Dunnit!

“Five copies for binding…”

It’s a funny thing, this thesis-writing business.  The hand-in deadline – 31st December 2013 – has been on my mind and on the horizon for ages. I have been ‘approaching submission’ for a couple of years at least, a bit like a tiny space probe heading for a very large but very distant planet. I travelled & travelled, but the planet never seemed to get any closer.  And then all of a sudden it was the only thing in sight, touchdown was frighteningly imminent, and there was an awful lot to do in a very short time. This was of course the point at which Word decided to have conniptions about the size of some of my files – thank you, Scrivener backups, for saving the day and my sanity!  Then there was the minor problem of getting long complicated documents to output to PDF format for printing. I have done this many times for shorter, simpler documents with no trouble at all, by using ‘print to pdf’ from within Word.  Suffice it to say that on this occasion I ended up printing all five lots of 380 pages myself from the Word documents, which was probably doing things the hard way, but it got the job done.

And then it was Tuesday afternoon, just after the end of the Autumn term.  Retro-rockets were firing and kicking up moon dust and the altitude figures were suddenly in feet rather than miles…  And meanwhile back on planet earth, four copies of my finished thesis – all 380 pages of prose, photos, quotes and references – were now bound and labelled and on their way to Senate House.  At Reception, a lady from the Graduate School appeared, disappeared, and reappeared again clutching a form, a pen and a clipboard.  I filled in the form and handed it back, at which point Ms Grad School smiled, said nice things like ‘well done’ and disappeared again with the cardboard box of thesis copies and the paperwork.

And that, for the time being, is that. I am not yet ‘Dr Southall’; in fact,  I’m in Ph.D limbo.  I know I’ll have a viva some time in the next three months or so, but apart from that, for the first time since I officially set out on this voyage almost eight years ago, I’m not in control of what happens next.  It’s a tiny bit disconcerting.  However, it’s a pleasant sort of disconcerting in many ways.  For a start, and unlike last year, I won’t be working through most of the Christmas ‘holiday’, trying to get a full draft of all chapters completed. This year I can take time off to go walking, watch Poirot and Time Team, and finish knitting that jumper at last with a relatively clear conscience. I might even get started on the knitted woodlouse I’ve been planning for several months now. On balance, this particular limbo is actually quite bearable!

Happy Christmas everyone!