Time to talk about one of my favourite Oxford buildings, 26-27-28 Cornmarket!! Popularly known as The Old Pret

Shana Tovah Umetukah - a happy and sweet New Year to all who celebrate tonight!

I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, invites applications for their fellowship in the Digital Humanities itatti.harvard.edu/fellowship-d...

Good morning from Ozymandias, in full regal mode (Photograph by Maria Spooner)

Are you free next Sunday? Do you live in Oxford? I'm running a noticing workshop at Caper Books for children ages 5 to 9. We'll be finding joyous, tiny stories in ordinary things to help with overwhelm and discover magic in the everyday! And tickets are only £3! To book: tinyurl.com/4tutvvfm #oxford

“And now the male shifts slightly and says ‘right. Bed.’ And yet, despite the clear intent in his voice, he will now do something very strange, continuing to sit on the sofa, scrolling on his phone, for another hour or more. It is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the natural world.”

St Oswald's Church Widford

It’s going to be one of *those* days in my garden safari again. That squirrel is only one missed jump away from becoming an interactive squeaky chew toy.

This is a really interesting piece about one of my favourite movies. And the forthcoming Lear Rex in which Al Pacino is starring has been directed by my brother Bernard! www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

The Radio 4 “In our time” archive is a goldmine and the range is astounding. In the last week or so I’ve listened to the Industrial Revolution (x 2), Typology, Pope Joan and Bacteriophages www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

Well this must be the first time that I am positively surprised by a UK entry-level academic salary.

Caturday already? Where does the time go, eh?

Shoes, you say?

Oops (Sound on)

The area round the new Oxford University Humanities Building. From left, the Oxford University Press building (1830), the Blavatnik Building (2015), St Paul's Church (1864), the Humanities Building (2025). The Radcliffe Observatory is in the opposite corner.

Sometimes I wonder why so much of the world's greatest fantasy was written in Oxford (Alice, LotR, Narnia, His Dark Materials...). Then I look out of the window.

He's filed himself

From Arts & Crafts patterns to medieval archaeology. These biscuits recreate stained glass fragments found a few years ago in the triforium of Westminster Abbey.

Still don't understand why they made the Hobbit movies when what the world really needs is a trilogy of films about Gandalf's 17-year archive trip to Minas Tirith.

Make a band even more alcoholic Guns 'n' Rosé

One of my favorite instances ever of collective disobedience: www.bbc.com/travel/artic...

Ozzy thinks Peter needs even closer supervision.

Ozzy supervising Peter

Ozzy supervising Peter

Mlem

"I think the advice I would offer is to remember that leadership is a service role. Your job as a leader is to support the people who work for you, to protect them, to listen to them, & prioritize them." ARL Views with John Unsworth, UVA University Librarian 2016-2025 www.arl.org/blog/john-un...

Got up for 30 seconds, came back to this.

Even better: we're using this as an exercise:

How about this instead?

Meerkat or mere cat. (A bit dark, but I couldn't resist the posture).

A @magdalenoxford.bsky.social JRF was my first postdoc. It was incredibly rewarding: not only did it protect my research time, but also gave me generous and constructively critical peers. While politics/development studies isn't on the list this year, I shared general tips for these kinds of posts:

Come and join us.... www.magd.ox.ac.uk/job-vacancies/

Ozymandias looking particularly dignified today (photograph by Sophie Fischer).

I deplore your taste in 19th century French artists, but I do so more in Seurat than in Ingres.

This is going to seem very random but I miss how the old bird app would have worked brilliantly for this: I’m looking for someone who can help me find information about how, and in what - if any - capacity, the Salvation Army might have been involved in adoption processes in London in the 1910s.

Very excited to receive an ERC Starting Grant to study the earliest archaeological and biomolecular evidence of Homo sapiens in NW Europe Watch this space for new positions in Bristol in 2026! 🎉 #HorizonEurope #ERCStG

Walking along Buttermere earlier this summer. #FingerpostFriday

Definitely an autumnal feel in the water meadow

Meanwhile, this was the face my cat Zoey gave me after I went on vacation for a week:

Much-needed rain. Tipping down.

A huge moment -- Melvyn Bragg steps down from In Our Time after over a quarter of a century. What a programme and what a legacy! Just a model for how to make great, clever, engaging radio, and a twenty-seven-year experiment that proves there's a huge global audience for smart, scholarly programming.

Chilling in my husband’s college room on his very comfortable sofas. Never fear, sticklers! As whippets are cat software in dog hardware, for these purposes he is deemed a cat.

Desk-loaf paperweight

Ozzy's back in the President's Lodgings.

Busy cat / tradie on his court day / me detangling my hair #critterposting #alttextposting

Back in Oxford - at Ramen Korner

Job in outreach at Cambridge Botanic Gardens #PlantScience #SciComm

But the most exciting news of the day is – yes, of course – it’s the 48th anniversary of the beginning of The Enfield Haunting, when a COMPLETELY REAL poltergeist moved furniture, made knocking noises and caused children to levitate