Sunday (and general unsocial hours of) working was a good way for me to get away from my family;-)

Why do you think the British cannot drink in a civilised way? I admit I was like that as a teenager, but then everyone else was - parents, grandparents, friends. I thought it was normal to get blathered.

I think it's worse for pub staff: they have to work all weekend and usually Christmas Day and New Year's Eve too. There was always a lot of bad feeling about who got time off at Christmas when I worked in those places.

Golfpro, you never struck me as a man that would know his colour wheel;-). Trinny and Susannah would be proud.

Ho can you tell who gave you stars? I have one, but I don't know who gave it to me.

There are no native swearwords in Finnish or Japanese. Apparantly.

What did you think of our 8 minutes of fame at the closing ceremony?

"He said: he woke up around 11, did'nt have breakfast (never does), watched some TV, had some nuggets (presumably chicken), had an afternoon nap, had some more nuggets then went to the track."

Yes...and I'm Bart Simpson


;-)

Every EPSRC person I know is on around 12,000.

That has happened at several universities that I know of: if you go beyond four years you are considered a "fail" by the university and the funding body, and the department will have its funding cut next year.

You should be shown how to use anything that's new to you: there'll probably be SOPs in place. Otherwise ask to be trained on the machine - the university would rather have people being trained up on something than guessing, I think.

Must slightly disgree with Coastman, though! I don't think any funding body views a PhD as research training: they want publishable/patentable results and they want them NOW. Not how it should be, perhaps, but that seems to be how it is.

The link to the Nuffield grant page:

http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/go/grants/nsbur/page_412.html

If you can identify an area that you're especially interested in, you can ask the lecturer concerned to apply for a Nuffield summer research grant. Currently we have an undergrad student (between 2nd and 3rd year) spending 6 weeks learning research techniques in our lab.

Ah, the lab fairy. I've heard that there is a Facebook group dedicated to her activities, but not being a Facebook member I can't confirm this.

She's been very busy this week, anyway.

I don't know...they contaminate your machines, they use up your stuff, they leave dirty glass everywhere. And it's never anyone you know who's responsible, so it must be those pesky ghosts. I suppose I am in an old building.

Yup. Being from Lancashire, I find the Yorkshire way of saying "no" quite bizarre. It sounds like "Neeeeeeer" to me.