Blimey, he's still going!

Forcing myself to sit down and post stuff for my blog has been a bit difficult for me in recent weeks. I've been out and about a fair bit when not working, so getting "quality time" to sit in front of a PC screen and tap tap tap away hard (as opposed to, say, messing around on Facebook)has been a bit difficult.

Anyway, I hope to be a bit more regular in coming weeks. One thing I will be doing is going through old essays of mine from my undergrad days and post them up. We are talking the period 1988-91. Apart from one or two stylistic changes I will leave them as they were originally written (one thing I've noticed reading them is how badly my writing has degenerated in the last couple of decades!). I got a 2.1, so they are not so bad! Furthermore, there are a lot of footnotes in them, so you can follow up stuff if something I say interests you. During Intro Week in my first year every fresher was given a guide to plagiarism and how to avoid it (the only official guidance we were given at the time to writing essays). Basically everything we wrote had to be backed by evidence. Consequently my essays were full of footnotes- more than were really needed. However, I think another reason for this was that holding non-conventional views on a fair few political topics (you may have noticed!)I needed back-up. Being able to quote sources to back you and your arguments up if you do not have conventional views is essential if you are to be taken seriously by others.