Wednesday Feb 1st- day 103

Walk in to Uni listening to the Arctic Monkeys.

"Now then Mardy Bum
I see your frown
And it's like looking down the barrel of a gun."

"Mardy bum" is a Sheffield expression meaning "misery guts". And a great name for a song.

Rosy phones. She is coming for two weeks on Feb 11th, so we have a chat about hotels and stuff. Ann has some other guests arriving on Saturday for a few weeks, a retired couple from Delaware, and it might get a bit crowded round here. Plus me and Rosy will want to see the sites, and get out of Seattle as well. Rosy tells me that the GP practice where she is a registrar (Shirebrook) has been making the news back home due to a political issue about the government giving contracts to run new practices to an American company. Newsnight were there filming on Monday, so it's all been a bit exciting! Unfortunately, Rosy didn't get to meet the redoubtable Jeremy Paxman, but I understand Kirsty Wark gave Tessa Jowell a hard time back in the studio!!

To my surprise, Durr-mont phones.
"Hey Chris, just wanted to give you a heads-up on the software".
"Err, right..."
We eventually make ourselves understood. An email with the code wings its way to me and it's all sorted. It's a perpetual licence and will last for as long as Microsoft rule the earth, which will surely be beyond my time on the planet.

I had a meeting with Barbara at 1 pm. That went fine. I am making slow progress, and now need to start wading through the data and see what happens. She also gives me some good tips on where to go for sightseeing round here.

In the evening, I watch "A day in September" on DVD, a documentary about the events at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The film is directed by Kevin MacDonald, who also directed "Touching the void". It is gripping, by its very nature, and ultimately very depressing- both that people would do such awful things, and that they would be driven to such extremes. I would recommend watching it- I didn't know too much about it myself, particularly not about the German government's apparent complicity in allowing the subsequent hijack of a plane which led to the remaining terrorists being handed over to Palestine. Grim stuff. And to think, all this was happening as I was about to make my entrance into the world.

Roger seems finally to have shrunk back nearly to his original size. I suspect that he won't ever fit back into his packaging, but not to worry. He has taken to sleeping in my ipod cradle.















"So how does it feel to be called 'mardy bum'?"