Endspurt

Dear All,

January has come and gone, and I have spent most of it away from home. We got back from the fatherland on Sunday, laden with wine and beer. There was much eating, much beer drinking, wine tasting and general non-thesisising. Now, however, I find myself back at home trying desperately to finish my thesis. Teaching begins again next week, and it looks like I'm going to be tutoring both on the evening degree course and the regular first-year module. I'm excited about both! I'm trying to get my thesis done before we get to the texts that I'm less familiar with.

Also, much more importantly, the wedding is in less than three months and while the thesis is taking priority right now I would like to spend a few weeks sitting about thinking about wedding stuff. That would be nice. At the moment we have 42 people for the evening meal, and our venue holds 45 comfortably. 50 at a squeeze, but we don't really want that. We still need to send our daytime invitations, arrange lunch and sort out seating charts. And find things to tombola (to raffle?). We need to decide on hymns (we have picked 2 so far) and readings (and readers?). And on music in general.

I have edited all the main chapters of my thesis and am now finishing my introduction. All is well so far - needs a bit more fiddling but should be ok. Then there is the edition of The Highlander, the poem that my thesis is mainly concerned with. I think I should be done with the introduction by Sunday. Two weeks should be enough for the edition (if Peter can help with hyperlinks), and then perhaps another week or so fiddling with footnotes, prettifying the chapters, finishing the bibliography, writing an abstract and acknowledgements. It has been a long 4.5 years but the thesis has turned out to be pretty good. Much different than anticipated: much more theoretical, much more mid-18th-century, much more Scottish. I have become interested in travel writing, literary tourism, aesthetics and historiography (although I feel a bit like a fraud with regards to anything history-y, seeing as I have never studied history at university). My official submission date, the 26th of March, coincides with this conference I'm going to: Romantic Adaptations at St Mary's College (Walpole's Strawberry Hill). I'm presented a condensed version of my thesis, and hopefully I'll be able to speak (that is, waffle) rather than read out a paper. What a fitting conclusion to the PhD process!