Smokin' Mouse Zombie

I've had to put in some solid desk-work since my trip to the Ancient Languages Taster Day at Liverpool a couple of weeks ago. To tell the truth, I've been procrastinating a bit since my last supervisory meeting at the end of January - not deliberately, but I had to spend some time preparing my presentation for the off-campus Study Day, and then I'd had two days away the week following that. I wanted to get into some good exercise habits since I've been paying a hefty wad of money for gym membership since the beginning of January, so I've been making the effort to get down there first thing in the morning, when the kids leave for school at around half-seven. Eight weeks on, it's pretty much part of the morning routine: I get my swimsuit on under my training clothes and pack my dry stuff, towels, shower gel etc. into a big bag and walk to the sports centre. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays (when I go with the Husband in the afternoon) I spend about half-an-hour in the gym itself working on a split training routine (chest/triceps, shoulders/biceps, back and abs) and then swim for twenty minutes followed by ten minutes in the sauna or steam room. Mondays, Wednesdays, occasionally Fridays and Sundays, I'll swim for forty minutes. Then I'll shower and walk home, via the shop to pick up any supplies we need. Usually I am sitting down at my desk by 9.30-45, feeling pretty good (all those endorphins!) and ready to put in some good study time. The times I've not been able to swim first thing I've spent the rest of the day feeling a bit seedy. I guess it's addictive. Pleasingly, I feel a lot more energetic, and my jeans are getting pretty baggy round the middle.
Anyhoo - when I was last down on campus for my supervisory meeting I'd blithely promised 10,000 words of work for the next meeting which was, in retrospect a bit optimistic. I'd not really factored in my days away, or the fact that one of the weeks was half term. Now the two youngest (11 and 13) are really good and don't mind amusing themselves while I work away in my satellite study in the bedroom upstairs, but by Wednesday afternoon I was feeling a bit sorry for the Bright-Eyed Boy who, unlike his sister who has her rowing to go to and a boyfriend(!), was spending unconscionable amounts of time on XBox live shooting the legs of zombies.
Even HE was bored of it! So I downed mouse and took him into town for a browse and a hot chocolate. Twice. In two days, so I sort of lost the impetus and the 714 words I'd had to commit to writing per day (I can't remember the sum it was 10,000 divided by the number of days available to do it, minus some stuff I'd written already) failed to materialise. I know that isn't a particularly high target word-wise, but it's NOT the writing-up that takes the time as any PhD student kno: it's the reading, assembling and reviewing of arguments, the cross-referencing, quotations, sourcing out-of-print books and articles and deciphering cryptic references in Victorian commentaries that takes the time!
It makes you break out into a cold sweat when you get to three in the afternoon and you've only put a couple of hundred words down BUT YOU'VE ACTUALLY BEEN BUSY EVERY MINUTE! I've had a couple of nights waking up at four or five am with some anxiety issues, sweating, heart pounding and certain that, come my viva, I'll be unmasked as a charlatan and a fraud.
Of course once you fail to make one day's word-count, the deficit is shunted over to be divided up and added to the remaining days' allotment....and of course it's a compound daily deficit, so every day I have a higher target and...o well, you get the idea! Now that the new half-term has started, I'm making a big push with the chapter and I am managing....just....to keep my head above water, and I may not submit exactly the 10,000 I airily promised but -hey! - I AM trying my hardest!

Chrissymas

Am now drifting glassy-eyed and circling the black academic sink-hole that is Christmas. Despite my best intentions I still haven't managed to tackle my supervisor's comments concerning my thesis chapter. But I have decided to wait - for the sake of the family - until at least Christmas and Boxing Day are over for that and content myself instead with some background reading during the periphery of the day. I am tackling a revised and expanded edition of Lev Vygotsky's Thought and Language which is absolutely fascinating. He critiques Piaget's hypothesis that children's language moves from personal ('autistic') speech towards the communicative and social and offers his own view that, as speech is primarily about the communication of need, it starts as social and ends up as inner locution. 'Egocentric speech' (speech to oneself) instead of being, as Piaget suggested, a half-way house in the process of the externalisation of the child's language, emerges rather - according to Vygotsky - when 'the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behaviour to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions'.
I can kid myself that this may be useful! It probably will not be, but at least I feel that I am maintaining a toe-hold in the academic process.

