(Nick suggested that I call this post “This, I Do Not Like,” but . . . no.)

I really enjoy Robin Hood, despite the fact that it’s very silly in parts. I’m fairly certain that one of the main reasons I like it is that Robin is one of the few genuinely English legends out there, along with King Arthur and Jack the Giant Killer.

I discussed it with my sister at one point, and she was uncertain about the idea, pointing out that it doesn’t even employ any of the main tropes, including the archery contest. My father, on the other hand, never misses an episode.

But there are stranger things about the show than the omission of the archery contest.

I feel a numerical list is warranted.

1. The fact that I’m blogging about it instead of just watching it.

2. Nick suggested that the hats in tonight’s episode probably weren’t period-appropriate. I don’t know about that, but I’m pretty sure that belted trenchcoats weren’t popular in the reign of Richard the Lionheart.

3. Ditto Guy of Gisbourne’s black-leather duster. But, really, who cares? It’s Guy of Gisbourne (or, as a friend calls him, “Lord, Have Mercy!”)

4. Marian’s over-the-dress corsets also cause me some concern. But Nick says I’m to leave those out of it.

5. In the middle of blogging I just came across the lines
“I’m not a Judas!”
“And I’m not Jesus.”
Well, no.

6. I’m fairly certain that Robin Hood didn’t earn his name because of his predilection for khaki-coloured hoodies.

7. Where is Friar Tuck? Nick swears he saw him in an early episode, but there’s been no real sign of it.

8. Shouldn’t Alan-a-Dale be a minstrel? Sure, any regular player of RPGs, especially table-top RPGs, knows that bards/minstrels are the most irritating of all character classes (although Nick suggests that if I’d ever played Dragonlance I would have found Kenders fairly annoying), but still, Alan is supposed to be a minstrel.

9. Will Scarlet’s memorial to his father, which was on par—despite the brilliance of Harry Lloyd’s performances—with the end of Van Helsing.

10. That Nick could tell that Sir Edward was going to die from his first appearance in the episode.

11. That Robin owes less to his literary ancestors and more to Marvel superheroes in his ability to completely and utterly defy the laws of physics.

12. Poor Much the Miller’s Son being relegated to the position of comic relief. Not appropriate for a Troughton.

13. They’ve just advertised next week’s episode as including a “Terminator.” I realise that that’s a metaphor, but, honestly, let’s not push the modern references too far, okay?

14. On that note, we’ve not only had an episode called “I Shot The Sheriff,” but we’re apparently about to have one called “Get Carter.” If that includes Michael Caine, I’ll be reasonably happy. If it stars Sylvester Stallone, I’m out of here.

15. The impunity with which they can wander around Nottingham with only the barest of disguises.

16. The casino episode. I know it co-starred Dexter Fletcher, and I realise that Wikipedia suggests that craps may date back to the Crusades, but really—did you not think we would notice that the mise en scene was distinctly Vegas?

Did I miss anything?

Driving home from a lovely, celebratory lunch this afternoon, Nick and I realised that there was going to be a power struggle for toilet access once we got home.

So, like any other stable couple, we decided to play Rock, Paper, Scissors.

The only problem was we kept choosing the same item, over and over again.

On the fifth or sixth attempt, I finally managed to crush Nick’s scissors with my rock, but it was a little weird there for a while.

I’m tempted to try a coin toss to see how many times it comes down heads—then I know whether or not to accept any unexpected offers of a trip to England that might come from old university friends.

This afternoon, we decided to clean out the study a bit. The aim, eventually, is to move one of the bookcases into the spare room—which will soon be a labyrinth of shelving with a bed in the middle—but it didn’t quite work out that way.

(On the other hand, much progress was made. Nick’s just wandered through to ask if I’m blogging about how awesome he is for cleaning everything out, so I told him I am. In a manner of speaking.)

The problem is that I’m reluctant to throw out any work-related material—while regularly throwing out letters from the council and from the bank without opening them first—while Nick won’t throw out anything at all. In fact, I have a box in my spare-room wardrobe containing nothing but his calendars from the 1980s. So the study regularly devolves into a series of teetering piles of paper. And all of those have to be moved before we can even get to the bookcases.

