A Return to the Front

Absolute madness - the urge to write gets no less, despite the traumatic ending to the PhD which saw me refuse at the last fence to do the proposed corrections.
Much shock and disbelief at someone who had completed, submitted, had a viva....and to all intents and purposes passed (although there was much huffing and puffing about the borderline status).
Why? Why did I not knuckle down and just do what I was told? Rewrite the bits that were considered unsatisfactory, go through with a fine tooth-comb and correct the typos, insert the references that were suggested as suitable?
Well, that boat had sailed. I could no more open up that document and write another word in it than fly to the moon. I had HAD it with academia. And academics, and the pifflingly unsatisfying nature of research done at such a micro level, that no-one either knows nor cares what the findings of your thesis are. Not even me. At a party, someone asked me to sum up my PhD in a sentence, 'Because' he said 'it's perfectly possible'. So I said 'Verbal aspect is not all it's cracked up to be'. And it isn't. And its not worth another moment spent on it, not even to get to wear the funny hat and have a limp and half-hearted buffet reception in the department common room.
But still...the urge to write persists, and its been a peculiarly unsatisfying 18 months on the intellectual front.
On the one hand, I have a great deal of specialised knowledge. On the other, I have neither the desire nor the opportunity to use it. I open many books and notebooks, my mind skids from one subject to another enthusiasm; it burns but briefly before the volumes are abandoned in the pile on the table, gathering dust.
What is my problem? Why am I such a light-weight, a butterfly, a charlatan? Have I had some psychological crisis that leaves me thus unable to commit to a project, or am I frightened of becoming a jack-of-all-trades, a flailing amateur, destined to half-fill journals with half-baked prose?
I've considered maybe I've been depressed, but I don't feel the awful sense of pointlessness and doom that supposedly accompanies that. I don't know what I feel. Boredom mostly, a sense of the drumming of fingers whilst the days fly by unused, a need to fill my days with something other than hoovering up mud, washing and cooking.
Even a part-time job - in a pleasant enough environment, with tolerable people, became a hindrance to getting on with...nothing. But I resented it's restrictions.
Rowing: Rowing is great when it goes well. It takes you out of yourself (because you HAVE to concentrate!), keeps you lithe and co-ordinated, fills your lungs with fresh air, but the interstices tend to become just time when you sit around waiting to go rowing again.
The children are growing so fast that I merely tend their needs and they beetle off on their own.
The Husband is going through such a total career and existential melt-down that we seldom communicate in any meaningful way at the moment. He is mute with misery, but I don't want to replicate his mother's inane witterings to fill the silence.
The Dog...the Dog is a blessing. Rescued mutt, desperate to love and be loved, bounding, extravagantly pleased to see his humans and snuggle inconveniently alongside them in bed. He keeps me busy; active, anyway.
So resurrecting this blog (as I have found the login details) will be a bit of therapy.
I shall work through - in words, blessed, necessary words - what it is that I am missing, and try to heal that wound, whatever and wherever it is, that lies across me.
Bear with me. It might not be pretty, or happy, or even useful. But I am going to give it a go.

