The visiting research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh look rather tempting, although all they actually offer is an office, no funding, and they want you to have you recruit referees to write in confidence to them about you, which is a really weird idea to a Norwegian. I mean, I know, I’ve heard about this, but serious, how weird. Here we base hiring decisions on publications, experience, maybe an interview or a trial lecture, and if referees are given it’s so that the committee can ring them and actually talk with them. Somehow that seems eminently normal to me, whereas these letters seem downright scary. And time consuming.

Anyway, the tempting thing is that one of the university’s research themes is “Life Writing, Testimony and Self-Construction”, which would be a great context from which to work on weblogs, I think. A minimum stay of two months though. That’s so hard to do when you have split custody of a child.