Dear colleagues, Graham Hutton and Conor McBride at Nottingham and I are organizing a termly seminar "Fun in the Afternoon" on functional programming and related topics. The idea is to have a small number of talks as an antidote to mid-term blues, three afternoons a year. The hope is that talks will be informal and fun, and that there will be plenty of scope for discussion and chat as well. Fun in the Afternoon will be peripatetic. The first meeting will be in Oxford University Computing Laboratory on Thursday 16th November, and Phil Wadler of the University of Edinburgh will be opening proceedings. All are welcome, but if you'd like to come, could you please drop me (Jeremy Gibbons) a line so that I have an idea of numbers? If you'd like to give a talk, please also propose a title and a duration. We haven't yet fixed the timetable, because it depends in part on what offers of talks we get. But our current plan is to have talks 14:00-14:45 and 15:30-17:00. Brings sandwiches to eat together beforehand, and join us for drinks in a pub afterwards. There's a webpage with more information at http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fun/ This page also explains how to subscribe to the mailing list, to which all further announcements will be sent. Directions to OUCL are at http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/about/directions.html Jeremy, Graham and Conor