(In fact, this is why Nick claims he needs praise—he decided, once we’d cleaned all the papers off his desk—that he needed to clean out his filing cabinet, which hasn’t been done in about six years. It’s now almost empty.)

At one point, we managed to carve a path to the corner shelving unit where Nick keeps his games—which is a story in itself, since when we bought it from K-Mart it arrived minus the struts that keep it stable, and I was too lazy to go back in and get them, so it’s now kept upright thanks to a blue plastic wine rack that inexplicably fell down behind it one day.

The top of this unit contains boxes full of our art equipment—and oddly, one that contained nothing but unopened, ten-year-old bank statements—and piles of sketchbooks.

It was these boxes that led to my downfall, because I decided to clean them out.

A reasonable ambition, I would have thought, but it ended up with me stuck behind a pile of ancient bank statements and drenched in linseed oil up to the elbows.

I probably should have seen that coming.

But, in a sit-com, the end result would have been humourous, salacious, or both.

The only end result for me was that I had to dig myself out from behind a pile of paper, getting increasingly dusty and sticking to everything I touched.

And even that wasn’t presented as a montage.

Having washed my hands, though, I’m quite pleased that life isn’t a sit-com. (And that relief doesn’t even take into account the fact that my most recent comedy has been Green Wing, and while it’s the most hilarious thing I’ve seen since Spaced and I am definitively addicted, I do not want to live in that world.)

Frankly, the real world has fewer plot holes and significantly better gender roles than the average sit-com.

I might make an exception if I could holiday in Futurama, though.

I’m no good at competitive sports—I never have been.

Much of this is down to natural clumsiness. My clumsiness—I once, as a small child, managed to slip on a boat and end up with my head jammed between two bollards. At least, in retrospect I believe they were bollards—seems to be irreparable, which suits me.

I understand that people say playing sports can actually reduce clumsiness, but I found all the shouting (mostly along the lines of “That’s your own goal!”) rather distracting.

But I’m not also not very good at competitive gaming, and that’s not down to clumsiness.

Some of it’s down to attitude—I’m both a bad winner and a bad loser, and frankly I don’t even like to play games with myself sometimes. But then most of my family are also game-based gloaters—well, alternately gloaters and sulkers, anyway—so I can shake that off.

But gaming also brings out a sort of anxiety. Especially those games that require you to get to a certain point before you can save.

I’m no good at the strategy-style games that Nick so thoroughly understands. I tend to get attached to my little pixellated men, and no sooner have I started to build up my mighty empire—usually by managing to build a well, and perhaps some hovels—then barbarians come out of nowhere and slaughter all my poor peasants.

The same is true for combat-based RPGs, except in that case it’s my avatar that gets repeatedly slaughtered.

Even games that have no combat breed their own kind of anxiety. Nick introduced me to the card-collecting and card-stealing game Packrat on Facebook—the very same game I was wasting the workday playing when my computer exploded, and which is consequently ambiguously immortalised in my astonishingly bad haikus. That rapidly became an obsession but, although the developers claim you can play it solo, there are various tricks built in to induce you to invite friends, such as restricted access to the markets that sell rare cards. And once you’re playing against real people—especially if, like me, all your Facebook friends are people you know in real life—you start feeling a little guilty about nicking cards off them.

This morning, for example, I nicked a high-end card from a friend—a card, in fact, that they would have had to spend some time constructing from lesser cards—and then felt so guilty that I spent forty minutes recreating the card myself and then dropping it back in their pack. (Hey, if you’re reading, I’m really sorry I nicked your Tangerine Turbo!)

But I like puzzle games. Those I can handle.

That’s why I loved Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. Any RPG that uses the Bejeweled playfield as the basic combat mode for defeating the evil Lord Bane is my kind of game. In fact, Puzzle Quest became a bit of an obsession, and led to about six weeks’ worth of conversations along these lines:

NICK: Hey, how did your day go? Productive?

