Went to bed at around 10 o'clock last night. This is early for me. I was drained after spending the morning at a rather charged meeting and then heading straight off to Cambridge for a conference.

I had to miss the first day of the conference because of the meeting but I had a nice evening cycling around looking at cows and popping into an overheated internet cafe where I bumped into Mai who had had the same idea. I've just left the conference room because I missed the speaker's handout and he's talking too fast for me to follow it. I then asked a couple of people and discovered that they have a room here with computers just for us to use.

It's all very civilised here. I made a joke about auditors to an academic downstairs and he said 'what are auditors?' (Maybe only academics will know why the next sentence might begin 'Picking myself off the floor, ...'). I also enjoy all the College stuff. Having breakfast in a big dark hall (candles are the only illumination on offer) and trying to get a proper view of the portraits (some top quality stuff), and I must make sure I stay up late tonight just so I can come in the night way (through a tiny door in the back garden, into the back of a building, out the front of it, and then along the terrace to our place).

I'm now very excited because I've been looking at this book on Grice longingly since it came out, not being able to afford it and not wanting to wait until the library finally gets it, and it was on special offer here for conference attendees (half price). Now I don't know whether to wait until I've polished off The Inheritors before getting into it.

The Inheritors is looking good, although I just started last night. Two days after Tim persuaded me I had to read it, Sylvia deposited it on the book crossing shelf outside my office. Tim is here and tells me he's also persuaded himself to reread it. We looked at in class the other day, doing a bit of Hallidayan analysis on it. It seemed appropriate, since Halliday's paper on it is a stylistics classic. The class was fun and, for me at least, the exercise demonstrated Hallidayan analysis, showed how it's useful for stylistics, revealed some of the style of the book, and made me want to read more.

B-)