Will the Professor Sir sign my book?

A bit like Oliver Twist going to back for more (alright nothing like it) I approached Professor Sir Roderick Floud to ask him if he would mind signing my book 'Quantiative Methods for Historians'. Anyway he said 'of course'. In fact it was much easier than getting more porridge or even, a better analogy, easier than getting Richard Bacon to sign an autograph in Whitby the other week - husband had to fake a headache in the hotel corridor. In this case I just simply asked. Or perhaps it was the absence of embarrased husband present which did the trick. Anyway I'm taking it in on Wednesday.

The course is outstanding. I'm certainly not disappointed. In fact the opposite. We were told all day today that this course is not only the nation-leader, it's the world-leader. In fact the whole 'school' is. There's only nine of us on the whole course (which is absolutely ridiculous as this is the only twentieth century history department in the whole country) and one of those is part time. We get one to one tuition on our options (surely only matched by Oxbridge) and we pick our essays for the Core Courses. As long as they don't overlap, much, but they can interweave. So for example I could do a 'Twenty-first century history of dementia' for my dissertation, with my Core Course 1 essay 'A history of age discrimination in the 1990s' with Core Course 2 essay being 'A post-war historiography of geriatrics'. I was going to do Madness & Society as an option at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the history of medicine but it's only available next term. So I'm going to do 'Interview Skills for historians' as I'm hoping to interview geriatricians etc.

Everyone on the course seems very nice indeed. We're a mixed bunch which is quite nice, and we all like a beer, but not too much of it.