Foot and mouth

Say what you like about Euro96, it at least gave academics in financially straitened universities something else to be worried about. A THES reporter ringing a London Guildhall academic the morning after 39 redundancies had been announced was alarmed when the conventional conversational gambit "How are you?" was greeted with an unequivocal "pretty deppressed". The questioner got no further than "You don't mean . . . ?" before the answer came "No, I was at Wembley last night".