Thoughts on a Rainy Day

I'm sitting at my desk peering out at the torrential rain and the bleak windy greyness of October. My latest tranche of work has been dispatched to my supervisor, so I'm trying to decide which text to do a commentary on next, but I keep getting distracted.
I'm restless and rather bored - even surfing the blogs that I regularly read, I am increasingly finding myself thinking "I really CANNOT be bothered to read all this": similarly, I find myself just deleting e-mails with only the minimum of attention. I've been so deeply engrossed in writing my last chapter that this sudden halt before I get the comments back has thrown me out of kilter. I know I've got lots to do, but I'm struggling to find the motivation to pick it up. I'm missing company. My mum (81 years old) has just embarked on a year-long course of botany and horticulture, complete with an end-of-year exam! Woo-hoo! Good for her! - I'd been nagging her to find a new group of friends - younger ones that didn't keep dying off - and this seems to have provided her with just this, plus an intellectual challenge to stimulate the old grey cells.

But, as I was saying to her this morning, I really miss going to lectures and stuff. Just being in an academic environment was tremendous fun, and I was certainly at my happiest when doing my undergraduate degree. There's not much prospect engaging with my current uni in the same way - living over a hundred miles away is not conducive to forming close working relationships within the department, and although I've been encouraged to drop in at any time, I'm really not going to do that unless I have a supervisory meeting or something.
But I do really miss academic company: my family (God love 'em) are lovely, but needy, and my PhD subject so esoteric that I'm just not going to get any feedback from them.

I really think the problem is that PhD students are, by their very natures, loners, and that can end up as lonely. They have generally started of doing a pretty general sort of degree amongst other like-minded souls and have gradually spun off into some weird orbit of their own, focussing on such minority interest topics that - even when surrounded by other scholars in similar fields - they can't find anyone who knows much about what they actually doing. And that's a bit disheartening. It's a bit like hacking your way alone through a dense forest of thornbushes without a map or a light or someone shouting encouraging noises from the distance. Still, we keep plodding on.

I've put my name down for a beginner's level modern Greek course at the local uni-over-the-hill, having decided that it's ridiculous that I can read ancient Greek but couldn't speak to a real Greek person except to ask for beer and souvlaki. Hopefully, I might meet some new faces and - who knows - maybe end up going to the pub occasionally?