Five good things to start November

[shewhomust]

A new page on the calendar that hangs by my desk:

Winter sunset shining through the passage into Maes Howe

The first entry in my 2015 diary:

Martin Simpson at the Old Cinema Launderette (strange but true...)

A quince poem:

Iain Galbraith's translation of Jan Wagner's Quittenpastete won the Stephen Spender Prize 2014 for poetry in translation. I like the 14 and under winner, too (from the French of Jean Dominique).

There are two kinds of physicists, the ones who are devoted to their blackboards and the ones who have to have a whiteboard -

according to Wendy James, project manager for Studio Daniel Liebeskind on the University's planned new Centre for Fundamental Physics. (She makes a good case for the building, too, and promises it will be "polite" and melt into the landscape. You might ask why the University has saved its polite and harmonious building for a site entirely within its own territory, and has built its domineering and impolite building on the main road into Durham - but that's not a fair question for Ms James).

An unexpected lunch date:

Talking of fundamental physics, we have a last-minute lunch date with a professor of chemistry and physics (one person). Better get ready to go!