Business as usual

Rightio, thank you for your patience gentle reader, I am now back from my little sabbatical. I was going to be back yesterday, but then I became unexpectedly drunk and could not type. Yesterday a couple of girls in my class called England 'gentleman country'. I asked if that made me a gentleman, but apparently I did not meet their definition. I think my jeans and shoes were the first giveaway, but also I have 'farmer hair', and of course, what respectable English Gentleman would be seen out in society without his trusty umbrella? Tenuously following the England link, I met an 80-year-old Korean man on the bus yesterday, who told me that he studied poetry for a year at Sheffield University in 1960/61; I think it's the first time since I arrived here that I've met anyone at all that had heard of Doncaster so I was very impressed. He could even remember going through our train station! I think I let him down a little though - he kept name-dropping various eminent scholars and poets he had worked with over there, but I'd not heard of any of them...