** Attention conservation notice: man complaining about being ill ** Day six of an absolute stinker of a head-cold; at the end of each day, it’s felt like a turning point has been reached, only for the actual turning point to occur in the middle of the night, and to be a turning not exactly…

Been pretty quiet here of late, as I’ve been grinding away at the last cluster of academic commitments on my desk, trying to get free of the backlog so I can leave the building without the waiter chasing after me with the bill, so to speak. Along the way, there have been a number of…

The arrival of a domain renewal notice by email reminded me that yesterday was VCTB’s 17th birthday. I bought the domain in March 2006, in order to map what was then still a Blogspot-based site onto a digital room-of-my-own. I don’t recall how quickly I then moved to using self-hosted WordPress, but I know it…

I arrived in Sweden three years ago today. I’ve come to realise that one of my persistent discursive tics—one that very much predates the pandemic—is to observe that a given stretch of time “seems like a lifetime, but at the same time like a blink of the eye”. I say it because it feels true,…