I began to feel somewhat let down at Bangor: promises I had been given about the increase in student numbers being matched by an increase in staff appointments were simply not honoured; as student numbers doubled and trebled, staff numbers went down (through retirements). So I decided to look for opportunities elsewhere. I was delighted when a chair of Linguistics became available at Essex; I applied and was successful. In my first year, I managed to finish off the manuscript of my book on Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax which I had been working on while at Bangor. Then I got sucked back into administration, with two spells as Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics and one as Dean of the School of Humanities and Comparative Studies. During a year's study leave in between my various spells of administration, I wrote Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English and Syntax. Currently, I'm working on a couple of acquisition books and a couple of syntax books. When I get bored with one or the other of them, I write the occasional doodle -- a sketch for a possible paper which I'll probably never get round to writing up, primarily because my predilection and passion (and, I suspect, talent) is for writing books rather than articles. You'll find some of my unfinished doodles elsewhere on my web-site.
Essex continues to be a great place to work in -- a place where people make a real effort to minimise the kind of bureaucratic barriers which slow down innovation in other institutions. To my mind, it's the best place in the UK for anyone who shares my interests in Syntax on the one hand and Acquisition on the other. There are lots of friends and colleagues I work closely with -- most notably, Martin Atkinson, Bob Borsley, Harald Clahsen, Claudia Felser, Mike Jones and Roger Hawkins (known informally as the UG group -- if we were a pop group, we'd probably be the UGgles -- or, Heaven forbid, the UGglies): we meet up regularly one evening a week to discuss our own or (e.g.) Chomsky's latest research.
Next, my spare time.