Suyash and I enjoying Pimms with Izrin on the punt. Circa 1997.
Author Archives: Khai Yin
The Oxford Angst
Colin Wood had said to me more than two decades ago – You won’t learn much about engineering here, Khai. Not as much as you would if you had gone to, say, Imperial College. But you will know that you don’t know. And you can (then) find out (about what you don’t know). Or, more …
Five Mathematicians
Because as Tim was wont to say to me, “What’s an engineer but a failed mathematician?”
Gentle Regrets
Like Scruton at Cambridge, at Oxford, I was socially estranged, but spiritually at home.
Je ne veux pas travailler
Sometimes you don’t feel you truly own something unless it presses against the flesh.
Babymetal
One item on the bucket list ticked–hearing Road of Resistance live. And I was in its infamous Wall of Death to boot and had lived to tell the tale. Despite how innocuous this band looks, Babymetal play some of the absolute heaviest, brutalest metal ever concocted by any mortal. The breakdown in Iine! has got …
Mechanicks at the Universitie
By the late Alastair Howatson. Shipped from a used bookstore in England, now in our family library for posterity.
Suyash
On my deathbed, I’d regret letting true friendships to atrophy over time. I’d only known Suyash for one year (he came to Oxford from Bucknell as a visiting student), but we were close as any brothers you ever knew.
VIII
One day I shall scull the choppy waters of Cherwell again. One day.
History
I’m now a proud custodian of these three important records of Mansfield College history–Mansfield College, Its Origin and Opening by Robert William Dale et al. (1889), The Life of Andrew Martin Fairbairn by William Boothby Selbie (1914) and Mansfield College, Oxford: Its Origin, History and Significance by Dr Elaine Kaye (1996). There’s something reassuringly immutable …