The Big News yesterday was the girls' school being evacuated due to a gas leak. Both Le Soir and De Standaard run articles in today's editions. In one photo you can see L & E - they're so pleased. Questions remain as to how it happened: human error by one if the team working on the roads or inaccurate diagrams of the gas pipe system?

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Finish The Talented Mr Ripley in one day - an afternoon and an evening to be precise. Thoroughly enjoyable. It's fascinating to see Highsmith manipulate the detective genre into a vehicle for self-fashioning. I'm going to find the Minghella film version.

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E's confusion of "telescope" for " horoscope". Inspired, in a way.

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Bogged down in coursework rereadings - seeing the same errors repeated despite numerous revisions. Like trying to microwave week old pasta.

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50,000 km service for the car. As usual I find myself bluffing my way through the questions at the desk - it's not the French, simply my ignorance of most aspects of car maintenance.

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Already behind on the Joyce.

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Teach a class on the first page and a half of Mrs Dalloway. Talk about the importance of hinges and waves. Forms of articulation and becoming. Also her use of idiom and graphic expression - how a phrase such as "work cut out" protrudes and breaks the comforting realism of simple description. Having looked at Nuvoletta's drowning last week, there's a fitting (if grim) logic moving on to Woolf.