I've set up monthly meeting with my assistant to make me look at the budget situation. Hopefully this will force me to grapple with the numbers - and more importantly what to do with them.

But somehow - although I'm reasonably numerate - as soon as you stick a currency symbol in front of any kind of figure I begin to feel I'm translating out of some very alien language.

TheOldPlace had a simpler system in many ways. If, by the end of the financial year, you hadn't spent the money you lost it. We all got through our book budgets for certain! Better yet we were sometimes given extra money from parts of the Uni which hadn't spent their allocation. The only way of getting through it in the time available was to hit a really huge bookstore a couple of hours away and literally pluck titles from the shelves. Great fun.

But we don't do that here. :-( We can carry money over which causes lots of problems down the line. But with a bit of hard labour for three hours or so, I've spent over $10,000 on books today.