No corrections

It's been a long and busy, but most enjoyable, day.

I attended Marina's PhD viva this morning. She gave a great performance over the course of the 2.5 hour examination. The examiners loved Marina's work and would have kept her talking much longer had they been offered the opportunity. I felt a bit sorry for Nagmeh, who was chairing the exam. At one point I'm sure that she was wondering if the discussion would ever come to an end, worrying about the limit of time on the room booking. The outcome of the exam was an almost unheard of, and very well-deserved, 'unconditional pass'. Marina has done extremely well, especially considering that she completed much of her research under Covid19 pandemic lockdown conditions.

I roosted on campus in David's office for a couple of hours this afternoon before heading over to Glasgow Queen Street by train with Emma. From there we caught the subway to Hillhead (a new experience for us both), then walked up the road to LauraMuir's flat for our book group meeting.

We were a small gathering of four: LauraMuir, Emma, Winsford and I. Although we hadn't all read the book in full, we had a good discussion of Fourteen days. The general consensus is that it could do with stronger editing. As one of those who has not quite finished the book, on the basis of our conversation I feel motivated to stick it out to the end. As usual, the book group catering was wonderful. We started with Champagne (and birthday cards for me), then worked our way through a mix of locally bought delicacies and home cooking: arancini; burrata; Asturian stew (meat and veggie versions); and cupcakes. We ended the meal in the traditional book group way with mint tea and Maltesers.

I was really grateful that Mr hazelh picked me up from Waverley in the car following our train ride home. I'm absolutely worn out after the excitement of the day, and very little sleep last night. I wish that I could have a lie in the morning, but I have a hospital appointment at 9:00am.

My blip is of a couple of the 26 pages or so of notes that I took during Marina's viva. Normally we use notes like these to help the candidate understand the context of the corrections to the thesis requested by the examiners. In this case, however, they are redundant :-)

Exercise today: walking (18,929 steps).