Fuddland

Finally, I got a full night’s sleep and am feeling more in tune with GMT life. I think I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, and had a terrible sinking feeling when I woke up during the night and thought it was going to be almost time to get up — I felt like I’d been asleep for hours, but knew I needed a few more to completely shake the jet-lag. A sense of wonderful relief swept over me when I looked at the time and saw it was only just gone two o’clock — I had five and a half more hours of sleep to look forward to!

I thought I’d spend today getting reaquainted with my work and figuring out how to cram three weeks worth of research into a single day, before I saw my supervisor later in the week, but this plan was scuppered by the fact that the department is hiring a new lecturer and we all had to sit through each candidate giving a demonstration lecture; there are three people up for the job, and they were all told to lecture on exactly the same subject [the divergence theorem, which we’ve all studied as undergraduates anyway]. Despite differences in style, each one has been virtually identical in content, which means everyone was totally bored of the topic by the third talk. I’m glad I’m not the one deciding who gets the job — I’d just give it to the first guy simply because he was the only one I listened to all the way through.