A Leap in the Dark

I should -really should - be settling down with a suitably academic book and doing some serious reading. But as is apparent, I'm not doing that.
I've decided to give myself the afternoon off, partly because the Bright-Eyed Boy has passed on the snotty cold that he was nursing last week and my eyes feel like hot pickled onions in my head, and partly because I've just e-mailed of the latest revision of my first chapter to my supervisor ahead of next week's routine meeting, thus reaching a bit of a hiatus. I'm not inclined to press on with any more writing until I get the comments back: I want to see what he thinks of what I've produced first. By and large he makes encouraging noises, but I always come away feeling slightly downcast and that I haven't said what I wanted to.
It's always a bit of an expedition: York to Birmingham is a good couple of hours by train. Factoring in an allowance for delays means having to set off after depositing the B-E-B at school, walking the two or so miles to the station (the car parking's extortionate and our buses are unreliable and rude), catching the smelly CrossCountry service to Birmingham New Street, surely one of the the darkest and grimmest station in England. Then get onto the branch line that goes by the university (hopping off if necessary for the library), and onwards to the satellite campus where my department is situated, a fifteen minute walk from the stop. And of course, the same thing in reverse after our meeting, which means that I generally get home at around eight in the evening.
When I first travelled down to the Midlands, I really felt that I could not cope with all that travelling - it seemed such a long trek, but now, weirdly, it all feels a lot easier: I recognise landmarks from the train, I know where to get sandwiches and coffee from, how long the various legs of the journey will take me, how to get into the card-protected buildings. It all seems so much more handleable somehow, although nothing's really changed. I've changed.
When I was travelling to Leeds by car everyday during my undergrad years, I had everything worked out to a fine art, and was never late -either for lectures or for picking the children up. But nowadays I am filled with amazement that I managed to do this five days a week for two years, it seems an incredible effort. I guess it's all down to familiarity. Things that are familiar aren't quite so daunting.
A couple of years ago my parents decided, quite out of the blue, that they were going to try a new holiday destination. We were quite surprised, as they'd been travelling to the Italian lakes for a least a decade and a half, with the occasional foray into Switzerland for much the same sort of break. They went further east, and hated it. Unusually for them, they'd not attempted to learn any of the language beforehand, and it seemed to me that from the outset they had almost deliberately decided not to engage with the culture or people - they were sitting back and waiting to be impressed, waiting for the good times to come to them.
Now, if you're unfamiliar with anything east of Italy it all becomes a lot more......rough and ready. Buildings seem to sprout up in odd locations, apparently ungoverned by planning applications or building regulations. Quite often they appear incomplete and remain so for years, with concrete columns and reinforcing rods bristling towards the sky. Roads regularly lack markings, traffic lights are uncommon, pavements rare, gardens seldom well-tended in the our sense of the word. A lot of the landscapes can look pretty desolate and barren, especially if you're used to being surrounded by softly rolling greenery and picture-card views. It was around this new country that my parents were bussed in the company of other equally elderly people. Excursions tended to be very long and tiring, usually ending in a meal of unidentifiable dishes in an out of the way and unfinished hotel. They had a miserable ten days and returned home vowing never to go there again (although looking at their photos, it seemed a most attractive place).
This year they returned to their usual haunt and loved every moment of it, steaming across the lake, going to see the Matterhorn, all the things that they'd done many, many times before. They were surrounded by what they perceived as familiarity. They know the language, the excursion destinations, the timetable for the trains, even the staff at the lakeside cafes - and they recognise what they are eating as well! But I can't help feeling that now they've shut the door on a lot of new experiences, too. I know that there are a lot of places left that my mother especially would love to see, but because the last time they tried something new and didn't like it, they probably won't want to try again. Knowing exactly what you like is great, but sometimes a leap in the dark can ultimately be just as satisfying.

