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Category Archives: Personal

Apologies

I frequently get comments from female working friends with kids who say, “I don’t know how you combine full-time work, two young kids and blogging! What’s your secret?” It’s a juggle which involves many late nights and a sympathetic, helpful husband. I have often wondered how many balls I can simultaneously juggle, as I’m one [...]

Eye Candy De Heir

Facebook. Besides being invented for the social glue that is the ‘poke’ (who do YOU poke and how often and can anyone explain why) it’s for sharing cool stuff like this 1930s aerial photograph of Edinburgh, the legendary city where I live. Originally by Alfred Buckham, I nicked it off SL’s page where it was [...]

Saints and Scroungers

One of my favourite modern films is “Stigmata”. In it, a Catholic priest and debunker of miracles for the Holy See (Gabriel Byrne) stumbles across the case of an American hairdresser (Patricia Arquette) who appears to be exhibiting the signs of Stigmata despite living an unashamedly dissolute party-animal life and being a complete non-believer. What [...]

Exam nightmares

Every now and then, I’m sitting in an examination room at my old English school. There’s been some problem with my A-Level exams, and they’ve asked me to re-sit the History exam some 20 years later to prove it was really me who took the original exam. I am trying my best to write essays [...]

Obligations VI and photos

As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been scarce over the last few weeks. This is because I went to London, Ontario to attend the Obligations VI conference (which covers private law: contract, tort, unjust enrichment, property, trusts, equity etc). The theme of the conference was “Challenging Orthodoxy”. If you know anything about legal [...]

Law, practice and shame

This is a post which has been a long time in the brewing (I started it back in May but was interrupted by exams, book launches, and book proposals) but hopefully it’s better for the brewing. There have been a number of posts, articles and incidents in recent months which have made me think about [...]

Mind the Welfare Gap

To William Beveridge it was about eradicating evil – the “giant evils” of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. To David Cameron it is about encouraging citizens to do the right thing – to work, to save, to take personal responsibility. The prime minister urges us today to go back to first principles in thinking [...]

Random travel observations (Malta and Sicily)

My tips for long flights are: Stick to water on the flight; Have salt; Get massages. (Had a massage the evening I left and at the Dubai stopover. So worth it.) Malta Australian cuisine being Mediterrasian means that, when one gets to the Mediterranean, the food is familiar. There are lots of construction cranes dotting [...]

Survivors’ Guilt

I’m blogging about Easter again, sorry. This time spurred by an online conversation between friends about the appropriateness or not of being wished “Happy Easter” on Good Friday. Classicists of the world, wrack off – yes I DO know the entire event was probably lifted from pre-existing pagan rites of spring, but for the purposes [...]