Working in Hong Kong but being located in London can be very trying. The worst aspect for me are the early starts, generally speaking I am an early riser but getting up at 12:30 for a meeting starting at 1am is very tough. I had three such meetings this week, and ended Friday feeling like…
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It is always nice to do things for students, and so even though I am in London I was happy to give a short speech to the Ecology and Conservation Society of HKU on Friday. Spoke about my life as an ecologist and conservation in Hong Kong. From the other speaker I also discovered that…
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The Year of the Ox begins, and let’s all hope its better than the Year of the Rat! I am still working from London with no real idea about when I will be able to return. At the moment I have a flight booked for early April, after the one in early March was cancelled…
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An unexpected benefit of in person interviews is that the interview panel brings all the candidates into the university and can talk to the candidates on Hong Kong time (even if the candidates are jet-lagged). Now that everything is being done using video links the candidates remain in their time zone, the panel in theirs,…
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Three weeks now of working from the UK. It has settled into a routine of sorts, most days are straightforward starting work about six and overlapping with Hong Kong’s afternoon to deal with day-to-day issues. The UK afternoon can then be used for activities that do not need to be done during the Hong Kong…
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The day that I arrived in London the existence of a new variant strain of COVID-19. Hong Kong then promptly banned travellers from the UK, and so I am stuck in London. I had expected a ten day visit to see family but it looks like I will be here until after Chinese New Year.…
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A year ago I was sitting in London for Christmas, it had been about a month since the protests in Hong Kong had hit the university campuses. This event had been much less serious at HKU than many of the other university campuses in Hong Kong, and I along with some colleagues perhaps played a…
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I have taken two weeks leave over Christmas and hope to be able to relax. It has been a year since I last took a break from work and I think that it is beginning to take a toll.
As I have reported on other occasions our marine centre at Cape d’Aguilar has been undergoing a major refurbishment and expansion. We now have a topping out date – 28th December. I visited the site this week to check it out myself and it is making good progress. The week was dominated by the closing…
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Teaching has now ended and so this is the time when it is convenient for me to have the town hall meetings with each department. These are agenda-free meetings where the Faculty Secretary and I respond to any questions that come up from the staff in the department. One thing that has always interested me…
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