ME: Well, I got past the two-headed ogre in the end, and took his battle hammer as my reward. That’s awesome—I haven’t had any trouble with the liches after that. But then I had to get assistance from a fire-worshipping minotaur cult. I had to find the pieces of their former robotic leader, and reconstitute him so he could take back the northlands from Lord Bane’s emissary, and that was a bit tricky—I had to go through initiations and then fight a fire sprite in a volcano, and I just wasn’t getting the right gems, so I couldn’t build up any mana, and anyway he was immune to my earth magic—

NICK: . . . I meant with your thesis.

ME: Oh, right. That. Okay, I guess.

In fact, I’m now excited to see that there’s a sequel coming out this year, although I’m a little concerned about the introduction of the Tetris mechanic—I’ve never been any good at Tetris.

In short, I suspect I’m the kind of gamer that handheld systems were made for. The PSP and the Nintendo DS—especially the DS—have excellent games, but most importantly they’re really designed to be played solo—even if you do want to use the multi-player mode for the DS, for example, you still need to own a copy of the game for each player.

So, they’re ideal for a player like me. The computer players don’t care if I gloat or smacktalk, and I don’t have to worry about disrupting anyone else’s gameplay.

Now, if I could only convince the computer-controlled characters in Mario Party DS that the entire purpose of the game—its whole reason for existing—is for me to win every single time, we’d be laughing.

I’ve been fretting a little the last couple of days about the next update.

I didn’t update yesterday because I have four hours’ contact time with students on Wednesdays and was frankly exhausted, but I still fretted.

Then, this morning, I drove Nick into work, which meant a drive home through the city in peak hour, which left a lot of time for fretting. I would normally wile away traffic jams thinking about how much more interesting life would be if I lived in a world where I got to fight mountain trolls, but this morning I worried about blog topics.

I thought it was just tiredness, and that ideas would come, but now I’m starting to think it’s linked to a general ambivalence about blog writing.

Or perhaps “uncertainty” would be a better word.

I really enjoy writing this blog, but every now and then I start to wonder about it. I imagine most bloggers do.

I wonder whether I actually have anything interesting to write.

I wonder whether I’m actually capable of writing, or whether this blog is providing fodder for writing classes—like the ones I allegedly teach—all over the world.

I wonder if I’m actually making sense, or whether the blog is interesting.

I wonder whether a blog such as this is simply an exercise in electronic egocentricity.

And thought processes like these tend to spiral.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I identify these days as second-generation lapsed Catholic; that is, I was raised by a lapsed Catholic. And one thing I’ve noticed about that is that Catholic guilt is absolutely the last thing to lapse.

So then I feel guilty about imposing my ramblings on an Internet that—in my saner moments—I realise can probably handle it.

And then I feel guilty about feeling guilty.

That’s the fun thing about guilt.

So I need to put a lot of these uncertainties away, and find a way to speak on this blog, a way with which I am comfortable.

That also means some negotiation of my sense of audience. I realise that, at the moment, my readership will be made up entirely of people who already know me—there’s no point trying to hide the crazy from them.

But this is the Internet, and there may be strangers out there who come across Circulating Library and find it interesting enough to return to it.

And that type of writing—to an anonymous audience whose scale and nature I can never really know—is a type of writing I’ve never done before.

I think this is just the ordinary panic attack of a neophyte. I’ve never left much of an imprint on the Internet, and I suspect that is where some of this uncertainty is coming from.

But I need to scupper it now, before it makes me second-guess the wisdom of starting this blog in the first place.

(Although, ultimately, I suspect my innate desire for an audience will be enough to pull me through.)

The moon is a crescent tonight, and it reminds me of The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes’s poem from 1906.

For some reason, it’s always the crescent moon that makes me think of “the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.” I’ve never seen a crescent moon ride horizontally rather than vertically, and I fear for the crew of a vertical galleon. But I don’t like to think too much about it, because I love this poem.

