Pig Sty Avenue

Blogposts here about the allotment outnumber those regarding the doctorate by... quite a lot. 100 to 1, maybe. Which is a telling ratio. The fact is, test validity theory, in fact almost everything connected with language testing is no longer floating my boat. If it ever did. And the thought of spending another 3 years researching and writing a dissertation which a handful of people will read, and which will advance the cause of human happiness, despite the best intentions, not one jot... Well, no. A novel's been growing in my head since Saudi, and its time has come. I'm not going to spill any creative beans here, but I will give details of the research, (which may give some clues): First World War especially life in the trenches; Glasgow in the 1920s; Territorial Forces just before and during FWW; crime and punishment in Glasgow, 1920s; Scottish state schools, 1920s; Teacher education, 1910-20. To get started, Jenkins, 1974. REFERENCES Jenkins, A. (1974). The Twentie...

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while. You can't buy The Grauniad without difficulty in Saltcoats, so I read a book on the way to Glasgow, and the paper on the way home. The book is always a novel, because you need to narrative to keep you occupied on a repeated journey. When I started to do this commute back in August, I was reading Trinities by Nick Tosches . I'd got it from a charity shop in Leeds because I was feeling the need for a gangster story to alleviate my Sopranos withdrawal symptoms. I liked the big idea, too: New York mafia wresting control of the heroin trade back from the triads. Lots of it was great stuff for afficianados of the genre: exploding Nigerians, for example. A lot of it was crap: all of the product placement: novels by blokes for blokes, you don't really need to know what designer gear the Godfather's wearing, do you? Then it was Billy Bathgate , which I did blog abou t . Brilliant. It's one of those books, won...

Despite being a horny-handed son of the Tyneside soil, and having some bolshevik tendencies to boot, I've always been a fan of the novels about rich English people in the 20s and 30s. Here's an interesting article about that milieu , with the names of several authors I haven't read.