In the Dark

Daughter #3 hosted a rather lovely soiree at our house last night. I say 'lovely' not because of the hosting arrangements (oh no! they were all rather carefree and ad hoc) but because the girls who attended - all #3's peers - were a simply delightful advertisment for 'the youth of today'. They represented a mix of friends old and new that have coalesced into a band of like-minded allies. Not that there was anything clone-like about them: each one seemed to represent a slightly different facet of young teenagerhood. They were an amusing, polite, gregarious and good-natured crowd and I was more than impressed by the fact that they managed to just sit there and chat and laugh for two hours and (more importantly) NOT SPILL A THING!!! It made me almost nostalgic for the days of ground-in jam sandwiches and trampled sausage rolls.
However, by the time the last liftless girl had been deposited safely home and I had hoovered some errant pine needles, my mind/body - tricked by the bonhomie of the previous few hours - was raring to go. Not even a fairly large glass of wine and the suitably soporific Match of the Day 2 was able to stop me revving in overdrive: Chelsea drew with West Ham? Yay! The Husband, who has decided that today will be his last day at work until after the New Year, was mindful that it was getting late and he was tired. So we adjourned to bed where I sat up reading Saturday's review section until he was snoring gently and I started to worry that the rustle of newsprint would wake him again. Consequently, I moved onto the glossy mag (less rustling) until bored by its silly vanity and cringing hand-wringing. By this time it was ten past midnight, so I lay myself down and turned off the bedside light hoping that sleep would come soon. Not a chance. An hour later I found myself increasingly convinced that I was getting colder and colder under the duvet and remembered that we'd fail to click the heating back on at bedtime. I grudgingly hauled myself to the airing cupboard and fumbled around for the on-switch and turned the thermostat right down. I'd been back in bed for about twenty minutes when it occurred to me that I'd not heard the heating pump come on, which meant that it was still, in effect, getting colder and colder in the bedroom. Indeed, I was convinced that I could feel my steaming breath in the dark. So up again I got and readjusted the thermostat to a slightly higher setting. I paused on the landing for a moment until the pump kicked in and I could stop worrying that the entire central heating system had broken down. That's a major concern in the middle of winter, and in the middle of the night - that, and the oven breaking on Christmas Day, or the freezer in the preceding week.
Well, that was it for the remainder of the night. Worry mode. I should, in hindsight, have just turned the light on and forestalled it all with some cheerful reading, but I was still partially convinced that I would fall asleep before too long. But no, my mind wandered and fretted around the usual unpleasant and cobwebby mental annexes that only open up during the hours of darkness: mortal illness, death, financial straits, and the most recurrent one for me at the moment - the feeling that I will most certainly flunk out of my PhD programme.
I've tried analysing this, and I think it's down to a lack of confidence in my own ability. Certainly my supervisor seems happy enough with my progress at this point in time. He does keep going on about word counts though, as if writing up research on a words-per-day basis can guaranteee its success. I'm not convinced this is true, considering that the early stages of a thesis will mostly consist of reading and making notes and that the donkey-work of writing-up happens at the latter-end when you have a clear model in your head of how (or if!) your proposal really works. I think that if you write up too early, you can run into problems if you come across a staggering piece of scholarship that impacts greatly on your ideas (and that is always a real possibility). It can become a major, major task to weave new revelations into a 'done' text, far more trouble and work than if you were still operating at a notes-and-ideas level. You don't know what you don't know, as Donald Rumsfeld said, until you know it. I am acutely aware that I have done no writing on my chapter since my last supervisory meeting a couple of weeks ago, and yet I seem incapable of doing anything about it: my mind keeps skidding away from the topic as if I have an aversion to it. I think it may be because I feel that I am losing control of the project: my supervisor has very definite ideas about what should be said and I often find myself chivvied down avenues that weren't part of my original plan. Still, I remind myself, he is the expert appointed to keep me on the straight and narrow, and to make sure that I deliver a PhD on target. When I was self-funded and part-time I felt that the PhD was mine: I was the client, was paying the university for their expertise, calling the tune, almost. When I got funding (mirabile dictu!), I ceded control. Other people now have a vested interest in my success and thus my progress. Research has ceased to be a delightful stroll around the charming groves of Academe, with ample pauses to sniff at random wayside blooms, it has become a goal-driven, progress assessed slog, with value-added, transferable-skill distractions en route.
When I was a child - and indeed as I grew older, my life seemd to consist of a series of disappointments. I never got the presents I really, really wanted for Christmas (and they were never extravagant) - I got the cheaper, less-desirable version. My friends were always less fun and cheerful than I had expected them to be, having been a voracious reader of Enid Blyton's Mallory Towers. Summer holidays were not golden and tranquilly idyllic, but long and dull and spent trawing around garden centres. My teenage clothes were a home-made approximation of what was then in the achingly fashionable Chelsea Girl chain. My boyfriends were generally off-hand and distant, and likewise an early doomed marriage was characterised by my husband's reluctance to be more than token, beery presence in his children's lives. All in all it seemed to me that, somehow, I always got less than the best because I probably wasn't worth anyone's full attention or effort. I was easy to ignore, write-off, dismiss as trivial, as a winging, neurotic perfectionist who should be damned happy she'd actually got what she'd got.

It wasn't until much later when I met someone who thought I was actually pretty remarkable that my self-confidence grew to the degree that I felt that...yes, I was worth the effort and, yes, I did have something to contribute, and I was utterly transformed and went from strength to strength.


