I’m Ruth Dixon and this is my blog about my garden and other interests… this blog may go in any one of several directions. We’ll see what (if anything) people find interesting.
I work (part-time) at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford on how the civil service and central government has changed over the past 30 years or so. See http://xgov.politics.ox.ac.uk. Some things from my work there may come into my blog.
The immediate impetus for starting this blog is the Oxford University ’23 things’ programme http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/23things/all-about-23-things/ and to take part, I must set up a blog – something I’ve been thinking of doing anyway. So here is my first post.
Why ‘My Garden Pond’? I can see the pond when I’m cooking or washing up, and it is a great distraction from other things that I should be doing. One rainy day two ducks came into the garden and started to investigate the pond – which has a waterfall topped by a ceramic dish. The drake sat in the dish and ate all the duckweed. I took a photo of him through the rainy kitchen window.
So this blog will be about the things that I notice whether on the pond or in the wider world.
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Testing how to embed tweets
Anyone know how to include tweets in a Wordpress blog post?
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Robert Wilson (@PlanktonMath) December 15, 2012Like this: Paste tweet https://twitter.com/PlanktonMath/status/279908377830752257 between [ and ] into Text window (thanks to @PlanktonMath for q!)
Looking forward to reading as I, too, am not sure where my ’23 Things’ will head!
Glad to have you in the programme, and that it coincided with your latent blogging ambitions! We’re also looking forward to hearing how it goes.
Hello Ruth, looking forward to reading your blog – nice to see someone else mixing posts about their garden with other interests. Your pond sounds wonderful!
Thanks for all your kind comments! The ‘waterfall’ sounds grander than it is! I’ll try to put in a photo soon.
Are you also interested in modernisation in Local Government? Lots of interesting things going on there too!
Yes there are – do you work in that area? I am only working on central government but there is certainly interesting work being done (by e.g. Tony Travers, LSE) on local government.