The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

In which I make a lifestyle change... Summer 2022. I walk past the local park, a slice of British recreation ground that currently looks like it is auditioning for the Australian Outback. Everywhere is dusty and brown rather than the vibrant green it should be at this time of year. I cross over the river and note that I've never seen it with so little water in. Every now and then there'd be a plume of smoke in the distance as another local heathland caught fire in the tinder dry conditions.  This summer has been unlike any I've ever experienced. In the UK you expect it to be raining constantly but here at least we went over two months where no recordable rain fell. 2018 was one of the hottest summers ever and it's thought that the chances of the UK experiencing a summer as hot or even hotter than 2018 is now one in ten. Due to the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that's about thirty times more likely than it was before the industrial revolution. Some scena...

In which I consider how to move forward... This week I had a free day and found myself heading for a day trip to the university city of Oxford. I concluded that it's my sort of place with overheard conversations being especially high-brow what with discussions on molecular physics and a tour guide discussing the connection between Edmund Halley and 'Captain' James Cook (though I did have to restrain myself from correcting the aforementioned guide for his information wasn't very accurate- I should know given my committed impersonation of Cook in a Wiltshire school in 2011).  The only place in the city I'd been before was the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is unusual as it displays it's huge collection of anthropological artefacts from around the world by type. This means you get display cases full of musical instruments, or looms or anything you can think of. It's a remarkable place that was easily worth a repeat visit given you could probably go a hundred times a...