But still deep down, there is that little girl who expects to be let down and feels that she is probably not up to much, who can't bring herself to 'waste' money on a decent haircut for herself and who is not surprised when 'friends' cancel a lunch engagement. And thus (I guess) it is with my doctoral studies. Surely the AHRC must have been mistaken in giving me funding? Me? They expect me to produce something worthwhile? Don't they realise that I will probably let the side down, fail to deliver? Last year, because I was 'in the driving seat', so to speak, I was only ever going to disappoint myself if I did not complete. No biggy. Now that there additional factors, parties and expectations attached to my PhD, I feel burdened by self-doubt and guilt. I am a shabby investment. It's not a great feeling, and one that, in the dark, in the middle of the night dammit!, returns to haunt me again and again.

A Trumpet-Blast Against the Monstrous Onslaught of Admin

Friday again, and my morning has disappeared like mist. The Bright-Eyed Boy is still not properly well, having spent the past couple of days inert on the sofa and refusing food. I've just managed to get a toasted ham and cheese muffin down him without any sicky repercussions (thus far). He seems a lot brighter and, with the exception of the trace of a headache (query: dehydration), certainly on the up. The Husband managed to work from home yesterday while I went down to uni for a 'presentation skills' workshop. I'm getting those boxes on my training needs form ticked at a rapid rate

Pity they're all largely useless and extremely distracting from the job in hand: i.e. research.

I find that it takes me a good few hours to get into the swing of productive scholarly thinking, and another few hours to make any decent headway and put some writing down. Pearls of thought are hard come by and require some extremely oysterly grinding of grit. The ratio of words-read to words-writ is about 10:1 at a conservative estimate - possibly more like 20:1. So anything that distracts is an unproductive irritant.

I was talking to the Husband about this and we decided that the modern mania for monitoring progress and outcomes has meant that we largely spend our time writing about our processes rather than actually doing them. Thus, the result of our investigations tends to show that we are failing as a result of not spending as much time on them as we should. This has the unfortunate effect that, in an attempt to rectify these apparent failures, more strategies are generated. As there are only so many hours in the working day, implementation of the strategies to deal with the first set of failing strategies bites further chunks out of the time that by now is desperately needed to be spent on the original process. We become locked into a downward spiral of assured failure.

What is needed is a return to academic roots. Stop hobbling scholars (and their supervisors) with all this 'quality control', 'investors in people', feedback, outcome bolony.
Universities: say to your post-grad students "Go away, read, research and write. Then come to me occasionally for a chat." The net result will be that the dedicated will stay the course, unfettered by admin and will produce the academic goods. Those that aren't, won't. But at least we won't be in the position of propping up weak candidates who probably couldn't survive the vicious cut and thrust of academia.
Of course, universities are not run for academic or teaching excellence any more. There's no message about the joy of learning for learning's sake, of education as broadening the mind and horizon rather than lining the pocket. Universities are run like the business sector and often managed by its economic migrants. It's all about bums-on-seats and cash in the bank. The way that departments are funded encourages the churning out of publications, not investment in teaching. Departments whose staff don't publish don't get funding, no matter how superb their track record of teaching is. Esoteric courses are ended in favour of more relevant ones. You try finding somewhere that teaches Sanskrit or Syriac. Rare learning and skills are going to be lost and, as they say in supermarkets, WIGIG: when it's gone, it's gone. The same way as the passenger pigeon or the Caspian tiger. And, sadly, just as unlikely to be revived.

Barcelona!

The long dry and mostly sunny autumn seems to have eventually come to an end: today is distinctly cold, dreary and wet. Daughter #3 has very bravely gone off to rowing-training, though I don't imagine it'll be as much fun as it was in the lovely mellow days just gone. She's doing tremendously well and has taken part in a couple of races, thoroughly enjoyed them and won a couple of medals. She is so good at organising herself for this, her guitar lessons and school that it's difficult to remember that she's still only twelve. Twelve, and on her road to independence. I am, by turns, very proud of her and sadly nostalgic that she's growing up so fast. I am feeling somewhat overwhelmed by my doctoral studies. Not that I'm not enjoying them - I really am - it's just that having got funding, the pressure is on to crank up the pace to submit in two and a half year's time - not the five years that I'd originally scheduled. There is so much to do and so much I don't know that even chipping away at it bit-by-bit is quite daunting. Luckily my supervisor is excellent and keeps my feet firmly on the ground, so I don't have the hassle that a lot of my friends have had with unsatisfactory working relationships. The only thing I'm finding a bit of a trial is the obligatory hoop-jumping that seems part and parcel of PhD work nowadays. 'Investors in People' meets academia: paper trails and finding and completing exercises just to have them box-ticked on my training-needs record. Honestly - I'm coasting downhill towards retirement. I'm not realistically going to find gainful employment at the end of the day, am I? (fair enough, my younger colleagues have none of them, to a man, found a job in their chosen field), so why pretend that all this time-consuming workshop attendance is anything more than a form filling exercise that takes me away from the real business of writing?

