Tuesday

So many emails... another request from a journal editor to review a paper but I declined immediately - the topic is too far removed from what I'm doing at the moment to make it sensible to devote time to it when chapter 6 is becoming urgent.

Emailed my kind referees to tell them that the funding body will need to be able to contact them in December or January - all replied very quickly to say it wasn't a problem. Only one is jetting off somewhere exciting and promises to check email regularly. Nice people but no doubt they'll all be after me to review papers, examine PhD students etc in the next few months..

In between a steady stream of visits from first year students I read through an MBA consultancy project report which I was sent by the student as she interviewed me for it. Did I really say what she quotes? More to the point, were the colleagues she interviewed quite so frank in their remarks as she reports? She has made a poor attempt at anonymising both individuals and universities where she collected data and the report is not well structured: I'm glad I didn't have to mark it.

The students all seem to be settling in well, happy with their accommodation, coping with the work and enjoying themselves. One is in her early thirties and I am astonished when she tells me that she has a teenage son. We used to get a great many more mature students than we do now and I miss them. At one stage we had a programme specifically designed for them which I ran for three years and I'm still in touch with a couple of the first group who graduated.

A quick trip to the library to return books - I thought I'd managed the process perfectly but a watching librarian pointed out that I hadn't followed the on screen instructions properly as to where to place the books. Collected another inter library loan and realised that the article would be very useful not only for chapter 6 but also in the review for ABR that I haven't finished yet.

Break for lunch and an interesting chat with Emma, my second cousin, who teaches part-time at Wheatley.

Spend far too much time trying to get to grips with the new letter template in order to put together letters of recommendation so that LSE colleagues can use the ICAEW library. Finally set them out in my own style, print them out, sign them and put them in the post. It all seems so time-consuming now we're so used to email.

Manage to write up notes from yesterday's meeting about PRME and circulate them for comment. Se that an email has arrived with comments on the joint funding project that I had hoped to get sent off this week. At a quick glance the comments seem mainly cosmetic and quite constructive: forward the message to the team and hope to find time later to go through them in detail.

Finally off to a meeting of professors to discuss our concerns about possible changes to our system of protecting research time. Volunteered to write up the statement we plan to produce - another task for this evening