ALL INVITATIONS TO WRITE SOMETHING THAT COME WITH FAR distant deadlines are a subtle exercise in entrapment (and I speak here from experience as both hunter and quarry) resting on the usual tendency to discount the future. How could anyone resist the temptation to talk about everybody's favourite subject – themselves – when it is enhanced by the flattery implicit in the suggestion that other people might be interested? So easy too: just a few thousand words about changes in the discipline in the last twenty-five years and the way in which one sees it.