Half-term looms again (can't believe we're nearly half way to Christmas this term already) and fortunately we've lined up a real treat: Barcelona, courtesy of Airmiles earned through shopping at Tesco. Brilliant - I can't wait, never having been there before. I'm going to try and savour every single moment, not get too stressed over the travel arrangements (like I usually do), and take time to stand and gaze in awe at all the unfamiliar stuff around me. It should be lovely, and a much needed break for the Husband, whose job is pushing him into meltdown, if not complete burn-out.....

All Over Bar the Shopping

Nearly there.......the Bright Eyed Boy dons his shiny new uniform tomorrow and heads off to the start of his last year of primary education. Daughter #3 is making the most of the last few weekday morning sessions of rowing training before her return to school next Monday. The weather is distinctly on the turn now, the sun at a lower angle in the sky, the nights that bit longer, dawn that bit later.... I can get quite melancholic with the shortening of the days: I need a goodly amount of warm sunshine to keep me chipper. This year however I'm not going to get much time to brood as I start my full-time doctoral studies in less than a month's time! To tell the truth, I haven't given it a great deal of thought just recently - there was a flurry of admin to complete just before we went away (only a fortnight ago in reality), and since we arrived back I have been absorbed by general mucking-out, uniform buying, hospital duty (visiting Pa-in-law after his DIY tumble) and wedding hysteria. Daughter #2 is drumming her fingers waiting for her 'big day' to dawn. I haven't actually bought anything to wear to it yet, so that delight is for next week when I have a bit of peace and quiet - although it won't be either peaceful or quiet as the wedding excitement will have reached fever-pitch by then, and no doubt there'll be unforseen crises to attend to along the way. So you can see that anything academic has been severely backstaged. Looking at the blogs that I read on a fairly regular basis, I have to chuckle at the beard-stroking earnestness that allows some chaps (chapesses are conspicuous by their absence in certain circles: I guess they're 'surrendered' or what have you) to spend their summers reading tomes of epic proportions then critiquing them online. I wonder if anyone really cares.....
Although to a certain extent I am envious of those scholars who can devote swathes of time to their subjects, I am so glad that I have a life external to my studies. Real life - family life - tends to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

The Days Thou Gavest....

Well.....that's the summer hols over for another year, and needless to say I am riven with guilt about not appreciating it more at the time blah blah blah. As per usual. Actually it was great: I loved every moment of our foreign sojourn. The fact that we've been to the same mediterranean island for the past six years (...I know - how predictable) lent the strange illusion that the total weeks spent on vacation had consolidated into one six-week long visit, and by the end of our second day we could not believe that we'd only been there a mere 48 hours. So we ate and drank and sunbathed far more than would be deemed good for our bodies, but it was immensely healing and nourishing to the soul - and that's what holidays are all about. But back to this grey and bickering small island with its cold drizzle and unappetising diet......We are already planning our next escape.

At the moment, I feel quite tired out and unenthused about rejoining the fray: the Bright-Eyed Boy returns to school later this week, leaving daughter #3 and myself to make a few desultory trips for new school uniform before she goes back next week. Then I am on my own again, facing the HUGE responsibility of becoming a full-time, fully-funded PhD student at the beginning of October. Ulp! (That, and daughter #2's wedding which is scheduled for a fortnight's time) No doubt I'll perk up once relieved of my quotidien maternal resposibility. Perhaps I should buy some new stationery goods to symbolise my new 'start'. I remember from my schooldays that a new pencil-case and jotter always seemed to promise a new, improved term-time identity, a new commitment to study and enthusiasm. I was always baffled by those who chose to cling on to their scruffy old pencil-cases and eschewed new goods: were they deliberately embracing asceticism as a style-choice or simply unable to appreciate the frisson generated by minor self-indulgence? Probably neither - they just weren't as neurotic as me, and no doubt their lives have gone on to be models of rectitude and fiscal commonsense.

