Transparency is all. I told you that I'd be monitoring the income from the Google ads which appear (fairly unintrusively) on the right of this blog. It's proved harder than I thought to get the information, to do with tax declarations etc, but I can now reveal our total earnings to date - $22. This is not actually paid over until the account reaches $100 so celebrations are for the time being rather muted. I know some of you think we should drop the ads but I do think it's worth claiming the first $100 at least.

I'm off to Oxford today to visit our principal educational publishing operation. The offices are in the former home of the Potato Marketing Board and when we took over the lease the signage reflected the organisational structure - crisps, chips, new potatoes etc. I suppose our structure (Europe, Middle East, Africa and Caribbean, Latin America) is just as baffling to an outsider. The building is also famous for starring in Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Country where he describes it as one of worst architectural warts in Britain. I think we've improved it a little but the best bit was and is the (albeit distant) view of the dreaming spires.

And if we use binoculars we can just about see (from a superior position) the offices of our fiercest competitor, Oxford University Press.