Anon. In the summer of 1996 I found myself watching bumblebees, sitting amidst a dense patch of nettles and comfrey in the Itchen Valley Country Park, on the northern edge of Southampton. I had managed to get myself appointed as a lecturer in the biology department at Southampton University, and was enjoying for the first time the luxury of being paid to do research on anything I fancied. The job of university lecturer is a pretty odd one. For a start, an ability to lecture is fairly low on the list of attributes for which the university appointing panels look. The main criterion that is used is the research record of the candidate. This explains why some university lecturers are entirely lacking in even the most basic communication skills, or indeed social skills of any kind. When I was an undergraduate I had one lecturer who, in a manner slightly reminiscent of but much less engaging than that of my old biology teacher, Mr Newton, would deliver an entire one-hour monologue with a pipe firmly clenched between his teeth and his back to the audience so that almost nothing he said was audible.
