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Dear Professor Lapping, Well, here I am on the beach outside Faro. It's very hot and I'm looking forward to my lunchtime vinho verde and grilled sardines.

What a good idea of yours to suggest I brought the mobile phone with me in case there was the odd problem over admissions which required attention.

You couldn't have been more right. There I was, watching some fado (Portuguese music) in Albufeira last night, when I had an urgent call from the university admissions officer saying that our department was seriously over quota. You know how we always calculated that only 50 per cent of the students to whom we made conditional offers will get the required grades. Well, the actual number this year turned out to be 97 per cent. This means (and I could be wrong because I dropped the calculator in the sea this morning) that instead of us having 140 new students in October we will have about 267.

There's no need for panic, though, because I've already put an emergency plan into action and have been ringing up successful students all morning and saying how pleased we are that they will be coming to Poppleton and hoping that they won't be put off by the news of the outbreak of typhoid fever on campus, or the extra three statistics courses we've programmed for the first term of their course, or the current accommodation problems which mean that they will have to share their study bedroom for the entire first year with either a member of the Christian Union or an International Socialist.

Hope your management course is going well and thank you for "empowering" me to fill up my holiday with all this exciting admissions work.

Must rush - there goes the phone again.

Bom dia Maureen

102969 Lapping, G. (Prof.) Dynamic Management Course Wilderness Trail PO Box 1892 Perthshire Scotland