I decided last night, for no apparent reason, to move Nick’s vast collection of art books to the shoddily painted (by me) craftwood shelves from the equally shaky dark-stained bookcase they’re currently on. This essentially involved moving them a metre to the left, but it’s slightly more complicated than that.

The art books are fine—they’re so huge that the books can’t doubled stacked even if I wanted to. But the other shelves are filled with results of eight years shopping at the Lifeline Book Fest, and I’m a little surprised at the things I’m coming across that, apparently, I can’t bring myself to get rid of.

I’m not sure, for example, that I really need all seven Donna Parker books. Sure, they have exciting picture boards showing full-skirted girls dancing at what I assume are sock hops, and the idea of 1950s American girlhood is always intriguing, but then I also own a copy of the journals of Sylvia Plath, so am I likely to re-read Donna Parker?

I’m also not sure that I technically need Walt Disney’s Annette Mysteries. These, I suppose, have some kitsch value (though not when crammed away out of sight on a back shelf); I mean, Annette Funicello solves mysteries!

I’m a bit annoyed, though, that I don’t seem to own Sierra Summer. I could at least have bought the entire set.

I think I’ve even got a copy of a Patty Duke book by the same author somewhere.

I’m also fairly certain that I don’t need the 1980s Nancy Drew revival: The Nancy Drew Files. I’ll resist to the utmost any attempt to remove my 1970s Nancy Drew books—they might be revisionist versions of the old 1930s and 1940s titles, but they’re the ones I grew up with—but these? Are frankly awful, unless you have a weakness for lengthy, badly written descriptions of the sartorial advantage of an oversized jumper worn over tight-legged jeans.

The one advantage of the series is that they finally realised that Ned Nickerson was a waste of space, although the fan-fiction writers over at the Sympathy for Ned community don’t agree with me.

Mind you, I’m not getting rid of my Nancy Drew/Cherry Ames slash fiction.

But for every slightly dodgy book that I probably should send back to the Lifeline sale, there are some little treasures that I’ve forgotten about.

I’ve found a lovely Collins edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems, which was hiding in plain sight. I’m not a particular fan of Longfellow, but the soft, green, suede cover of this book is a delight in and of itself.

There’s also a 1970s paperback of Tuck Everlasting, which I haven’t read. At least now I can pull it off the back of a shelf and add it to the precarious pile of books on the bedhead (I still haven’t effectively learned the lesson of seven years ago, when I must have shifted too much in my sleep and was unpleasantly woken by a hardcover copy of The Vicar of Wakefield bouncing off my forehead. Despite this, the bedhead still seems to me a sensible place to store books.)

I’ve also unearthed a lovely pile of the Mary Grant Bruce Billabong books, some of which are modern paperback reprints, but four of which are lovely 1980s hardbacks that, despite the unattractive cover art, have a solidity and weight far in excess of their size. When did they start depriving children of solid-feeling hardbacks in favour of flimsy paperbacks that all seem to have the same holographic covers?

(Speaking of holographic covers, I also located my copy of The Looking Glass Wars. Not quite a holographic cover—although my copy is unnecessarily shiny—and a disappointing book to me. It seems there’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it.)

On the plus side, there’s a copy of The Mystery of the Shining Children, one of the Jenny Dean Science Fiction Mysteries. Really, who doesn’t love a book about, according to the back cover, “a sixteen-year-old sleuth with a passion for solving some of the most extraordinary science fiction mysteries ever recorded”?

Now I just need to find the other three books in the series.

Also lurking far on a back shelf were several of the Dana Girls mysteries. Teenage girl sleuths who are also students are a private girls’ school? Two of my favourite genres in one—and if none of my girls’ school stories have shown up in this list, it’s only because they have a dedicated bookshelf and don’t get shuffled around.

And Bedknob and Broomstick. I’d completely forgotten I owned this, although four of author Mary Norton’s Borrowers books, which I’ve adored since childhood, are on one of the shelves in the hallway. And, for that matter, why only four? What happened to my copy of the fifth?

This post, I’m starting to suspect, could last forever. But there’s one final set of books that I’d forgotten and am thrilled to see again: Mary Poppins. I’m not even sure I own the original book—although I remember a copy from my childhood that must still be at my parents’ house—but I do have Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Mary Poppins Comes Back, and Mary Poppins in the Park, and that’s enough strange and slightly sad, 1930s-1940s, English urban fantasy to be starting with.