The worm is feeling a little worthless today, seasonably SAD and a bit sleep deprived. I went down to uni yesterday for the second time in a week. This doesn't sound much unless you remember that I live in York and the university where I am registered as a doctoral candidate is in Birmingham. I was a bit knackered before I left, as one of the children has started having debilitating anxiety attacks, mostly to do with school. We've tried pretty much everything, and the school has been marvellously tolerant and supportive but it's pretty hard to deal with an incoherently hysterical child through the night and then be on the ball studies-wise. With my marvellous husband-and-family safety-net in place, I made my way to the Midlands, if somewhat uneasily.
The department is a little odd to say the least, looking like a 1970's old folks home set amid gloomy pinetrees and dankly dripping foliage, up a little pointlessly meandering mossy path. The blinds are always drawn and the carpets ruckled. It definitely feels a little....odd. All it needs is the solemn ticking of a pendulum clock, or a childish voice singing a nursery rhyme unseen in the distance to make it the set of a psychological thriller/horror story.

Anyway - my supervisor is a most pleasant person, and massively knowledgeable. So much so that I am constantly faced with my own ignorance. And not a little overwhelmed by the whole process. I am trying so hard to be competent and punctilious about doing what I should, but am not at all sure about my progress. It would appear that I am doing OK - that's what the supervisory reports say - but sometimes I feel that it's all a bit beyond me, that I am a fraud and it's going to become obvious to everyone that I know next to nothing about the subject that is supposedly my speciality. Everyone is much cleverer than me, and can probably smell a false premise and a flawed argument as soon as I walk in the room. It's probably got something to do with the fact that I am unable to devote myself 24/7 to the academic process and in addition to feeling a pretty inadequate and helpless parent at the moment, I'm feeling an inadequate student too.

Roll on the Christmas break: I really need to recharge the batteries.

The Bubble

I think one on the most difficult things about doing a PhD the way I'm doing it (a hundred plus miles from the campus) is the sense of isolation. But not just the sense of isolation from my department colleagues, but a sense of isolation from almost everyone that I come into contact with on a day-to-day basis. My family are great (in that they have realistic expectations about what sort of tea will make it to the table and whether socks come in pairs anymore: I'm 'on-site' when it comes to that sort of stuff, so it would be perverse to wait for others to do it) but it is just not fair to buttonhole them with an assessment of, say, how Jewish Paul the apostle really was, or how Jesus is always written of as physically making the first move in a clause and what verbs are involved. So I don't tend to. The husband will make a reasonably convincing attempt at interest and comprehension (and he is excellent at spotting a false premise or typo) but it's difficult to give him the sort of background knowledge (in a nutshell) to an argument that I've spent the last four or so years accumulating. So I confine myself to generalities. My parents (into their eighties) do show an interest, but have to keep asking me what it is I'm doing exactly. My parents-in-law (just into their sixties) show no interest at all. When I tell them I've been 'working', they never ask 'what doing?' I think they'd prefer it if I worked in Spar or an office or something, then they'd feel comfortable asking questions about my daily round. As it is, there's just an uninterested silence. I'm presuming it's uninterested - wouldn't you ask if you were the slightest bit curious? God knows what they think I do all day! Self-flagellating? Running a crack-den? The children are just lovely but still think that I'm vaguely Classics-based. So nothing doing there. I do have a couple of post-grad friends, but no-one that I see on a regular basis. So my thoughts just end up going around and around in my head like flies trapped in a jam-jar.

And to tell the truth, I don't mind too much. I've always been a bit of a hermit: give me a good book and a glass of wine and I'm happy. And since these studies are what I've chosen to do, and enjoy doing, I can happily spend all day picking through texts and assembling thoughts. Occasionally though, I get the sort of feeling that I imagine horses getting when confronted with a jump they just don't wish to take: gut-based refusal. I have to snap my laptop shut and run off, usually into town for a well-earned latte and a bun.