I don’t even know why. And, oddly enough for me, I can’t even remember when I first read or heard the poem. It seems as though I’ve always known it.

In a way, it reminds me of hearing Old English spoken—or, I suppose, more properly, read. I don’t understand the words, I have no vocabulary to draw on, and it may as well be gibberish—but it isn’t. It draws on some deep centre of my brain as though the language that I love, and speak every day, and work with, and revere as one of the most flexible modes of writing on earth gives me some degree of understanding of its alien root.

Fanciful? Yes. But it’s the best way I can think to describe it.

And “The Highwayman” draws a similar response from me—not as deep or primal, but similar. It’s not the only text that does so—Poe’s The Raven is another example—but it only happens when it’s a work that I seem to have known for as long as I’ve been alive.

Is “The Highwayman” good poetry?

I don’t know.

I’m not capable of judging.

It gives me goosebumps every time I read it, and I must have read it a hundred times by now.

Perhaps there’s a shadowing here of the nostalgia created by the fact that I, like so many young girls, favoured fatal love fantasies when I was younger; once upon a time, it seemed romantic to die of leprosy—or some such—in, if I can use this cliche, the pursuit of love. (And I’m not alone; look at Anne of Green Gables and Agatha’s Christie’s autobiography, to name just two.)

I grew out of it, but perhaps a shadow remains to lend some sympathy to the black-eyed landlord’s daughter, Bess the landlord’s daughter, resolving on gripping the trigger if she couldn’t free herself from her bonds.

But I think the real secret is the rhythm.

Take these verses as an example:

Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight, Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.

He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord’s daughter, The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

As I say, I don’t know if it’s good poetry. I do know that Noyes is profligate with his exclamation marks, which normally bothers me.

Is it doggerel? Not is we accept Wikipedia’s definition, because the metre here, the rhythm, the movement of the poem is where its evocative power lies.

Anyone who’s read my Ode to Pirates and the consequent silly but immensely fun comment thread knows that I’m no poet.

Perhaps, then, I’m easily moved by poetry that speaks on a shallow level.

Certainly, I’m no fan of Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome but I appreciated, and even thrilled to, the verses from “Horatius” when they were recited in an episode of the new series of Doctor Who:

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.

Shallow? Or just a poor judge of poetry?

I hope neither is true of my love for “The Highwayman,” or I won’t know how to celebrate the next crescent moon.

Once again, I’m addressing a topic that has little to do with my proposed focus for the blog, although it did come out of something that I’ve been reading.

Namely, I’ve been reading forum postings about inviting family for Easter dinner, and it took rather a strange direction: people started wondering why it was okay to eat lamb at Easter, which many posters said made them feel a bit funny, but not to eat rabbit.

I think this is a case of confusing the metaphorical with the actual.

Sure, Jesus is frequently referred to as The Lamb of God.

But he isn’t actually a baby sheep. It’s a metaphor.

But the Easter Bunny, on the other hand, is actually a rabbit. A real rabbit. (Yes, he is a real rabbit. I’m not accepting any suggestions that he doesn’t actually exist, even though the Easter Bunny that I grew up with bought his eggs at Woolies on Easter Monday once they’d gone on special.)

So eating rabbit on Easter might lead to some fairly horrified children if someone can’t distinguish an anthropomorphic animal from his less vocal colleagues, and the next Easter rolls around without any eggs at all.

Look, I enjoy watching Supernatural, okay?

Sure, it’s cheesy, but it’s fun and sometimes we need a bit of trash in our lives.

On the other hand, I don’t enjoy watching J-Horror, because J-Horror is freaky and terrifying.

I suppose that’s the point, really, in which case—well done, Japanese film makers.

But is it too much to ask that there aren’t any advertisements for freaky J-Horror films during Supernatural? I don’t really enjoy spending ad breaks with my hands over my face.

Oh, and on that note, Jessica Alba? Whatever happened to Sarah Michelle Gellar?

I’m obsessed with Pirates on Facebook.