Just, as Nick suggests, as some beneficent deity intended.

The new MacBook is here—and it’s lovely. The keyboard is a vast improvement on the last one, and this one hasn’t had a chance to turn a nasty, grubby colour yet.

I would love a black one at some point, but for now the extra cost isn’t worth it yet for an aesthetic improvement.

But the most important thing? Now I can play Packrat in the living room.

I submitted my thesis today.

Well, I handed it in to the printery, and they’ll pass it on to the Thesis Office once it’s bound, so to all intents and purposes, I’m done.

The degree isn’t conferred yet, of course, but that’s out of my hands.

The feeling is rather anti-climactic, which I think is largely shock—the shock that I’ve actually come out of this with what my supervisors feel is submittable work. And I trust my supervisors on this; they wouldn’t allow me to submit something that was rubbish.

I can’t trust my own opinion of my work, because I have no judgement of it any more. That, I think, is the worst of the debacle that was my M.Phil.—I lost the ability to judge my work effectively, and I haven’t got it back yet. Maybe I won’t, but I think the experience of this last degree will help.

Because this Ph.D. was an unmitigated joy from beginning to end.

There were certainly periods when I felt the work wasn’t going anywhere, when I was blocked or near to it, when I was frustrated by the inability to locate sources (I’m still a little miffed that I had to hand in my beautiful Chronology of the Works of Eliza Winstanley—102 items, where the previous listings hadn’t exceeded forty—with some items marked “not sighted”).

But none of that ever took away from the sheer joy of the work, the euphoria that—unbelievable as it is to many of the students I’ve taught over the years—that comes from good, tight, plausible expository writing, the sense that this is actually a contribution to research in the field.

I’ve loved every minute of this work.

And I’ve loved being a postgraduate student. There’s always a sense, when you’re a postgrad., that other people don’t feel you’re holding down a real job. I even embarrassed a telemarketer once when he asked me my job and I told him I was a postgraduate student; “Oh,” says he. “So you don’t work, then?”

We know postgraduate work is exhausting.

We know the remuneration is problematic; you can live comfortably, certainly, but when emergencies arise, there’s nothing in the piggy bank, and always there’s a sense of nagging anxiety that you’re in a precarious financial position. But we don’t do it for the money.

We do it for the research.

We do it for the contribution to knowledge that we can make.

We do it because we know that education is more than job-training: that is can enrich society in broader, deeper, and more profound ways than the previous government would have us believe.

We do it for reasons that, when we come to blog about them, look like cliches, and yet are no poorer or less sincere for that.

For all these reasons, I’ve loved my work and never regretted it.

And I’m going to miss that.

I have a lecture and two tutorials to give today and my thesis needs to be ready for copying by tomorrow.

But I will update properly soon!

There are currently four crows in my back garden, two more than usual.

If there’s any increase in numbers, or I catch even a glimpse of Tippi Hedren, I’m cancelling today’s classes.

Oooh, I’ve been looking forward to this.

Whenever I teach Gothic Literature, which is not nearly often enough, there are always three novels that the students feel they should know, even though they’ve rarely read them: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We rarely read Frankenstein any more, but they’re always surprised by the other two.

I’m not sure why, but these must be among the most, if not the most, frequently adapted nineteenth-century novels. And they’ve never been adapted accurately.

The adaptations usually have some positive features. I quite liked, for example, the way in which Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula caught much of the spirit of progress that marked the novel: the dependency on new technologies that gave the middle-class English professionals—and of course Quincy, the representative of American progress—such an advantage over the distinctly Old World Count. But the need to give the Count a tragic love story robbed the figure of much of his viciousness and made, in my opinion, a much less creepy tale of the whole narrative.

And I’m not even going to mention the recent BBC telemovie.

Jekyll and Hyde hasn’t been treated much better.

But this isn’t an adaptation. And that’s the first thing in its favour. Because this is an entirely new way of approaching a story that everyone feels they already know—and, really, they do, so thoroughly saturated are we in this narrative.

The other reason I was so excited about this so far in advance is Steven Moffat.

