I made it to Oz by the skin of my teeth. If I'd succumbed to the stupidity and lack of concern of Singapore Airlines I might not have got in at all until next year. Scotty from Marketing has been forced by the grown-ups to reduce international arrivals until x% of the population is vaccinated.... Continue Reading →

She's not actually biting, but yeah, nibbling. The reality of "these four walls" for another 6 days (assuming I don't get infected). First world problems and all that... Couldn’t sleep (woke at 4pm. Lay in bed listening to the bloody BBC World Service, then got up Read my quota from Introductory Readings in Anthropology and... Continue Reading →

Half way there, and had a half way decent sleep for about half the night. Woke up at five, non-groggy. Read six extracts from an anthropology book, as you do (blogged here). Did some more indexing of the wonderful "Magpie" newsletter of the Manchester Wildlife group while listening to ABC radio Adelaide, which had the... Continue Reading →

Sigh. Sleep patterns back to square two or three. And THEN I managed to get my timezones out by an hour, so the meeting I thought I was getting to early?... was just finishing. All was not lost, but v. annoying. Did a bunch of grunt work after that, somewhat sleep deprived. Then got my... Continue Reading →

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said that all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Well, I'm testing that hypothesis. It's going... well, I think. Crap sleep last night, of course. Found myself waking at midnight and just going with the flow, did a couple of hours of work (some of it work work,... Continue Reading →

It's getting easier. My body clock is, despite what an objective observer might say, tumbling into fewer and fewer grooves in search of the Right One. And given that this is not my first time on this rodeo, I'm getting into better grooves on work too. Now, if there could just be a non-locked-down Adelaide... Continue Reading →

Near the end of my first interminable blog post about quarantine, I asked "am I to be deprived of the daily public health checklist call that was the highlight of my last quarantine?" With perfect comic timing, minutes after I hit publish, the phone rang. The usual rigamarole about personal details, contacts, past history, vaccination... Continue Reading →

tl;dr - the first 24 hours have been not bad at all. I even got some work done. Just over 24 hours ago the coach pulled up at a four and a half star (no, I didn't know they did half stars either) hotel in the CBD of Adelaide. After a brief wait while the... Continue Reading →

"Sociologists invent words that mean industrial disease..." (From Dire Strait's song of the same name) People like me, only more successful than me, like to stick labels on things. It gives us a sense of control in a terrifying world, and if other people start citing "your" label then you win at the game of... Continue Reading →