Last week I visited Auschwitz.

Who is that stranger in my father’s bed? Those sunken eyes The concave cheeks Salted with stubble The thinned grey hair Plastered to a narrow skull. I have lost the man I loved. In truth it had been a long journey To this resting place. A slow stepping backwards As memory stuttered and stalled And confusion dampened The flares of anger That made strangers of us both.

I’m thinking of becoming a less lazy photographer. Can you help? Brussels window. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I enjoy a bit of photography from time to time, since I have an annual tradition of posting my favourite photographs at the end of each year. Photography is something I’ve enjoyed since childhood. I was probably only seven or eight when I got my first camera.

Another year, another tweet thread of the books I read these past twelvemonth. Click on the images to access higher resolution versions which are just about legible, or better still, read the thread on Twitter. In 2022 I managed just 20 titles, five of them novels and seven by women.

Another year, another two thousand or more photographs, some of which I thought were quite good. There’s a little taster below but if you want to see the full set of 55 pictures that were my favourites from this year, you need to click through to my album on Flickr. Silhouetted Robin. Louvre Reflections. Colourful Communication Barcelona Balcony The Circle of Light. No Cafe Society in Autumn.

Thanks to the paucity of my education and cultural life I have come late to Isaiah Berlin, the noted philosopher and historian of ideas whose thinking provided such a guiding light to the 20th Century. But I’m definitely a fan now. I’d heard the name, of course, but would have been hard-pressed to tell you why he was well-known.

Things have come to a pretty pass when the UK can turn out Prime Ministers more frequently that I post to my blog. It might be taken as a sign of the times if the times weren’t so damned confusing. Black and white shot of people reflecting off the gleaming surfaces inside Barcelona airport Whatever. The itch to keep writing is still there, even if it remains distracted by the demands of work.

“The Queen is dead; long live the King!” is such a cliché of stories and films that it was surprising to hear it for real. Not that we did actually hear it for real. The secrecy surrounding the Queen’s final hours means we cannot be sure what was said at the moment of her passing or even if the new King had arrived in time.

Reader, I bought a Brompton. After all my research – and a considerable amount of humming and haa-ing – I finally took Henry’s advice and went to my local bike shop to test-ride a couple of different eBike models. The cheaper one on offer there didn’t work out – easy enough to ride and a motor with plenty of power, but nothing like the compactness of the folded Brompton.

You’d think assessing bicycles would be a lot easier than assessing researchers, but I’m not so sure. Though I spend quite a bit of time as chair of the DORA steering committee pondering how best to evaluate research and researchers, this weekend I’m mainly preoccupied with rethinking my commuting options. When in 2004 we moved to our current house, a 25 min walk from the station, I used to cycle for that leg of my journey to and from work.