I’m not as obsessed as some; I’m a mere level 244 Corsair Pirate. But even that level of high-seas ferociousness took some doing.

The game is slightly odd. It’s essentially farming; you roam around the ocean—well, you move forward in what feels like a straight line—picking up various items that you use to buy ship upgrades, or fight monsters, or attack your friends.

I mean, where’s the downside? Where else can you attack sea monsters with dynamite-wielding parrots?

Plus, pirates are awesome. Everyone knows that pirates are inherently cooler than ninjas.

But one of the things that I love most about Pirates is the way in which you need to type in thoroughly bizarre combinations of words in order to heal yourself after a fight. Apparently, the ability to type disconnected pairs of words proves that you’re a “human pirate.”

So, I’ve decided that the only way to really celebrate my joy in Pirates is to write a poem* entirely out of pairs of words that I’ve been asked to type during the healing process. I’ve added punctuation, but other than that each pair of words is accurate.

*Disclaimer: I’m not sure whether people regularly meet poets, but you do meet a large number of them when you work in an English department. Every poet I’ve ever met has been a lovely and extremely talented person. I sincerely hope that none of them think that I think that this is a real poem.

An Ode to Pirates

Weekends with
guess firearms
fantasia, but
[com]pany’s analogy—
wick shadowing
year—moves,
solicited, united.
Thieves and
circus circular
blunder, however,
attempt pianists,
Milton—forward—
theatre, horseback;
the affecting
nominations—tine.

An Exegesis

Lines 1-3: The author celebrates the fascination of a world in which she can spend weekends with fantastic weaponry, especially throwing bombs at fellow pirates.
There is an element of mendacity in these lines, since the author rarely waits for weekends, but instead usually plays Pirates during the work day.
Lines 3-7: A sense moves in of the passing of time, and the author starts to think that maybe blowing friends and colleagues out of the water is not a productive way of spending time.
Lines 8-10: This sense of wasted time leads to remembrance of childhood fantasies of running away from home and joining the circus, as long as it was the kind of circus that Enid Blyton depicted.
Lines 11-13: The author thinks of other, more productive ways of spending time, such as learning the piano, or reading Milton; the thought of the seventeenth-century poet is a particular spur to a sense of futility, leading to the more exaggerated desire for horseback riding, even though horses are ridiculously large and slightly creepy.
Lines 14-15: The surreality of the idea that she would even be capable of riding an enormous horse—with the fangs, and the frothing jaws, and the hooves the size of dinner plates—brings the author back to her senses, and the thought of forks reminds her that her best bet would be to go and make herself some lunch.

Wedge, your father must be spinning in his grave.

(That is, if it weren’t more likely that Darth Vader simply had him thrown out an airlock.)

But that’s beside the point.

I’m very disappointed in you, Wedge Antilles.

Your father, the good Captain Antilles, resisted the Empire.

You fought against the original Death Star, and you survived. Not many people did.

You fought in the Ice Battle on Hoth, and you survived. Largely, I admit, because you didn’t make Dacks’s foolhardy mistake and claim you could “take on the whole Empire myself,” but still. You survived.

And then you flew against the second Death Star. The “fully operational” Death Star that blasted half your flotilla out of the air and still you survived.

That’s fairly impressive.

And now what is this I see?

Betraying King Richard?

(Sure, he may have been a testosterone-fuelled, war-crazy king, who left the kingdom to be ruled by his apparently able younger brother while he went gallivanting around killing ‘infidels,’ but that’s apparently beside the point.)

Having strangely creepy, bondage-infused sexual politics?

Selling everyone you know out for the sake of gaining control of Sussex?

(Okay, Sussex is kind of cool: it has Bexley-on-Sea where an Agatha Christie novel partly took place, and Crawley where part of The Cure grew up. But is that enough of a reason to actually betray people for it?)

Look, Victorian seaside resorts aside, I’m extremely disappointed in you.

The Wedge Antilles that I know would never have done this.

And I think you should give serious thought to this pattern of behaviour, before you end up duelling over a pit of hot tar.

None of us want to see that.

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.