I was mesmerised in the outbound airport by a rack of Moleskine goods of every size. Had I not been going on my holidays (rather than returning from them) I would no doubt have plundered the display for another large floppy-back 18-month diary (week per page). I've been using one of these for over a year now and am very conscious that it runs out at Christmas and I haven't seen one locally. I love it: it's now covered in my erratic handwriting in various different inks and is full of useful website addresses, quotes, references and bibliographic essentials. My supervisor expressed a modicum of surprise that I 'did everything longhand'. I don't - at least not 'proper' work -but I've never mastered the art of cyber-notes - where do they all go? Everything that has caught my imagination or attention is there to see and, most usefully, I can usually visualise a particular item's whereabouts on the page or pen-colour which makes its retrieval much easier than snatching it back out of the ether. It is a real vade mecum, a commonplace, a forum, a repository of knowledge, ideas and the springboard of thought. And much as I love the functionality and range of my laptop, it will never replace my diary.

Mild Annoyance at Irritating Bloggers

I generally spend about an hour a day catching up with the blogs that I've got filed under 'favourites': it makes me feel like I am keeping abreast of the work environment even if I'm not putting words down myself. But just recently a couple of them have began to rankle and I'm seriously thinking of knocking them off the list. It's hard to identify the reasons precisely, but it's the same sort of feeling that you get when a colleague's voice starts to get on your nerves and you sit drumming your fingers, waiting for them to get on their favourite hobbyhorse yet again. The intrusion of ego into scholarship, I think. Sure - everyone's got a point of view (and there's nothing duller than a blog detailing field-resources with no personal reflection) - but when that point of view becomes absolute conviction and obscures objectivity......

The older scholars tend to take themselves less seriously, even though they are the ones with greater academic clout, but I suppose that self-deprecating humour comes after years and years of experience and the realisation that the more you think you know, the less you actually do! I have to admit a wry smile when one of these established scholars verbally 'pats' a neophyte on the head: the puppy-like fawning and widdling that follows is most amusing.

The Eye of Joy

On Wednesday we put the final touches to my AHRC nomination form. I can at last breathe a profound sigh of relief and think about the fact that I HAVE FUNDING FOR MY PhD STUDIES NEXT YEAR!!!!! I can hardly believe, after such a long time - this is the third consecutive year of applying - that I have finally been successful. I am enormously buoyed up by the whole thing and immensely grateful to all those people who have contributed their time, efforts and encouragement. I shall do my utmost to prove myself worthy of them and of the award. At last I will be able to immerse myself more fully into the academic life and feel that I am truly part of that community.

There is a part of me, however, that is very reluctant to rejoice too much: a little worm of caution gnaws at me telling me that the money isn't actually in the bank as yet, not to count my chickens etc.

This is where I appeal to that little-known 'Eye of Joy'. The 'Eye of Joy functions in much the same way as its better known talismanic cousin the 'Evil Eye'. Anyone who has been to the eastern Mediterranean cannot have failed to observe the dark blue and white symbols that are liberally on display, particularly on things like the prows of ships, or hanging from rear-view mirrors. They are to ward off the 'Evil Eye', a malevolent force that can invoked to bring misfortune to the unwary (I've got one hanging in my kitchen, brought back from Greece). Just as being unprepared can lay one open to the force of evil, so can overconfidence and the premature celebration of good luck. It is customary to receive good news with an acknowledgement that things can go awry, that events lie in God's hands and that he can withdraw a blessing as well as bestow it. The uttering of a brief apotropaic formula ensures that the expected good luck or anticipated event will materialise, and that the utterer's confidence is not misplaced. And that is what this last paragraph has hopefully ensured: that I shall receive my dosh!

