I’ve lost count of how many doctorates I have examined – either as an internal or external examiner.  I’ve travelled all over the UK in doing so, from Oxford to Dundee, and also served on PhD juries abroad – in Estonia and four times in France.  Today I have served as examiner for a thesis submitted at Kings College, London.   But my topic tonight is not that.  It’s the changes in the work we can do whilst travelling.  I am in London about once every ten days for one purpose or another.  Even before I was a PVC I spent a lot of time visiting London.  One of my earlier books was very largely based on research amongst the foreign census collections held by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys at St Catherine’s House.  The library there was open to the public only between 10 and 4, so I used to get an early train down and then work through without a break for lunch before setting off back to St Pancras for the slow journey home.  There was no public access to a photocopier in the library, so most of what I was involved in was copying down data on various European cities.  My activity on the journeys to and from London was spent marking student essays or, on the way home, doing calculations on my new data, using a pocket calculator.

But the train journey to London is now hugely changed.  It started some years ago with mobile phones and the possibility of ringing someone up in response to something in a paper one was reading.  Then came laptops and the chance to work the whole journey on a paper or even on a presentation one was scheduled to give on arrival.  More recently wifi has come to the train.  The train has become a mobile office. Today I spent an hour on my journey to London re-reading parts of the thesis for examination and also going through my fellow examiner’s preliminary comments once again.  But I also kept up to date with my e-mails as well as listening to some favourite music on my MP3 player.

On the journey home I have read the papers for the University Executive Board tomorrow.  I am traditional enough to have those in printed form, so this was a rather old-fashioned aspect of the journey that had similarities to actions of some years ago – others would have read the UEB papers on their iPads.  But I have also dealt with e-mails to and from colleagues in Greece, China, the USA, France, Germany and Italy and should end my journey in Sheffield at 2100 this evening pretty well up to date with the day’s correspondence.  I have also exchanged a series of text messages with a colleague who is on an earlier train north.  Finally, all being well, in a few minutes time I will upload this blog from a Word file into uSpace.

Advances in telecommunications enable us to keep in touch with each other and with what is going on in the wider world.  But the downside is that I am still at my keyboard at a time of the evening when I could be doing the crossword in one of the papers I’ve picked up during the day, or watching the Derbyshire landscape pass by.