Monday

The optician said my eyes are fine, which is cheering. Tomorrow, the doctor for my ears. A flurry of bad tempered emails made me ponder on the walk to the opticians through the fog and I have resolved to keep out of the work politics that are depressing me. I do find it difficult to watch people making foolish mistakes when a bit of imagination, responsive listening and careful impression management could preserve the goodwill that's essential to the proper functioning of the organisation. But gone are the days when people set aside their own agendas to pull together. From now on I'm saying nothing and doing nothing unless I'm asked. That should give me time to get on with the book.

Got a bit further with chapter 6. My co-author is laid up with dental problems so although today was our self-imposed deadline for completion of the whole draft I have a bit of breathing space as she hasn't finished her bit either. Reread two papers by Alice Belcher which criticised the compliance report produced by the Cadbury Committee. I think her criticisms were unfounded: the original intention of the compliance report was simply to report data for the successor committee and the papers in the archive indicate that it was only decided to publish it at a later stage when it became clear that it could be useful for companies as a benchmark. But Alice writes very well. She is a high achiever: a chartered accountant before doing a degree and becoming an academic lawyer, with a very young family, who became a professor very quickly.

Set about collecting more information from colleagues for the British Accounting Review Research Register: as usual, some immediate replies from the good guys. This time I'm not chasing anyone (another resolution). I've told them the deadline and if they don't provide the information by then they'll either not be included or included with incomplete information.

Read a draft paper for a colleague. As it's on a tax issue I couldn't make any comment on the content but it was so well written that I actually understood it and learnt something from the exercise. Difficult to get tax research published but this is to be sent to a journal that seems rather more practitioner oriented.

Long list of tasks to do at work tomorrow and a day of almost continuous meetings.