A Half (Term) Life

Well, at least today was payday - if not for me (I never get paid a bean) , then for the husband, who very generously sees it frittered away on food, mortgages, diesel, Starbucks etc. etc. It seems a particularly long time since money last entered our account and since we were literally down to our last brass razoo, there was a great feeling of relief to know that we could at last afford to use the debit card again without going into the red. It's rather lovely today: warm and sunny with a light breeze, but we've had to make a trip into town to stock up on those things which aren't really necessary, but make life a bit easier when you get them. Baby wipes, new shoelaces, razors, dog poo bags, that sort of thing. Town was busy, teeming with tourists determined to enjoy its history and picturesque nature. I have no problem with that, except it makes the streets a bit of an obstacle course. Fortunately the city-centre is pedestrianised during the main part of the day, although you do see the occasional loon who has not realised this and is forced to run (or drive) the gauntlet of meandering, sausage roll-munching rubberneckers. It's time to renew the bright-eyed boy's passport as it runs out before our summer holiday. It will be his third passport: the photo on his first one was taken at ten days old, and the second at five years. It's a little poignant to see his little life measured out in five year spans. When this next passport expires, he'll only have a year before he applies for an adult ten-year one. How time flies.

Half term is nearly over and, in truth, these holidays have not been too successful. We all seem a bit fractious, pulling in different directions. I think we're tired, bored and a little unsettled, but maybe that's just me projecting my own feelings. I'm uneasily aware that my studies have gone by the board just recently, but it's very difficult to stay fully motivated when I'm not really part of an academic community. There's no-one in my particular field to sit down and discuss ideas over a coffee with. I miss going into uni and meeting up with folks before and after classes - to tell the truth this distance learning is all a bit lonely: hour after solitary hour on the computer, or silently reading. I'm also in limbo again, funding-wise. If I receive nothing again this year, I'm faced with another year of scraping train fares, money for books, ink-cartidges, paper etc. with no prospects of attending conferences or anything above the absolute minimum. I've got enough put by for another year's part-time fees, but it's a bit of a half-life - like being an academic semi-member of the living dead! Fingers crossed, chin up eh? Worse things happen at sea.

Pastures New

Well - Induction Day on Monday went a lot more smoothly than I had anticipated. I tend to such days as a procession of hurdles that need to be successfully overcome. First, Train No1 was waiting in the station in the chilly 6am light....the computerised reservation system had failed so it was rather difficult to locate the correct carriage, let alone the right seat. The cross-country line is slow and there are regular stops along the way so journey No1 took three hours. Train No2 runs at approximately 15 minute intervals and arrived within a very short space of time so that I managed to disembark at my destination at 9.25. That left me 5 minutes to complete the 15 minute walk up to the department, but academia running as it does, I arrived in time to make myself a cup of lousy coffee before we were shepherded across the hall for the usual meet and greet stuff that makes up these things. It concluded with gratifying alacrity and I managed to have a few words with Academic Supervisor No2 before walking back downhill to the branch line station where I travelled one stop up the line to the main campus. It's rather a pleasant green-ish space surrounded by utilitarian brick-built units and a couple of remnants from the age of successful Victorian enterprise (the Great Hall and an enormously tall clock tower that seems to act as a giant sundial). Obtaining my student ID card I made my way (after a fairly decent latte) to the library that smelt....oooh....like books! I found a few useful volumes and, having checked them out, proceeded to lunch on a baked spud and coleslaw. Early afternoon I had my first meeting with my PhD supervisor: it went very well, and I think that we should be able to work together excellently. Having discussed targets and arranged the next session, I made my way back to the branch-line station ...but not before I'd checked out the on-site Waterstones and made an appropriately reduced-price purchase courtesy of my new student card! Finding myself with a few spare minutes at the main station, I had another hot drink and waited in relative comfort in the passenger lounge before boarding the 16:30 home. I eventually arrived back at our house at 7.30pm, much to the excitement of the dog, who'd been wondering where I'd been all day.

The upshot to all this is that the things that I had worried about prior to the event didn't trouble me: I pushed through the 'comfort zone' and am pretty sure that next time I won't feel anything like as apprehensive. Success.