Not a big one for honours, unsurprisingly (whose idea was it that we remove all references to the empire in the honours, and allow the option of being presented them by the Speaker? I like that), but if we have to have them in their current form, then I’m glad that they’re going to good people.

Prof Averil Millicent Cameron, CBE, Prof of Late Antique and Byzantine History, Univ of Oxford and Warden, Keble College, for serv to classical scholarship.

Ms Susan Catherine Leather, MBE, chair, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Auth, for serv to the regulation of infertility treatment and embryo rsrch.

Ms Julie Therese Mellor, chair, Equal Opportunities Commission, for serv to equal opportunities.

I didn’t make lectures very often at Oxford, but I did hear Averil Cameron a few times, which was great and may have contributed to me getting some marks at all from the GH1 and 2 papers; being one of the first woman heads of a formerly all-male Oxford college endears her to me too. Suzy Leather has a reliable way of winding up the anti-choice and anti-gay brigade at the HFEA; Julie Mellor was unfailing an articulate spokesperson for women’s equality in any number of arenas until she stood down earlier this year. And now they’re all Dames.

Meanwhile, Chris and Tim are getting excited about an award for services to bats in Oxfordshire…

(thanks Tim W for the link to the full lists)