Desert Island Desks

• A new 50ml bottle of Waterman's violet ink.
• A home-made desk tidy (made of nine centres from paper-tape reels) containing eighteen overhead projector pens (two water-soluble ones, sixteen permanent ones in seven colours and three widths) and one Staedtler correction pen.
• A plastic-straw model of a face-centred cubic crystal cell, and one of two adjacent body-centred cubic cells.
• Eight pencil-stubs, including one advertising Pritchards PUROSAN (``kills germs as it cleans; established 100 years'' that must be older than even me by a year or two.)
• One of those pencil shapeners with the plastic tub to catch the shavings.
• A plastic bottle (marked CS-85 Di ket e  rive   ad  leaning  olution) containing isopropyl alcohol (for correcting the ohp slides and livening up the coffee).
• One or two as yet unused pencils (twenty-four of HB, thirty-one of B).
• A July 1992 copy of Thomas Cook's European timetable (Railway and shipping services throughout Europe).
• A fine china coffee beaker from Rotterdam, still half full of good strong coffee.
• A one pound honey jar full to overflowing with the week's dottle from the espresso machine.
• A very thoroughly washed out 500g Marmite jar of very finely ground dark roast Medelin coffee.
• A dark beige anglepoise lamp.
• A piece of grey paper about four and a half inches square that says `Week-1-end for the use of passengers holding a valid ticket for this journey in Standard accommodation on payment, on the train, of a £3 supplement'.
• A copy of the University of Oxford Internal Telephone (and email) Directory (October 1991, ``OUP now on network'').
• A piece of 10swg copper wire about one nano second long, for use in first year hardware lectures.
• A small portable radio tuned to Test Match Special (England have just gone in for their second innings).
• The keyboard of the Sun that stands on the two baulks of timber that don't quite touch the desk, and the mouse and mouse-pad that go with it.
• A 15" square pcb carrying 16k by 17 bit of very fine core store (so fine that nobody believes that there are cores there... which rather spoils the effect) and a piece of paper that fell out of something Joe Stoy once owned, that says ``PLACE THE SELF-ADHESIVE GOD HERE''.
• A pair of Sony MDR-A10 folding headphones with the hinge that digs into the top of my head.
• A copy of Golwg magazine (volume 4, number 45, 23 July 1992).
• Four copies of all of the publications I have been able to find from the SERC project whose final report I have to write this weekend. Drat. That's what I've been avoiding doing.