obviously, you'd have to be careful with taking the mint sauce on to the plane given its thermo-nuclear capabilities.

Sorry, I obviously read the original post wrong. I thought you were planning to kidnap a member of the PGForum.

As a sad music anorak, I organise my MP3 player into two folders - albums and hit singles. Being particularly sad, I then sort the hit singles chronologically. Suffice to say, today I am listening to the hits of 1991, so I've heard some of the following delights:

Seal - Crazy
Chris Isaak - Wicked Game
Mock Turtles - Can You Dig It
EMF - I Believe
KLF - 3 Am Eternal
and, erm, MC Hammer - Pray

Well, you've got to have a bit of MC Hammer, haven't you?

At that moment Thomas looks up and shouts:

"What's that coming over the hill?"

I'd email them again in term-time with the offer. One other thing you could try (if you have a bit of time on your hands) is to apply for a PhD that starts during what would be your final year (you could try to convince them to postpone the start until the autumn). If you succeed great. You probably won't succeed but you will have practiced the whole application process, put in words your motivation for doing a PhD and you could ask for feedback. This way, you are well prepared for the main RC season.

Make sure you have a good chat with your referees early next term to tell them what you want to do and would you would like them to do.

It is the holiday season at the moment so many will be away. Also, they get deluged everyday by students asking about PhDs (mostly from abroad) so your email probably got lost in the daily noise.

In your email say that you'd like to ring them to talk about things. As first impressions count make you're well prepared with a list of questions before you do. There's no hurry at the moment, Sept/Oct time will be fine. Obviously, main Research council funding season is Feb-Apr. What caught me out was the amount of work it takes to create a single application and I wrote 6 in 6 weeks! It consumes almost all of your study time as you invariably have to spend time preparing a short literature review (this is actually quite a large task).

So expect your academic studies to suffer over that period. With that in mind, try to get as much of your studies done as possible before the main season gets going, it'll make life a heck of a lot easier.

Anyway, excusing Jojo's seduction techniques for non-local 15 year old boys, what was the drink you tried to get from the pub or off-licence when you were underage?

That'll be it. Unfortunately, it arrived after I became legal so I never tried it myself. When I was a nipper, Diamond White was the stuff to get at 8.2%. Mind you, connoisseurs may remember that K cider was stronger at 8.4%.

If you could get served in a pub, a pint of Redrock cider at 6% would get the evening off to a flier.

You could woo him with a 2 litre bottle of Lightning White.

They've finished for the summer. Outside the local off-licence tonight would be a good bet

PS - I think you've broke Coastman's heart!

Marvellous. Will be getting some new smileys as well? We definitely need a laughing smiley!

Hi PostgradForum team. I know you're reading this but please can we have some avatars???

Lamb, why not use the ball and crane yourself? You could have a Lamb Slam!

9250 to go.

This is so daft, I may be forced to bring the particularly silly questions out of retirement.

Hello ROO, BTW!

as this was posted 73 hours ago, I'm back dating my 10 per hour and taking off 730.

9260 to go!