But my favourite line from it is still this “A naked man on a naked horse is a very fine spectacle; I had no idea how well the two animals suited each other: as the Peons were galloping about they reminded me of the Elgin marbles”

By pure chance, whilst travelling around Argentina, I bought an English-language copy of Voyage of the Beagle only to find that I was inadvertently retracing a lot of Darwin’s route. Very enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Oh yes, but we still love bland and beige. This is also an iconic sketch… youtu.be/H-uEx_hEXAM?...

I feel we need to have a transatlantic bland-off between New England and The Original England.

March 5th, for anyone wanting to celebrate

6% of the food economy, allegedly, but very much citation needed there

Also, councils generally are so short of financial flexibility that they can’t employ enough in-house engineers to do this kind of design work, so it goes to consultants and costs more overall, but those costs are met by capital funding rather than revenue.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, it’s delightful. Not.

How about St Pirran’s Day, patron saint of Cornwall, home of the pasty: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty

Presumably the Telegraph printed this … on the ram-page?

This is going to sound very privileged, but one of the joys of my job in the past was going to southern Chile in November. You leave wet cold dark Britain behind and arrive to daffodils and the warm winds of springtime.

Exactly! My colleague has moved to conference-style poster sessions (with informal oral Q&A from staff) as a way to assess students' work because it allows us to see what the student actually knows.