I'm doing a couple of days' work for Oxford University Press at the moment, lurking in a soundproofed booth, recording and verifying long lists of tricky words for some audio to accompany two of their dictionaries. Gives me the chance to visit old friends, do a bit of extramural pronunciation work and use up some holiday that I'd otherwise lose, so it's all very handy.
I'm also being much more cautious about walking around too much - using buses and lifts, and working from home one day a week, which is helping the SPD. Indeed, I was so immobile this weekend (partly due to the foul weather and partly because of spending Saturday night driving the big white bus), that I'm feeling almost comfortable today.
PS I'm going to be on Feedback this Friday!

Look at that ticker - less than 100 days to my due date (or "guess date", as the most recent birth book I read would have it). According to my favourite transatlantic veg-foetus comparator, s/he is now "as tall as an English hothouse cucumber" - but just wait for next week, when - all being well - we should achieve "hefty as a cauliflower" status. S/he is certainly now big enough to kick me in what feels like my liver...
M and I are warily beginning to gather a few things for my hospital bag (TENS machine, newborn-size babygros), all passed on by his sister D, with the promise of Niamh's old Moses basket and carseat to follow.

Not much out-and-about to report on over the last few days, as I'm a bit immobilised by SPD (read all about it). We did venture to Richmond to see There Will Be Blood, which felt well-made, but insufficiently engaging - and so over-long that I had to get up before the end to walk about a bit.
I was going to blog about asking school-leavers to pledge allegiance to the Queen this week, but it's so self-evidently stupid I can't seem to work up a head of steam. When I was sixteen I remember another girl and me telling the deputy head at my comprehensive that as anti-royalists we certainly wouldn't be standing up for or singing the national anthem at our GCSE certificate ceremony, which some staff member had presumably decided to include to lend some sort of gravitas. There was Trouble.
The OAE Johannes-Passion concert Mum took me to last month is being broadcast by Radio 3 next week (on Good Friday). I really recommend it.

New priority seating signs go up on the Tube from this week which for the first time make explicit reference to pregnant women. I find I am rarely offered a seat even now I'm obviously gravid and not just plump, so we shall see if it makes any difference. I'm reminded of the rigid pecking order in the Paris Métro for such seats, where femmes enceintes take priority over old people but must yield to the disabled, who in turn give way to mutilés de guerre. But in Paris they actually vacate the seats for you - and my Korean colleague tells me that over there, the seats are left empty even if there are no suitably qualified passengers around.

I confess I am also disappointed to see that the middle pictogram of the parent carrying a child is wearing one of those mysterious triangular skirts that denote femaleness. They missed a trick there - could have made a bid for equality (or perhaps non-skirt-wearing gender neutrality) like they did in Vienna last year; they changed the person fleeing towards a fire exit to a booted long-haired female figure, and - shock horror - had an apparently male (or at least betrousered) figure changing a nappy.

"Language and picture language say a lot about social roles. We are used to seeing pictograms of men for everything, and only pictograms of women when it is to do with children. That's not reality."

M's book comes out this week! Please look out for it in your local bookshop, and if they don't have it, ask them why not.
He also has articles in History Today and BBC History magazine - to go along with the latter, there's a photo gallery and a podcast too (select March 2008).

Meanwhile, in the world of pronunciation, my colleague Martha did a sterling job on the Today programme this morning, talking about Dmitri Medvedev and other Russian pronunciation pitfalls with John Sergeant and Jim and Sarah - until next Tuesday you can listen again - it comes at 8.50, right at the end of the programme.