walking with N & D, Number One Cat feels that cat therapy is much more urgent. I have tentatively begun rereading the next Murray novel, as I think I said before, but have made no more progress over Christmas. Instead I've been scuttling through an Elizabeth George (I do enjoy her writing and I admire the clever way she manages to sound almost convincingly like a British author, though I still think her characters' names are sometimes a bit off) and am looking forward to P.D. James' Death Comes to Pemberley, as well as the second Shirley McKay Hew Cullan book, Fate and Fortune. Apparently her hero is off to Edinburgh in this one, with the first one set in St. Andrews - I'm feeling slightly spooked! It's all the stranger as hers, to me (I don't know when she wrote them but they came out recently), seem much newer than mine but are set two hundred odd years earlier. I wonder did we ever meet as students?

And speaking of students, back to the lectures. I wish I'd known, as an undergraduate, how much it means to the lecturer when a student in passing says thanks. I'd have said it much more often!