We are well past the point of no return for the Part IA exam papers, and I am now crossing my fingers that nothing goes wrong between now and when the scripts come back for marking. Many thanks to my co-Examiner Cengiz Öztireli and our amazing and long-suffering Undergraduate Teaching Manager, Becky Straw, for their assistance.

As Chair of Examiners for Part IA, I have found it appropriate that Examiners this year should sit almost the entire exam rather than leaving 20 minutes after they arrive, in order to ensure timely responses to student queries. Leaving the exam so close to the start saves nobody any time (since you must remain alert and available the whole time anyway), and to the contrary only creates completely avoidable chaos. The likelihood of an error being found within the first 20 minutes is entirely discountable anyway, so if the Examiner is there to respond to such contingencies, they must be present for longer.

As I have done ever since I arrived in 2023, I have assisted the Part II Examiners with dissertation marking. This year it has been a bit more of an exciting process than usual, which has underscored for me the importance of maintaining year-to-year continuity in the Examiners team so that both the spirit and parameters of the role can be preserved without straitjacketing it through over-regulation.

I had not planned to be working on funding proposals right in the middle of the Examining crunch, but fate has intervened and here I am. We managed to get one proposal in, and I have another one that I am preparing for a different call.

Continuing on from last time I made my way through the rest of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels, finishing up Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution. VanderMeer is at his best within Area X, and his workplace drama and detective narrative is disappointing by contrast. Absolution comes to us a decade after the original trilogy, and my take-away is that there is a fine line between leaving enough unsaid to create the illusion of a complete but mysterious world, and simply blasting out a lot of fraying threads that do not appear to be weavable into a coherent whole. Too much here gives the appearance not of a mystery that is left tastefully unsolved, but rather of authorial flailing.

I picked up Contact, of which previously I had only seen the film (a long time favourite). It’s very enjoyable and mostly well-written, but I cannot help feel the presence of the authorial avatar who will not shut up about the folly of evangelicalism, or the evils of television advertising.