Highlights and lowlights

The time is flying by: with lectures and travelling time and my ongoing fitness push I hardly have any spare time during the week. It's mostly been fun, although I had a dull lecture this week for the first time. The lecturer was using too much technology, breaking up the flow of the information by changing the colour of the pen through the software and using the eraser tools and so on. A lot of the time I was willing him just to get a move on.

I had my first practical, and they eased us in gently with sex-linked genes in Drosophila melanogaster, including a bit of talking from the front and then inspection through the microscope for the phenotypic characteristics. Not taxing at all. I also have an essay to write: "Fish intake and IQ". I have to produce a draft within a fortnight, then the final version, and then deliver a 10 minute presentation to a few of the students and tutors. Considering I've done presentations lasting an hour to rooms containing several hundred people, I'm not too nervous about it.

As well as continuing with my hour in the gym each day, I've joined the campus squash club. This isn't the university one, just a few people informally on a Wednesday afternoon. I last played squash competitively at university the first time round, where Squalid and I used to play before lectures in the morning - that was in 1986 or so. I took my nephew David to a local club once when he was visiting a year or two ago, but apart from that I haven't played at all. Well, this time round, my incredibly competitive nature meant that I managed to beat some of the others, who weren't even born in 1986, but my age and dubious fitness meant that they could probably have played on while I had to stop and remember how to breathe.

Mr A was away in Italy playing on motorbikes this week, and returned in the early hours on Friday morning. He had a great time, and didn't break anything on the bike or himself, so that was good news. The weather has turned so cold and autumnal that it's definitely time to put the trampoline away for the winter; we've taken a delivery of logs and the open fire is back in use.