The Man with No Time

Last weekend I took a long holiday down in Brighton with some friends from my undergraduate days. I had to drive down, which was a long journey, but I was able to stop off in Coventry both ways, which really helped make the journey bearable! It’s many years since I went to Brighton, and I never really saw much of the place. We either went to the beach, or were on the seafront for the Brighton Speed trials. It was therefore rather nice to actually explore the town a little more. My friend James, the driving force behind the trip, has fond childhood memories of wandering the lanes, and of the beach, and was keen to show the place off the rest of us.

Computer and board games will be the subject for part 5 of the opening post series on this blog. Two posts in a day! Can you tell it's the weekend and I've got nothing to do? Computer games, once the hobby of only geeks such as myself, have become something of a mainstream pastime in recent years. A greater and greater percentage of the population are playing board games, as the generation that grew up with them continues to play on the new generation of consoles (PC gaming is another story). In my opinion this is a good thing. Board games, on the other hand, have almost gone in the other direction. The old scene of families sitting down to board games of an evening or at the weekend is, in my experience, in steady decline. Traditional boardgames, such as Monotony (sorry, Monopoly) and Scrabble are being usurped by 'German-style' games, and becoming more geeky in the process. Or possibly that's just the sense that I get from people I know, although recent game...

Welcome to my blog! Let me introduce myself. My name's David, I'm 24, and I'm a hobby-holic. I have far too many of them for the amount of time that I have. In fact I frequently hear the phrase "how do you find time to do all of that?" What's that old saying? If you want something done, give it to a busy person to do? That's me all over. I'm currently at the University of St Andrews, studying (hah!) for my PhD in astronomy; specifically, in the art of planet hunting. I'm a member of the WASP consortium, which is one of the biggest transiting planet searches around, and has members from universities around the UK. So far our tally of planets is up to 82, but it's increasing all of the time. I mostly enjoy my work. Life every job, and make no mistake, it is a full-time job (albeit one with a great deal more flexibility than most others), it has its ups and its downs. Around that job I have many, many hobbies, hence the name of the b...