As far as I’m concerned, Steven Moffat can do no wrong. I was exactly the right age (and, frankly, the right kind of girly swot) to become totally besotted with Press Gang, which was essentially a how-to on writing tight, high-quality drama that didn’t patronise its audience.

Then there was Coupling. And the new series of Doctor Who, for which he gave slightly tremulous fans of the original series four brilliant episodes in the first three seasons.

Oh, yes, the idea of Steven Moffat made me particularly interested in watching this.

And it’s good. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to get to that point. But it is good.

The idea of time-sharing and scheduled versus unscheduled changes is both a fascinating one and an intensely modern way to approach suddenly finding that you have two completely separate people living in the one body.

For that matter, the use of technology to allow each to track the behaviour of the other is both modern and, at the same time, faithful to the obsessions of the late Victorian Gothic novel, stemming back to the sensation novels—particularly Wilkie Collins—that helped keep Gothic literature alive in a mid-Victorian England obsessed with realism in its fiction.

Ditto, the use of the cityscape, which worked so well in the relatively contemporaneous Invisible Man: the idea that one man can easily become lost among London’s teeming millions, the anonymity, the dark alleyways.

I like the idea of the change coming late in life, as well; it not only recalls Henry Jekyll’s own mid-life crisis, but has, to me, shades of a disease such as Huntington’s Chorea—the idea of a debilitating, degenerative disorder arising late, once you’d already had children and, possibly, doomed them, too.

Speaking of children, can I mention how much I love that the twins are called Eddie and Harry?

And, finally, Denis Lawson. Ah, Wedge: you survived the Ice Battle on Hoth and the destruction of both Death Stars. Is there anything you can’t do?

I am an appalling housekeeper.

I’m good at a number of things, I think. I seem to be an effective teacher; at least, my students mostly pass and, as far as I can tell, don’t actively hate me at the end of the semester. I’m an efficient researcher, as well. I’m also good at remembering where other people have left their glasses although not, alas, at remembering where I have put my own.

But housekeeping? No. We don’t live in actual squalor, mind: not the kind of squalor that includes dead animals or human waste (okay, there was that one possum, but he was in the downpipe, not the living room. And I do occasionally have to chase out water dragons seeking fresh fruit and bush turkeys hoping for a dry nesting place. But those are temporary).

But we generate a lot of paper: books, notebooks, draft chapters, sketchpads, notes, stray Post-its. And, somehow, I’m starting to think that having everything in piles doesn’t really qualify as being tidy.

The study is causing me particular concerns.

I love my study; since moving out of home, I’ve been longing for a house where my desk wasn’t in the corner of my bedroom, and this little, white, wooden house is the first place where I’ve managed that.

So I love my study.

I love the window, even though it opens on to next door’s unpainted, corrugated-iron roof, and the sun’s unbearable in the afternoon (don’t blame me for the chintz curtains—they came with the house).

I love my James Jean prints, even though the one of Hansel drowning two witches as an interrogation method (from Fables) does seem a little creepy, now I look at it.

And I love my books.

But that’s where the problem starts. And ends, really. Because books are never a waste of space, but they take up so much space. And technically, I only have half a study, since Nick occupies the other corner.

So what this picture doesn’t really show is that the shelves are essentially triple-packed: books, with books on top of them, then more books in front. Trying to find anything is a nightmare, and I’m getting to the point where I’ve forgotten what I’ve already bought.

There are also books on the floor, although that did cause amusement when the temporary kitten wouldn’t believe me when I told her that the piles weren’t stable and then had to go and hide behind the swan table until she calmed down.

What I find particularly odd is the tendency of the study to attract wasps, so that you hear them buzzing somewhere and next thing you know they’ve built a succession of nests down the back of your hardback of Leslie Stephens’s Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, which you don’t discover for months, because, really, who reads Leslie Stephens on a regular basis?

So I’m hoping now for a bigger study. One where I can have bookshelves lining the walls. Shallow bookshelves, so I can’t triple stack even if I’m tempted.

I could just stop buying books, but that doesn’t seem like a viable option. It would take a heart of stone to go to the Lifeline BookFest and walk past a facsimile reprint of late Wizard of Oz books, or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or the complete poems of Keats in a puffy orange suede jacket.

Even if they do end up sitting in a pile on the floor until you’ve temporarily forgotten about them.