Honourable or Dishonourable

If I start by mentioning the traffic I'm aware I'll start to sound obsessive...  However I can't hide my delight that the powers that be had decided after a couple of hellish weeks trying a new 'free for all' roundabout traffic scheme to reinstate the lights at the Mill Hill Roundabout!!   Free flowing traffic mid-morning (late lecture today) and 6pm.  Oh joy.

Lecture went well today and the fact that I'd neglected to put up my availability poll until this morning meant I had time to do my own thing during the morning and early afternoon.  Ceri back from her honeymoon and feeling very positive - looking enormously relaxed after just a week spending time together.  Just hope the pace doesn't knock that out of her too quickly.

So - the lecture.  Today was biological and genetic theories of personality; a lot of material and a lot to say.  A total of 68 slides, which others tell me are impossible to present in under 2 hours, but I'm sort of quietly impressed that I can pitch it just right, even with a break and finishing a little early - still getting in some little anecdotal examples and allowing time to respond to questions.  I enjoyed it, I DO enjoy it.  It's a part of teaching that I love - I feel like I'm sharing something of myself along with the material, and I can see that my enthusiasm means something to a lot of the students who are in turn so keen to feel someone cares about their learning experience.

Now today has brought some interesting news - firstly the final admission of the Rt Honourable Chris Huhne that he has lied consistently over the course of 10 years about his driving transgression.  Here is a man who insisted upon his honour with remarkable self-confidence throughout those years and now faces a spell in prison and public disgrace. How he ever thought it would go away and why he persisted so long in forcibly denying his falsification of evidence is quite mind boggling.  He has been proven indeed to be a dishonourable man.

Second is the declaration that the body of bones found under the Leicester car park is indeed Richard 3rd - the last of the British kings to die in battle and the last of the Plantagenets. With all the retrospective defamation of Richard it appears now that he was an noble man right to the end; that he fought bravely on the battle field and despite his light and delicate frame sustained several dreadful wounds before succumbing.

Almost as amazing is that the facial reconstruction, based on the skull, reveals how closely her resembled the image we have all become familiar with, but with a more gentle visage.  However, an art historian reveals that Richard's portrait had been altered after Henry came to the throne - to make him look harder, slightly evil, and more hunched.  The suggestion now is that this was a technique to try to justify the claiming of the throne by the then Duke of Richmond.  The portrayal of the man as a hunchback and an evil child-slaughtering villain, as so eloquently reflected by Shakespeare, may have been a reflection of the ensuing propaganda machine.  He had a curvature of the spine, bones reveal, but maybe Richard was in fact an honourable man, not a dishonourable one, after all.