Academic Down Time

I admit that I have NOT done well on the work front today: daughter #3 had a teacher training day, daughter #2, spouse and Bouncing Babba came round early desperate to show me photos of their trip away (mostly of the BB enjoying himself). I was anticipating the Oldies rolling up mid-morning, as is their want on a Friday, but as luck would have it, the Tesco man arrived earlier than usual to deliver the week's food. This meant that I could put plan B into action and pop into town to see the relics of St Therese of Lisieux at the Minster before they continued on their journey. This was duly achieved and distracted by the delicious sandwiches in Olio & Farina (gorgonzola, mortadella and salad on ciabatta) we dived in for a spot of lunch. We then spent a bit of time looking for a suitably lightweight rowing jacket for #3 (result!) and a new purse for me as my bank cards had annoyingly just all spilled out into my manbag for the nth time (again, result!). By the time we got home it was already half past one and I spent a little while looking for articles on the 'fallacy of intention'. Three fifteen and it was time to pick up the Bright-Eyed Boy and get #3 to the boathouse in time for her training session, which we nearly didn't because of the horrendous road works that have locked the centre of town solid.

I've developed this annoying mental countdown machine in my head and I'm all too aware that I've lost a number of working hours today through a combination of factors: being too available, being easily distracted, being a chauffeur (chauffeuse?). I'm thinking about getting a sign made that reads 'The (potential) Doctor is unavailable for consultation. Please come back after 5pm' and hang it in the front window. Unfortunately, many of the distractions come from within....and not just from within the house! I shall try to be good, however, and take the laptop to Starbucks whilst #3 is rowing again tomorrow morning. Must remember the blinkers and earplugs though.......!

And, yes, I could have spent the time that I spent writing this working, rather than blogging, but -hey! - it's 5pm Friday evening now. Where do the days go?

A Room of One's Own

Thank goodness for Argos! After yesterday's post, I started to have a good look around the upstairs of the house for an appropriate workspace. I ruled out the 'spare' bedroom pretty much straight away: it's only 2mx3m, most of which is taken up by an L-shaped built-in bed and wardrobe. Besides it's south facing and gets very warm in the summer. Plus the dog has adopted as her room, so it smells of dog farts. We've had a couple of plastic crates full of books - untouched - adjacent the door in our bedroom since we had the extension built nine years ago. I got the tape measure and determined that there was enough of a gap for a compact computer desk if I moved the crates elsewhere. Argos had a suitably cheap self-assemble jobby for a mere £29.99 that fitted perfectly, so I bought it and bolted it together once the children had gone to bed. Success! I redistributed the books and utilised the crates for recycling receptacles and hauled the finished desk upstairs. I'm rather pleased - our bedroom is north-facing and so always stays cool, is away from the main road and thus quiet, and has a phone point in it. True, my books are on the ground floor directly beneath, but the husband suggested I could rig up some sort of basket on a pulley and let it down (with a request note) from our window for a child to fill with either books or possibly chocolate.....

I've spent a couple of hours up there working on the laptop this afternoon and managed to get about six hundred words down which is quite as much as I would have hoped to achieve on a 'good' day.

Virginia Woolf was absolutely right when she identified that women need a room of their own in order to write successfully.

Sanctuary!

The school summer holidays have begun and I have immediately identified a major problem: there is nowhere for me to do sit and do my work! The downstairs room at the front of the house has my desk in it and what we consider to be the 'family' computer, the one where we retrieve our emails, download music, store photos etc. I do normally work at this desk, although I use my laptop which is dedicated to university/thesis stuff. This room can get very hot (being south-facing) so in the summer months I sometimes move through and work on the dining-room table at the north-facing back of the house; this is very pleasant as the french windows open out onto the garden. Trouble is, all the music equipment is in the front room so if daughter no.3 wants to play her bass guitar it gets disturbingly noisy. She quite often wants to go on the house computer too - which is fine, except I can't sit at the desk. The dining-room at the back of the house is a continuation of the living area which contains the television, hi-fi and XBox console. Now, the children do get on fairly well together, but tend to prefer their own personal space. Often, when the bright-eyed boy has tired of telly or playing Gotham City or somesuch, he will move into the front room and the girl will watch music channels. If they are confined together too long they tend to bicker, or the older of the two starts to tease. So where can I go? I've got to press on with my writing if I am to make satisfactory progress towards full-time doctoral work come October. I can't really expect them to confine themselves to their bedrooms (I'd work in ours, but all the books are shelved downstairs and there's no floor space to squeeze in a desk/table), or not to make use of the facilities in the home. Child care, if I can get it is sporadic and of a couple of hours duration at the most. Maybe I'll have to start getting up r e a l l y early and start writing before anyone else gets up? Or go to bed in the wee small hours? Unfortunately, my most productive time is in the afternoon: prime argument time, if there's going to be one. It is quite frustrating. And there's another six weeks of it........